Friday, January 28, 2005

What I Really Want From a Political Party

This is not a short rant, so I'll start it one day and get it finished as I have time. The theme this time? What I want from a political party. Let me stress this again: *a* political party. Having to split my vote all the time sets back what I really want quite often: one way I sorta get what I want and the other only sorta get what I want. Keep in mind that I am sometimes "Out There" in what I want. Somtimes there are contradictions and how I resolve them isn't always easy.

I want a political party that is technophillic and very fond of funding science. This means that knowledge and discovery are high on the party's areas to fund and one of the last to be cut. That means that the Department of Energy, NASA, NIH, and NSF get enough money to keep the US as the primiere source of scientific discoveries on the planet. This means making sure that there is enough money to pay for those researchers. This means there is enough money to fund university research. This means there is enough money for the scientific national labs to do quality work and pay competitively. This means NASA can have a very robust robotic exploration program and an exciting manned program that compliments the robitic and acts as a source of pride and prestige that doesn't require smacking other nations to get. In this day and age science and technology are life for a nation. The US has a unique culture in that respect in that we have many multiple tracks that science can be explored. Each has different emphases. Each has different strengths. So long as they are given enough money, they have cranked out vast amounts of discoveries and often awe inspiring ones at that.

I want a political party that is extremely pro education. This means from day care to college and graduate school. Education ought to be a right, not a priveledge. Every child, every man, every woman ought to be able to get the level of education that they are capable of. In an ideal world, everyone would have a free college education. I have my qualms over letting anyone become an English major, but I suppose that's difficult to justify otherwise except that liberal arts majors - at leas tlast I checked - didn't seem to do well post college on average. I do have my serious qualms about the primary and secondary levels of education in a big, big way. However, that will be a rant for another day.

I want a political party that is pro military...but not necessarily pro defense contractor. I have worked for defense contractors and all too often I have seen them suck the life out of projects with intentional blood sucking. There needs to be serious reform on the part of the procurement strategy for the military. We need equipment that is the best in the world. We need it pronto. We don't need to be sitting there developing fighters for 20+ years (*cough* the F/A-22 *cough*). That plane should have gone into production and devliery ten years ago! Soldiers are the important ones here and delivering equipment that allows them to do their jobs well and effectively happens to be the most important thing: not the jobs in the congressional districts, not anything else. Just the lives of the men and women that are called on to be at the sharp point of battle.

I want a political party that thinks about the interests of our nation in foreign affairs. This means that it is not afraid to go it alone when it needs to. This also means that it ways the consequences of doing so and finds them acceptable. It also means that working cooperatively ought to be at the top of our list and only as a last resort going alone ought to be done. It would not have hurt the Bush administrations goals to have waited six to twelve more months to go hunting in Iraq. Saddam could not have proved that he had disposed of the WMDs. To do so would have invited in the Iranians or others to smack him in the region. The inspectors would not have had the proof that they needed to say he disarmed. That would have likely succeeded in placating our European allies that we have gone the extra mile and that we were in fact justified to smack Saddam ourselves. I doubt we would have had German or French ground troops, but we would have had a lot more support after the fact. Obviously that was a very bad call on the part of Shrub's political team and it could have been far, far better had it been done differently.

I want a political party that is green, but not capital Green. I can see the damage being done to the environment. I can see that we need to get away from oil. I can see we need to greatly increase our efficency and introduce recycling in a vastly greater scale than we are already doing. Additionally, I have concerns about the marginal land that has been put into production for agricultural purposes. At the same time, the antinuclear attitude has gotta go. It's far cleaner than even solar (ever looked at the manufacturing process and the nastiness produced from it?) The amount of radioactives that are released by coal burning than ever done by a nuclear power plant. Well, except for perhaps everybody's favorite example of stupidity, Cheronobyl.

I want a political party that's moderately liberal in its social policies. In my ideal world, the government would stay out of people's lives altogether or as much as possible. However, as has been demonstrated by history, to guard rights, ironically, you have to have government involvement. I'd like to be a libertarian, but I can't say that it'd work in reality at all.

That said though, I have to say that I want a political party that is emphateticly for personal responsibility. If you're an adult, you're hale and healthy, why in the world are you depending on anyone to take care of you. The goverment sure shouldn't be! I don't want the nanny state. I was living in NM at the time of the infamous MacD's coffee incident. The woman did get bad burns. It was because of the coffee and its temperature. It was also her decision to put it between her legs as she was driving in traffic. That was a situation that was entirely her own fault: its VERY likely you're going to have to stop suddenly. The fact that she was rewarded for her stupidity and cries of victimhood.

I want a political party that thinks before it leaps, doesn't analyze something to death, and even acknowledges that there are possibly no good answers, but something still must be done. It needs the honest foresight then to realize that fixing things down the line as best as possible can be done and will have had some plans to do so.

I want a political party that is pro legal immigration. Those individuals that work their way throught he nightmare of the immigration department shouldn't be as penalized as they are. Those that are illegally here shouldn't be tolerated. Frankly. Should we have an open border with Mexico? If Mexico is capable of controling its borders in a manner that we like, si! However, they're a bit touchy, understandably, about things that they are told they have to do. I am not a fan of the Border Patrol at all.

That leads me to my whacky political view: I'm an expansionist. Yop. I'm all for moving those borders outward. I am not for conquest and annexation. I am for voluntary unions. Mostly. In an ideal world, I'd love to see the US, Canada, Mexico, Carribean, and Central America united. Perhaps with Britian, Australia, Japan, Korea, Ireland, Polynesia, South America, and Phillipines tossed in. Even Indonesia too if we could figure out how to fix the massive problems there first. The one place I'd consider just outright annexing is Haiti. The place is a mess and needs serious help that it won't get otherwise. So, at any rate, I'm an political extremist whacko in that sense, or so I was labeled by an individual on alt.history.future.

That's it for now. I'll write some more another time and add in more details then.

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