Wednesday, July 18, 2007

What I Have for Liberal Tendencies

Or Why Kinja Ought to give me a liberal tag too. ;)

I just did a post about why I think Kinja keeps giving me a conservative tag for my blog. It comes. It goes. However, most of the time that I look its there. To be sure, not always. Just because I think Canada looks like some great ice cream to eat after a nice and spicy main entree of Mexico doesn't mean I am necessarily strictly a conservative. That is not to say that I don't have some conservative views, but rather there's more a mishmash of what I have thought about and believe.

1. Equal pay for equal work. I don't care who you are, what you are, or where you're from. You do the work, you ought to get paid for it. Man, Woman, Mutant from Mars. It's all the same to me.

2. I have a strong environmentalist streak. I genuinely worry about the environment and the stupid things that people do to it. Global Warming is real, man-made, and something we must work to fix. Or Else. Anyone who has read this blog has seen me trumpet this time and again to try to get the message out.

3. I support gay marriage: it's a civil institution, folks. If your church doesn't support it, that's fine by me. I have to admit I am less than comfortable with some - alright a lot - of the actions of various gay groups in SF, especially some of the street fairs - oy, I'd be equally disturbed if straights did the things I've seen there in public! - but this is still something I think ought to be taken care of and all the implications that go with it.

4. School reform: I have some pretty strong opinions here. I don't think the whole asinine voucher idea is a good idea at all. I strongly believe that education is the leveler of the social field. If you get it and use it you can do almost anything. It doesn't matter where you're from, socially, if you get a good education, there are few heights that can't be scaled. That said, reform in our educational system is definitely needed and the money needs to be spread not just to the richer districts, but should be available to all districts. This shouldn't be a knee capping of richer districts, but pulling up the poorer ones. I'd even go further and state that I think that for certain majors - so long as you can maintain a good GPA - in college/university ought to be free for citizens. This includes science, engineering, possibly business related ones, teaching, but not the other, well, liberal arts ones. Science and engineering ought to get the highest priority though, IMNSHO.

5. Inheritance Tax. Anything above $10 million ought to be damned heavily taxed. We don't need no stinking aristocracy here.

6. Reforming our health care system. Damnit, Janet, it's broken and needs to be fixed. Everyone ought to have good, inexpensive health care, but the devil's in the details. I don't have an answer here: having the government do it tends to be bad, but the private sector has seriously fallen down.

There are more, but I don't have time right at the moment to continue this. I have to say that if you are purely liberal or purely conservative, even dogmatic in those areas, you might want to reconsider by, well, using your brains a bit. It's fine to disagree on issues, but to just tote a party line is inane and stupid.

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