February 20, 2009

• What are some controversial views you hold?

  You know I never answered my own featured question. Crazy huh?  Well here goes…

  1. I don’t believe in God. I don’t think there’s any such thing as spirituality or faith. I don’t believe in energy, aura, power, energy, deities, nature being alive, spirits, psychics, time travel, ghosts, alternate realities, reincarnation, mystical creatures, vampires, lycans, fairies, superpowers, heaven, hell, nirvana, or any other form of life after death.  However, I don’t disbelieve in any of these things and I hope at least some of these things really are true.  Oh and I do believe in Magic. Why? Well I can’t very well call myself a wizard if I don’t now can I? 

  2. While I do believe that there are probably other sentient species besides humanity in the Universe, I don’t believe any of them have ever been to the planet Earth or left any evidence for us to observe. It’s possible they have, but I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe it.

  3. I believe that every illegal substance should be legal. That includes Marijuana, Cocaine, Opium, etc. These substances should be carefully watched and regulated through a series of incentives and disincentives. These incentives and disincentives should be based on scientific studies of the relative addictiveness and health effects of use of these substances. That is, external harm caused by these substances on the society would be taxed proportionally to that harm and the money used to compensate for it.  Age prerequisites for a lot of these controlled substances should be mostly repealed except at the lowest necessary level where serious health concerns are raised by the use of it. That is to say giving alcohol to a minor young enough to cause serious developmental harm and beneath the age where he or she is considered an adult would be an illegal criminal offense. Other than that though, there’s be no silly age limits.

  4. I believe the age at which you should be considered an adult should be a qualified 14 or 15 years old.  Maybe 13. This is sort of tricky,  because ideally want to divorce the very idea of “age” having to do with maturity and have some sort of test or metric of maturity. But that can have a severely negative impact on self-esteem if you are one of the people who doesn’t qualify as “mature”. And what kind of test would really be fair?  No… I think if you should either eliminate age prerequisites altogether OR have sort of a buffer period wherein an adult parent can petition the courts to override a child’s decisions but has no direct control over their choices.  As a general principle though I think children need to be treated more like adults much much earlier in their lives. And that entails substantive education. In particular sex education should begin extremely early and not be left solely to parents.

  5. I believe in universal free public education. That *includes* College and grad school. I really think the endowment system for higher education is just plain dumb. Basically it’s a form of college-loyalty indoctrination and should be highly discouraged.

  6. I believe in a truly open marriage system. That means of course no restrictions on marriage by race or gender or sexual orientation. It also means allowing polygamy. multiple men, multiple women, multiple men and women combinations would all be legal and protected through the law. It would always have to be concensual though and it might make sense to explore the possibility of requiring psychological evaluations before ANY marriage is entered into as a reasonable price to pay for the marriage protections of the State.  Of course Churches don’t have to support or contribute to ANY of these kinds of marriages. They can even discourage them. That’s up to them. It’s a matter of the State that allows them. As a matter of public relations it might be wise for the State to re-brand marriage as Civil Union to pacify the religious groups. I don’t believe they should, but I don’t particularly care.

  7. I believe that prostitution should be legal. It should be highly carefully regulated and licensed. Certainly slavery commited under the guise of prostitution should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law… probably the laws against that should be much stronger, roughly around the level of criminality that treason is judged at today (treason itself probably shouldn’t be punishable by death, mass murder and rape should be considered more heinous crimes).   Prostitution however should not be painted under the same umbrella. There should be two levels of legal prostitution, first an industry level where it is engaged in explicitly for profit, and a more social services level where it is used as a form of licensed therapeutic component.

  8. I am Pro-Choice. I don’t know when life begins, but pretty much every pro-choice policy makes sense, is fair and just, and will help prevent abortions from occuring in the long run. I am utilitarian pro-choice advocate, not on principles. Pro-life policies are dangerous and harmful to many women.

  9. I believe that the scientific evidence for man made global warming is convincing enough and should be acted upon. Enough said.

  10. I believe that Israel is ruled by a dangerous fundamentalist religious regime pretty much on the same level of Iran and our policies toward them should reflect that. In other words if we want to play nice with Israel we should play nice with Iran too and vice versa. But human rights violations contributed by both regimes or ANY regime for that matter should be severly discouraged and ultimately not tolerated. I think Israel should unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and open its borders with Gaza and the West Bank. That’s a start.

  11. I believe that the United States is a dangerous imperialist power. We’re probably one of the nicest imperialist power the world has ever seen and it’s probably a good thing overall for the world that we emerged as the victorious super power in the modern era,  but that doesn’t make us any less dangerous going forward. I believe the United States should renouce unilateral actions and act in accordance with the concensus views of the United Nations on all matters of international significance.

  12. I believe the United States should openly eliminate its nuclear arsenal over the course of some reasonably small specified time (say 5 years) and allow inspectors from all over the world to come in and verify that the United States has no weapons of mass destruction. This should be the model then that it shoudl encourage ALL other nuclear powers to follow.

  13. I believe the United Nations should be remade, the Veto system eliminated and some sort of reasonable concensus system should take its place. Probably a three house global legislature solution would make snese. More on that another day. Most United Nations representatives should be elected by their populace. It should be a position nearly as significant as President or Prime Minister.

  14. I believe in universal single payer healthcare. All nations should have this. The right to basic healthcare and a high quality education should be a fundamental right, certainly above and more significant than the right to bear arms.

  15. I don’t believe in the Death Penalty. To be morally consistent, if you punish killing, you shouldn’t be doing killing.

  16. I believe the United States should begin to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately and close Guantanamo Bay tomorrow, and renounce torture and warrantless wiretapping unequivocally. Fruther I think members of the former administration should be brought up on international charges so that all of what they did can be revealed for the world to see, whether or not they are aquitted or convincted it’s more important that this be visibly revealed to all to see.

  Gah there’s so many more! But I’m running out of time so I’ll let that be a start and stop for now.

  I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

  • 11:35 am
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