My Proposed Party Platform

Nicholas Aden wrote a blog “The Proposed Party Platform” I felt any response was probably worth an entire blog by itself, so I am proposing my party’s platform:

Iraq: Pull out. They resent us, we suck at occupation and it just fuels terrorist sentiment anyway. Believe me, terrorists aren’t picking on America because we display military weakness or look like easy targets. If that’s what they were aiming for they’d be attacking Switzerland or something. We are the biggest, nastiest bully in the schoolyard and it looks big if they stand up to us, even if they aren’t effective.

Economy: I am mostly in favor of encouraging businesses to do certain things, rathering than forcing them. Green is taking off in plenty of industries, and that’s only a good thing. Let’s keep that Malthusian Doomsday at bay, yes? Not being an economy buff I don’t have too many specific ideas here, but as far as I can tell the President and government in general doesn’t understand the economy well enough to get it to dance to their tune. It just sort of does its own thing. Economy “experts” are mostly quacks who are right about 50% of the time. It’s almost as if they are just making shit up.
Leave it alone, stop talking about it like it’s something in your control. Just tax it and use the money for worthwhile things.

Drugs: Legalize and regulate the manufacture and sale of all recreational drugs. The FDA will be in charge of doing enough testing to write dosages, contraindications and hazards on packaging and that’s about it. This will take some time because they outlaw shit that they don’t know anything about, but all the standards should be on the market in a year.

Billions of dollars get flushed down the toilet, and billions more lost in taxable revenue because the moral majority can’t let the populace decide for themselves how they want to have fun. Not a single thing that law enforcement has done about drugs has ever impacted the price, availability or purity of drugs in any major city for more than about six months. Most of those trumpeted multi-million dollar drug busts are just sacrifices anyway while ten times as much slips by. Marijuana is the number one cash crop in America for God’s sake (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/America's+biggest+cash+crop-a0160421540). The war ain’t working so quit it.

Take the money, probably a good deal less money, and use it for treatment. Take money out of the hands of criminals and corruption from our cops and judges. Take back your right to control the way your brain works at any given time. It seems to me like the control of what I can and can’t put in my body is pretty basic and essential.
I could, and have, written entire blogs about this, and I just get more and more convinced, so if you really care you can read my other blogs on drugs if you like.

Death Penalty: No longer allowed. It isn’t a deterrent. It’s expensive. It puts innocent people to death. Besides, plenty of fine books have been written in jail.
On the note of incarceration in general: prisons are full, and by and large they are full of drug offenders and recidivists. Prison sentences don’t seem to be stopping crime. Inmates need to be educated and given a chance to get decent jobs. The reason criminals steal is usually because it is easy money and wage slavery sucks, not because they are just hopelessly bad people who need to be punished. As usual Puritan moralizing gets in the way of ACTUAL RESULTS.

Abortion: Leave it alone. In fact promote it in cases where the mother or family would otherwise end up on welfare, or at least make it free for those who will just end up on the government dole. Fingernails, hair and human DNA don’t mean a human life, it’s the potential for life.

Gay Marriage: The only real argument against is Biblical moralizing. Marriage is a state recognition of the human emotion of love between two people. No matter how much conservatives like peeping in people’s windows it isn’t their business who is fucking who in which orifice. If the government is going to give legal rights to people in love who are willing to spend the rest of their lives together then it should do it regardless of those people’s sex.
People aren’t going to randomly get married for tax benefits any more than they do now. If you want bring up the whole “They can’t raise a family without adopting” issue then we can just make hetero marriage without intent to have children or adopt made illegal as well. Fair is fair, and if children are the reason for marriage then straights should have to have children to get married.

Health Care: We have an idiotic health care system. By and large those that need it don’t have it and those that do have it don’t need it. On top of that the bureaucracy necessary to just determine whether you QUALIFY for gov’t care is staggering. Either the gov’t needs to provide universal health care or individual health care outside of employment needs to be made affordable and effective.

Our criminals get better health care than our children, and the solution isn’t to take health care away from prisoners. Frankly universal health care seems the best deal to me. Hospitals, doctors and pharmacies bill everything directly to the government. The only paperwork is to prove that care was given and received.

So much money is wasted just figuring out who is responsible for what costs and who is covered for which procedure or medicine that a universal system would work just by being far more efficient. Besides, if it is a federal crime to misrepresent medical bills and so on maybe more people will be charged for only the services that are actually received.
Universal health care would also help unify disparate medical records and etc. We keep moving more and more time in our lifetimes. The days of family doctors who can recite patients’ medical histories from memory are long gone. To be effective medical records need to be quickly and accurately available wherever a patient may be.

Guns: This has come up quite a bit around ProU. CCW permits will be legal in every state and you will have to go through a background check to get a gun. If you want one you should be allowed to have one. On a crazy long shot maybe we can get more and more people to take responsibility for their own safety and we can start phasing out our traffic nanny, ineffective, often corrupt and power hungry law enforcement establishment.

I don’t really think that more guns in more hands will actually solve much, or even drop crime that much, but most legal gun owners are at least reasonably sane people unlikely to pull their weapon at random and fire into crowded malls.

Law Enforcemnt in general: First, too many things are illegal. Drugs, and other personal choices like prostitution, and gambling are personal choices, not matters for cops to break down your door for.

Money will be diverted from crime fighting efforts to crime prevention efforts. Arresting people who have already committed crimes is far less important than preventing people from committing crimes through education and other socializing programs. Provide free/inexpensive drug clinics and treatment facilities that actually work (none of that 12 steps shit) and there will less junkies mugging people for dime bags.

Provide effective education and put people in decent jobs and there will be fewer people stealing to feed themselves and their children.

Make drugs legal and there will be far fewer neighborhoods where the most powerful people are drug dealers.

Sex Education: All federal monies will be pulled from abstinence only programs and put into programs that provide realistic information and options. Abstinence is the only 100% deal, but people are always going to have sex. We are built for it. Our minds are programmed for it. It isn’t going to stop and everybody should understand what they are doing and how to get the results that they most desire from their sexual lives, even if that desire is to not have a sex life that involves another person.

Education in General: Every child will be educated from a young age in things that interest and motivate them. Certain basics will still be required, but at least 2/3s of the curriculum above, say, the 3rd or 4th grade will be student driven. Kids hate school because they are learning about things that they don’t care about. When they don’t care it gets forgotten or goes unused, so there really is no point to forcing kids into classes just because WE think that it’s important.
I think this will keeps kids I school and give us more responsible, more interested and just all around better children. They may not all know trigonometry, but they will all know the things that they want to know.

Exhausting our children’s minds on things that do just that, exhaust them, is a waste. Teachers will provide resources and any information that they may have. Teachers with specialties will be sought out by students interested in that specialty. We have enough free, reliable information that the strict classroom is no longer necessary. Put text books on the internet for reasonable prices and let the kids choose which ones interest them.

Religion: It is perfectly acceptable for conservative Christians to tout their beliefs, so let me outline mine. Atheism. I won’t stop you from practicing, or ridicule you for believing in God, but it is perfectly acceptable for me not to believe, and for me to completely disregard all the crap you say, “Because the Bible says so.” Even if I thought there was a God, you and your 2000 year old book is not where I would go to find out what HE thought about things. Creationism will not be taught in Biology class. It isn’t a biological matter, it is a theological one. Hell have entire classes on origin theories, but Creationism isn’t science, and neither is Intelligent Design.

Stem Cells: Allowed and encouraged. The use of embryos marked for destruction towards saving lives is just smart. Most people against stem cell research don’t actually understand what a stem actually is or how we get them anyway. When everyone who knows something about stem cells supports using them, and all those who don’t know a thing about them are against it seems a fairly simple decision, no?

Terrorism: Small groups of radicals will always be able to occasionally do large amounts of damage. Killing them all or chasing them down is pointless and impossible. Besides, every country on Earth supports terrorists in some form or another under whatever name is least likely to be scrutinized by the public. What we need to worry about is the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons. It is really only a matter of time before some organization gets a full on nuke and levels a city. We need as many allies as possible united against things like that and the best way to do that isn’t to invade their countries. America and a dwindling number of Western powers will not defeat terrorism through military might.

Also, stop torturing people. It just makes us look bad, and doubly bad for getting caught.

FCC: This abomination and insult to public intelligence will be abolished. If you don’t want to hear “fuck” on the television then don’t watch those kinds of programs. The standards are applied unevenly, nearly randomly, and are often blind to context. They also favor showing violence over sex or nudity and generally promote the usual Puritan conservative values of the kind of people that would think that the FCC is a good idea. Nipplegate was ridiculous. We don’t need that crap. Let the free market do its job. If people are really bothered by certain content then they won’t watch certain shows.

Grow the fuck up people. The real world is rated R at least, and XXX in most people’s lives, so stop scrubbing it up for presentation on television and radio.

I guess that about handles the things I really care about. Feel free to engage me in any way. The two party system we currently is massively flawed. It promotes centrist inaction punctuated by periods of clumsy shifts towards one side or another. We have two parties that don’t accurately represent the breadth of ideas of their constituencies. More parties means more choices and a better chance to have people running the government we actually believe in, rather than settled on. I might like to actually be excited by a Senator or President some day, but I doubt that the Republicans or Democrats is going to do it. Maybe you feel the same? Vote third party, lose the primary system and electoral college and we might actually get a worthwhile democracy again.

There is too much money, and a dearth of fresh ideas in politics. Start a party, fix the system.