A quick primer, for those who may care about such things, on some of my basic political beliefs:

* I believe all governments are, essentially, predatory. I believe the American Founding Fathers understood this, which is why they tried very hard to create a government that would function only just barely well enough to keep the lights on and the water running. I believe that when we complain about how disfunctional our government is, how inefficient it is, how laden with incompetence it is, we are badly missing the point. An incompetent, bungling government is something to be deeply grateful for.

Under the recent Bush Administration, the government only seemed to be staffed with dolts; in fact, I believe, most of those people knew exactly what they were doing. Their so called incompetence never seemed to cost them any money or many elections; in fact, somehow or other, despite every law they've broken and crime against humanity they've blatantly committed, none of them have spent a single night in jail.  Or seem likely to.  That's not incompetence.  Evil pure and simple, yes.  Ineptitude, hell no.

* I believe that religion is a social control mechanism. And I believe that it is the most successful social control mechanism in the history of humanity, far more successful than secular government. Having said that, I think submission to superstitious terror is beneath the dignity of what humanity can and should aspire to, and if such is to be the cost of living as a civilized being, I prefer anarchy. (And I'm a fat geek; I'd DIE in a real anarchy. FAST.)

* I hate affirmative action. I know, I know, as a white male I have no right to say this, and it automatically makes me a racist and I should just give up the futile effort at fooling anyone and go put on a white sheet and start dancing around a burning cross. Well, fuck anyone who thinks that way, and fuck everyone who thinks that you can somehow fix racism by reversing it and then institutionalizing it. If the Federal government is going to be in the business of redressing social inequity... and I have no problem with that as a basic concept of government... then instead of creating laws that force people to take race into consideration with every personnel decision, they should be trying to create and model policies designed towards making such processes as color blind as possible.

* I'm not wild about abortion, but I don't believe abortion is the issue. The issue is whether or not individuals will have the freedom to control what does and does not happen within their own bodies. And as to that, I deeply believe no government has the right to deny me or anyone else any medical procedure I want and can pay for, just as I similarly believe that no government has the right to force me or anyone else to undergo any medical procedure I do not want.

* I believe the war in Iraq is wrong. I believe that's so self evident to anyone capable of even a moment's real lucidity that I shouldn't have to point out all the reasons that it is wrong. If the guy down the street is shouting insults at you, you have many legal and moral recourses, but one of them is not and never will be to invade his house, break most of his chattels, steal the ones you like, torture, rape, and kill his family, and then burn the place down. Even if you truly believe he's got weapons and is planning to use those weapons on you at some point in the future, you still are not allowed to pre-emptively take these actions. And while analogy is always suspect, I believe this one is pretty exact. That is pretty much exactly what the United States did to Iraq, and we are still over there, torturing, raping, and killing that guy's family, breaking and stealing his shit, setting fire to the walls and furnishings. The only thing we should be doing over there now is trying to put out the fires we set. Given our level of competence at actually helping anyone, though, I think we should just get the fuck out of there and let the United Nations do what they can. And resign ourselves to paying horrific reparations, with the understanding that for the next hundred years at least, if the Iraqi people want something from us, we damn well owe it to them.

* I believe the U.S. Constitution is a deeply flawed document -- no document that approvingly acknowledges slavery can be anything but flawed -- and I would love to see it replaced with something better. Pragmatically speaking, however, any attempt to replace it would only end us up with something far worse, so I'm willing to live with it.

* I like Christmas. I think it's very cool. I'm not a Christian, am not even particularly religious (although I have articles of faith, at least one of which we'll get to on this list because it also pisses off  many of my fellow liberals no end, the tiny minded little fuckers), but Christmas is what the Winter Solstice Holiday that every human culture has always celebrated was always called in my childhood, and that's the word I have the strongest, most positive associations with. So I say "Merry Christmas" on my own time, and in the house I share with my wife and stepkids our holiday celebration is, and will remain, Christmas, despite the fact that we are about as secular humanist as you can get, and my wife and I are both educated enough to know that even if Jesus ever was born, it wasn't anywhere near December 25th. We make Christmas cookies, we send Christmas cards, we put up Christmas decorations, we will goddam well have a Christmas tree.

So during the holidays, I say "Merry Christmas", and if that pisses anyone off (and I imagine it will, at some point), well, there are many people who get pissed off over how I choose to wear my hair, too. I think people who get exasperated over such things badly NEED to be exasperated, hopefully into fatal aneurysms. So I wear my hair long and I say "Merry Christmas", and that's enough about that for now.

* I'm not sure about gun control. I'm still up on the rails about it. See, I hate guns, absolutely. Yet... our forefathers seemed to feel that individual ownership of weaponry was an essential component of individual liberty and social freedom... and I am not sure they are wrong.

I intensely dislike the idea of anyone anywhere being able to walk around with the power of life and death over me, or people I love. Yet, at the same time... the idea of giving all the boomsticks over to the authorities makes my hackles crawl. Would it make cops safer? Yeah, but... well, we don't draft cops in this country; they sign up for the job and last I heard, nobody advertised it as being 'safe'. I'd be happy to pay cops more and equip them better; I'm not sure I'm happy with the idea of seeing to it that they are the only people on the streets with guns.

Beyond that, it's extremely impractical. There are millions of guns in circulation. Gun control laws are not a magic genie; most of the people that society feels shouldn't carry guns are criminals already.

I've already come up with a solution for this; I wrote it up on a much older blog. I called it 'gun insurance'. Maybe I'll go back and dig it up again.

I also think our Constitution pretty unequivocally denies the power to pass any laws in regard to gun control whatsoever. I'm hardly a strict constructionist of the Constitution; in fact, as I already mentioned above, I feel it's a deeply flawed document... but it is the Owner's Manual of the United States, so I do feel we should pay some attention to what it actually says.

Whatever the case, in the end and at this point, I'm just not sure about gun control.

* I cannot support 'hate speech' and 'hate crime' legislation.

I deeply loathe many of the more extreme consequences of absolute freedom of expression. I abhor most exclusionary hate speech, and there are kinds of porn that will make even a filthy jaded old Internet pervert like me go pale as milk... but, nonetheless, I think that the essential concept of freedom of expression requires that we tolerate ALL forms of expression. Letting any authority decide which speech is acceptable and which isn't... nuh uh, that's a bad road to start walking on. So when you start pointing out certain types of extremely distasteful speech and levying fines and even jail sentences on people simply for speaking their minds, well... I think you've left the Freedom Trail and are heading towards despotism. At a fairly decent clip.

Similarly, I feel that when you set aside a certain type of crime as a 'hate crime', what you are doing is criminalizing a person's thoughts and feelings, rather than their actions. I cannot support that. I don't mind 'criminalizing politics', whatever the hell that means. But criminalizing speech, and criminalizing thought... that troubles me deeply.

* I believe in intelligent design. I really, honest to Whatever, do. I think the universe around us is simply too complex to have 'jest happened'. I think it's an artifact of some sort. What sort? I have no idea, any more than I have the slightest frickin' clue who or what set the whole thing in motion, or whether there is any greater purpose to existence than just existing.

I do not believe the idea of 'intelligent design' qualifies as science, but on the other hand, it mostly doesn't qualify as science because religious people think they KNOW who designed the universe, and 'scientists' feel just as certain that nobody/nothing did... so no one is trying to do any research into it. I understand my 'faith' in intelligent design is just that... but instead of having one side rather smugly say "Well, it's the absolute truth, and we know all the details because they're in our Bibles", and the other side just as contemptuously declare "No, there is no Higher Intelligence, that's all childish superstition, we KNOW the universe just 'evolved' over a course of billions of years as a progression of various random chemical interactions"... I'd like to see actually unbiased people who know something about how the world really works, really looking into it.

It's been said many times before, but I will say it again, because it's always worth repeating these essential truths: atheism is in every way as much a leap of faith, or an organized religion, as Christianity or Buddhism or anything else. Insisting that something DOESN'T exist takes as much arrogant gall as insisting that it does... more, in that one can prove that something exists, but I can't think of any feasible method for proving something doesn't.

No human being I am aware of understands how the universe around us works, or where it came from, or where it's going, or even, for the vast most part, where it is and what it is doing right now. We don't truly comprehend time, or space, or matter, or energy; our most brilliant researchers are waving a couple of lit matches around in an abysmally dark cavern of ignorance.

We have to keep trying to find stuff out. Embracing the ignorance and making a virtue of it, as the ultraconservative Christian right wants us to do, is absolutely deranged, but it's nearly as addle-minded to simply say "well, those guys we don't like believe in something, so we're going to laugh at it and pretend that we know it isn't true, when we actually do not know any such thing, because we haven't bothered to do any real research or experimentation on it".

I, personally, believe in Intelligent Design... in a vague sort of way. I don't insist anyone else believe in it... but I do get annoyed when all my fellow liberals insist that the entire concept that the Universe 'just goddam is', is the only acceptable concept for a truly enlightened and rational being to believe. The truth, at this point, is that no one knows for certain a single frickin' thing about the actual nature of the Universe. And if we can't agree on that and move forward with open minds, we aren't going to ever learn anything.

So, there you go. A quick primer on some of the things the guy behind this particular blog believes, or doesn't believe, in. Make of it what you will.