Archive for December, 2006
To the Streets!
Dan Conley at PoliticalInsider.com has predicted a return to the Vietnam era-style protest, arguing that if President Bush escalates the war in Iraq, increasing public outcry will cause anti-war advocates to take to the streets:
By spring, expect a massive, million + participant march in Washington to coincide with the fourth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished.” Every Democratic candidate for President … and at least one Republican … will speak at the rally.
I wonder. It seems to me that a big part of the motivation for war protests during Vietnam was the presence of the draft. But when a President fails to heed calls from study groups, Congress, and public opinion polls, perhaps there is no other option but to stage protests. Then again, when a President ignores all that, maybe people considering protesting will just come to the conclusion, “Why bother?”
I also wonder as to which Republican candidate(s) for President would consider appearing at such a rally. None that I’m aware of have established themselves as anti-escalation, though several have remained silent so far.
Who thinks these protests will happen? Who would participate in one? Would any Republican presidential candidates speak at them? Would all Democrats? Should President Bush listen to them? Discuss (as usual).
Oh, and by the way, tomorrow night I will be hopping a flight to Europe and then spending the next couple weeks visiting Berlin, southern Spain, and Scotland with my handsome, handsome boyfriend. If you’ve got any travel tips, let me know before 6:00pm, because I won’t have much internet access (if any) until I get back January 12th. (Billy, once again, will be in sole control of Urbanagora–yikes!)
The Atheist’s Case for Libertarianism
A while back, in the midst of discussion on religion and politics, Brandon gave us a look into the political mindset of an atheist (”An Atheist Worldview“). I found it interesting that his views were so sharply different from mine – somewhat morally relativist, supportive of the welfare state, and fundamentally opposed to the individualist ideologies. As an atheist libertarian, I seek to provide an alternative political vision for atheism, and hope to explain how my own atheism has informed me politically in a far different way than Brandon’s has for himself.
Because I come from a relatively secular Chinese family, organized religion has never been an issue with me. My family intermittently flirted with various sects of Christianity, from Catholicism to Baptism, but those experiences never made much of an impression on me. Nonetheless, I came to simply accept certain things without considering their veracity. I passively acknowledged that God existed, that Jesus was a cool dude, and that they were all in concert with Santa Claus (by far my biggest concern when I was young). I went through some personal soul-searching in high school, when I began to fear the concept of eternal punishment in hell. For a time during my Freshmen year I heavily experimented with religion, visiting my local Baptist church with my mom on Sundays. I was very concerned with morality to be exact. After a while, through the process of self-questioning, I realized that I didn’t believe in God. Come 10th grade, I was a full fledged atheist. I had come to accept the problem of evil: if God were omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good, there could not be evil in this world. But there is evil in this world. Alas, no God, at least not one who is both omnipotent & omniscisent, and wholly good. And if he wasn’t wholly good, I decided he wasn’t a god worth liking and respecting and believing in. And if he wasn’t omnipotent and omniscient, I felt like there was no point in grounding my morals, and my behaviour, on the fear of sin and punishment.
So how does my atheism inform my libertarianism? Two things: the nature of life, and the nature of ourselves. Both sort of boil down to my views on atheistic existentialism, the antithesis to most monotheistic religions of today.
I generally believe, like most existentialists, that because there is no god that created us, we did not come into this world with a purpose or a point to life a priori, and certainly no guarantee of an afterlife (it’s a reality that scares me a lot, but nonetheless not something I can reject). We live and then we die. Simple as that. Where I disagree with existentialism is my belief that we do come into this world with a certain human nature, which we owe to biology and nature.
From these two points, my first corollary is individualism. We are born into this world, simply put, in individual bodies. We aren’t some collective mass of consciousness. Moreover, unlike Brandon, I believe we are first and foremost self-interested creatures before we are social creatures, because we are first and foremost biological organisms in nature before we wenter into some societal structure. I believe that one of our foremost qualities of our human nature is the innate desire for freedom. We simply don’t want other people to tell us how to live our life or how to achieve our conception of “happiness.” And the atheist in me says that we only get one life, so we might as well let each and every one of us be masters of our lives, freely making the choices for ourselves. What that means politically is a governing philosophy that should seek to maximize freedom, and that supports what most of you are familiar with: free markets, capitalism, free trade, deregulation, privatization, personal ownership, property rights, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, personal choice, etc etc.
My second corollary is an ethical system that firmly believes in individual negative rights. As an objectivist-leaning person, I tend to believe that there are rarely any ethics systems that exist independent of society. For most ethical philosophies, we mus affirm certain values as a society, because obligations of equity, altruism, and humanistic compassion don’t objectively exist in nature, nor in ourselves. While we may exhibit certain tendencies to be kind, compassionate, and altruistic at times, we certainly don’t have an innate feeling of obligation to do so, and even if/when we do, it is ultimately limited by our foremost quality of self-interest (who gives their life savings to charity? No sane person). However, the only ethical system that does derive from certain tenets of nature is individual negative rights. The common attack on this system by atheists like Brandon is that the common defense of rights – natural law – doesn’t exist. They point to the fact that, absent a God greater than ourselves, there is nothing in nature that points to any obligations for the basis of rights. But I beg to disagree. Individual rights are derived from our individual selves. This is why the framers of our constituion, a deist (Jefferson) among them, held such truths to be “self-evident.” What do I mean when I say this? I would argue that there are some fundamental truths about human nature, certain timeless things we as individuals never want done to us: be murdered or physically injured by someone else, have our property taken away without our consent, be silenced by others, and have beliefs forced upon us. And because we are all fundamentally human and possess these traits, we are all “created equal.” Hume’s is/ought fallacy does not apply, because what is in nature is what each individual believes ought to be (or not done to them). It would only follow that we have certain rights to life, free speech, freedom of belief, possession of the private property we’ve accumulated, and to be treated equally before any legal system that governs over us. Might I add that every individual has a right to be governed only through his/her consent, and the only form of government that does so is a democratic one. And it follows that the only system of ethics that comes closest to objectively existing is one derived from these rights, and seeks to not violate them. On a sidenote, I suspect Brandon and other humanist atheists believe that our rights only exist because society affirms them, and society affirms them only because they provide a large amount of utility to the public at large. But that begs the question: how can one define utility, public good, or the “welfare” of the populace in general (which is simply composed of individuals) without an objectively standing ethics system based on individual rights? I leave that to be answered by others, because I am genuinely curious.
Incidentally, the reason I believe things like murder is wrong in society, and why government should prohibit it, is because they are violations of an individual’s negative rights. And one’s negative rights are generally related to individual freedom, for all of the above that we want not done to us are simply manifestations of not wishing to be limited in our freedom. And murder is the ultimate violation of that freedom, because without life no freedom is possible.
Before I end, I should say that I don’t generally believe in positive rights. Things like universal healthcare, personal dignity, unemployment benefits, and a social safety net are not on my list, and for two reasons. Firstly, while desires for those things may exist to a certain extent in humans, such desires are not nearly as absolute, universal, and timeless as the negative desires I listed above. Secondly, positive rights require action. Negative rights require inaction, which is simply the state of being that we all start out with. I fail to see how something can be an inherent “right” if it is based on the work and creation of others. Rather, we should call them what they are: entitlements.
Finally, I leave a question to Brandon and co. In his post, Brandon talked about his belief that we have a responsibility to help others in society. At the same time, he pointed to a skepticism dof eternal truths and gtentative support for relativism. I wonder, then, how we can have an objective responsibility to do certain things if can’t accept certain objective truths. What, afterall, constitutes “goodness” in a world of subjectivity? The dangers of relativism lie in its nature of unending expansion. Without assumption of certain truthful starting points, all knowledge fails to exist on stable grounds, and all policy in government fails to properly derive from said knowledge.
~By Doctor X (Josh)
The Atheist’s Case for Libertarianism
A while back, in the midst of discussion on religion and politics, Brandon gave us a look into the political mindset of an atheist (”An Atheist Worldview“). I found it interesting that his views were so sharply different from mine – somewhat morally relativist, supportive of the welfare state, and fundamentally opposed to the individualist ideologies. As an atheist libertarian, I seek to provide an alternative political vision for atheism, and hope to explain how my own atheism has informed me politically in a far different way than Brandon’s has for himself.
Because I come from a relatively secular Chinese family, organized religion has never been an issue with me. My family intermittently flirted with various sects of Christianity, from Catholicism to Baptism, but those experiences never made much of an impression on me. Nonetheless, I came to simply accept certain things without considering their veracity. I passively acknowledged that God existed, that Jesus was a cool dude, and that they were all in concert with Santa Claus (by far my biggest concern when I was young). I went through some personal soul-searching in high school, when I began to fear the concept of eternal punishment in hell. For a time during my Freshmen year I heavily experimented with religion, visiting my local Baptist church with my mom on Sundays. I was very concerned with morality to be exact. After a while, through the process of self-questioning, I realized that I didn’t believe in God. Come 10th grade, I was a full fledged atheist. I had come to accept the problem of evil: if God were omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good, there could not be evil in this world. But there is evil in this world. Alas, no God, at least not one who is both omnipotent & omniscisent, and wholly good. And if he wasn’t wholly good, I decided he wasn’t a god worth liking and respecting and believing in. And if he wasn’t omnipotent and omniscient, I felt like there was no point in grounding my morals, and my behaviour, on the fear of sin and punishment.
So how does my atheism inform my libertarianism? Two things: the nature of life, and the nature of ourselves. Both sort of boil down to my views on atheistic existentialism, the antithesis to most monotheistic religions of today.
I generally believe, like most existentialists, that because there is no god that created us, we did not come into this world with a purpose or a point to life a priori, and certainly no guarantee of an afterlife (it’s a reality that scares me a lot, but nonetheless not something I can reject). We live and then we die. Simple as that. Where I disagree with existentialism is my belief that we do come into this world with a certain human nature, which we owe to biology and nature.
From these two points, my first corollary is individualism. We are born into this world, simply put, in individual bodies. We aren’t some collective mass of consciousness. Moreover, unlike Brandon, I believe we are first and foremost self-interested creatures before we are social creatures, because we are first and foremost biological organisms in nature before we wenter into some societal structure. I believe that one of our foremost qualities of our human nature is the innate desire for freedom. We simply don’t want other people to tell us how to live our life or how to achieve our conception of “happiness.” And the atheist in me says that we only get one life, so we might as well let each and every one of us be masters of our lives, freely making the choices for ourselves. What that means politically is a governing philosophy that should seek to maximize freedom, and that supports what most of you are familiar with: free markets, capitalism, free trade, deregulation, privatization, personal ownership, property rights, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, personal choice, etc etc.
My second corollary is an ethical system that firmly believes in individual negative rights. As an objectivist-leaning person, I tend to believe that there are rarely any ethics systems that exist independent of society. For most ethical philosophies, we mus affirm certain values as a society, because obligations of equity, altruism, and humanistic compassion don’t objectively exist in nature, nor in ourselves. While we may exhibit certain tendencies to be kind, compassionate, and altruistic at times, we certainly don’t have an innate feeling of obligation to do so, and even if/when we do, it is ultimately limited by our foremost quality of self-interest (who gives their life savings to charity? No sane person). However, the only ethical system that does derive from certain tenets of nature is individual negative rights. The common attack on this system by atheists like Brandon is that the common defense of rights – natural law – doesn’t exist. They point to the fact that, absent a God greater than ourselves, there is nothing in nature that points to any obligations for the basis of rights. But I beg to disagree. Individual rights are derived from our individual selves. This is why the framers of our constituion, a deist (Jefferson) among them, held such truths to be “self-evident.” What do I mean when I say this? I would argue that there are some fundamental truths about human nature, certain timeless things we as individuals never want done to us: be murdered or physically injured by someone else, have our property taken away without our consent, be silenced by others, and have beliefs forced upon us. And because we are all fundamentally human and possess these traits, we are all “created equal.” Hume’s is/ought fallacy does not apply, because what is in nature is what each individual believes ought to be (or not done to them). It would only follow that we have certain rights to life, free speech, freedom of belief, possession of the private property we’ve accumulated, and to be treated equally before any legal system that governs over us. Might I add that every individual has a right to be governed only through his/her consent, and the only form of government that does so is a democratic one. And it follows that the only system of ethics that comes closest to objectively existing is one derived from these rights, and seeks to not violate them. On a sidenote, I suspect Brandon and other humanist atheists believe that our rights only exist because society affirms them, and society affirms them only because they provide a large amount of utility to the public at large. But that begs the question: how can one define utility, public good, or the “welfare” of the populace in general (which is simply composed of individuals) without an objectively standing ethics system based on individual rights? I leave that to be answered by others, because I am genuinely curious.
Incidentally, the reason I believe things like murder is wrong in society, and why government should prohibit it, is because they are violations of an individual’s negative rights. And one’s negative rights are generally related to individual freedom, for all of the above that we want not done to us are simply manifestations of not wishing to be limited in our freedom. And murder is the ultimate violation of that freedom, because without life no freedom is possible.
Before I end, I should say that I don’t generally believe in positive rights. Things like universal healthcare, personal dignity, unemployment benefits, and a social safety net are not on my list, and for two reasons. Firstly, while desires for those things may exist to a certain extent in humans, such desires are not nearly as absolute, universal, and timeless as the negative desires I listed above. Secondly, positive rights require action. Negative rights require inaction, which is simply the state of being that we all start out with. I fail to see how something can be an inherent “right” if it is based on the work and creation of others. Rather, we should call them what they are: entitlements.
Finally, I leave a question to Brandon and co. In his post, Brandon talked about his belief that we have a responsibility to help others in society. At the same time, he pointed to a skepticism dof eternal truths and gtentative support for relativism. I wonder, then, how we can have an objective responsibility to do certain things if can’t accept certain objective truths. What, afterall, constitutes “goodness” in a world of subjectivity? The dangers of relativism lie in its nature of unending expansion. Without assumption of certain truthful starting points, all knowledge fails to exist on stable grounds, and all policy in government fails to properly derive from said knowledge.
~By Doctor X (Josh)
The Atheist’s Case for Libertarianism
A while back, in the midst of discussion on religion and politics, Brandon gave us a look into the political mindset of an atheist (”An Atheist Worldview“). I found it interesting that his views were so sharply different from mine – somewhat morally relativist, supportive of the welfare state, and fundamentally opposed to the individualist ideologies. As an atheist libertarian, I seek to provide an alternative political vision for atheism, and hope to explain how my own atheism has informed me politically in a far different way than Brandon’s has for himself.
Because I come from a relatively secular Chinese family, organized religion has never been an issue with me. My family intermittently flirted with various sects of Christianity, from Catholicism to Baptism, but those experiences never made much of an impression on me. Nonetheless, I came to simply accept certain things without considering their veracity. I passively acknowledged that God existed, that Jesus was a cool dude, and that they were all in concert with Santa Claus (by far my biggest concern when I was young). I went through some personal soul-searching in high school, when I began to fear the concept of eternal punishment in hell. For a time during my Freshmen year I heavily experimented with religion, visiting my local Baptist church with my mom on Sundays. I was very concerned with morality to be exact. After a while, through the process of self-questioning, I realized that I didn’t believe in God. Come 10th grade, I was a full fledged atheist. I had come to accept the problem of evil: if God were omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good, there could not be evil in this world. But there is evil in this world. Alas, no God, at least not one who is both omnipotent & omniscisent, and wholly good. And if he wasn’t wholly good, I decided he wasn’t a god worth liking and respecting and believing in. And if he wasn’t omnipotent and omniscient, I felt like there was no point in grounding my morals, and my behaviour, on the fear of sin and punishment.
So how does my atheism inform my libertarianism? Two things: the nature of life, and the nature of ourselves. Both sort of boil down to my views on atheistic existentialism, the antithesis to most monotheistic religions of today.
I generally believe, like most existentialists, that because there is no god that created us, we did not come into this world with a purpose or a point to life a priori, and certainly no guarantee of an afterlife (it’s a reality that scares me a lot, but nonetheless not something I can reject). We live and then we die. Simple as that. Where I disagree with existentialism is my belief that we do come into this world with a certain human nature, which we owe to biology and nature.
From these two points, my first corollary is individualism. We are born into this world, simply put, in individual bodies. We aren’t some collective mass of consciousness. Moreover, unlike Brandon, I believe we are first and foremost self-interested creatures before we are social creatures, because we are first and foremost biological organisms in nature before we wenter into some societal structure. I believe that one of our foremost qualities of our human nature is the innate desire for freedom. We simply don’t want other people to tell us how to live our life or how to achieve our conception of “happiness.” And the atheist in me says that we only get one life, so we might as well let each and every one of us be masters of our lives, freely making the choices for ourselves. What that means politically is a governing philosophy that should seek to maximize freedom, and that supports what most of you are familiar with: free markets, capitalism, free trade, deregulation, privatization, personal ownership, property rights, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, personal choice, etc etc.
My second corollary is an ethical system that firmly believes in individual negative rights. As an objectivist-leaning person, I tend to believe that there are rarely any ethics systems that exist independent of society. For most ethical philosophies, we mus affirm certain values as a society, because obligations of equity, altruism, and humanistic compassion don’t objectively exist in nature, nor in ourselves. While we may exhibit certain tendencies to be kind, compassionate, and altruistic at times, we certainly don’t have an innate feeling of obligation to do so, and even if/when we do, it is ultimately limited by our foremost quality of self-interest (who gives their life savings to charity? No sane person). However, the only ethical system that does derive from certain tenets of nature is individual negative rights. The common attack on this system by atheists like Brandon is that the common defense of rights – natural law – doesn’t exist. They point to the fact that, absent a God greater than ourselves, there is nothing in nature that points to any obligations for the basis of rights. But I beg to disagree. Individual rights are derived from our individual selves. This is why the framers of our constituion, a deist (Jefferson) among them, held such truths to be “self-evident.” What do I mean when I say this? I would argue that there are some fundamental truths about human nature, certain timeless things we as individuals never want done to us: be murdered or physically injured by someone else, have our property taken away without our consent, be silenced by others, and have beliefs forced upon us. And because we are all fundamentally human and possess these traits, we are all “created equal.” Hume’s is/ought fallacy does not apply, because what is in nature is what each individual believes ought to be (or not done to them). It would only follow that we have certain rights to life, free speech, freedom of belief, possession of the private property we’ve accumulated, and to be treated equally before any legal system that governs over us. Might I add that every individual has a right to be governed only through his/her consent, and the only form of government that does so is a democratic one. And it follows that the only system of ethics that comes closest to objectively existing is one derived from these rights, and seeks to not violate them. On a sidenote, I suspect Brandon and other humanist atheists believe that our rights only exist because society affirms them, and society affirms them only because they provide a large amount of utility to the public at large. But that begs the question: how can one define utility, public good, or the “welfare” of the populace in general (which is simply composed of individuals) without an objectively standing ethics system based on individual rights? I leave that to be answered by others, because I am genuinely curious.
Incidentally, the reason I believe things like murder is wrong in society, and why government should prohibit it, is because they are violations of an individual’s negative rights. And one’s negative rights are generally related to individual freedom, for all of the above that we want not done to us are simply manifestations of not wishing to be limited in our freedom. And murder is the ultimate violation of that freedom, because without life no freedom is possible.
Before I end, I should say that I don’t generally believe in positive rights. Things like universal healthcare, personal dignity, unemployment benefits, and a social safety net are not on my list, and for two reasons. Firstly, while desires for those things may exist to a certain extent in humans, such desires are not nearly as absolute, universal, and timeless as the negative desires I listed above. Secondly, positive rights require action. Negative rights require inaction, which is simply the state of being that we all start out with. I fail to see how something can be an inherent “right” if it is based on the work and creation of others. Rather, we should call them what they are: entitlements.
Finally, I leave a question to Brandon and co. In his post, Brandon talked about his belief that we have a responsibility to help others in society. At the same time, he pointed to a skepticism dof eternal truths and gtentative support for relativism. I wonder, then, how we can have an objective responsibility to do certain things if can’t accept certain objective truths. What, afterall, constitutes “goodness” in a world of subjectivity? The dangers of relativism lie in its nature of unending expansion. Without assumption of certain truthful starting points, all knowledge fails to exist on stable grounds, and all policy in government fails to properly derive from said knowledge.
~By Doctor X (Josh)
Merry Christmas
While many educated people read this blog, and I realize that as education increases, so too does atheism, but I cannot resist wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. If you do not believe in this Day in form, then at least try to believe in the spirit of the Day, a universal reminder of love, joy, and humanity.
I am thankful for all the people who read and contribute to this blog, making it a rewarding and valuable venture.
The Storm Keeps Gathering
This is not the sort of thing I like to be proven right about. Let’s hope, during this holiday season, somebody notices this escalation before it gets beyond the point of no return.
In the meantime, merry Christmas.
A Brave New World
The ethical dilemma of genetically engineering “designer babies” has been around for a while. The newest wrinkle in the debate is not creating babies who are perfect, it’s creating ones who are disabled. A recent survey of clinics that offer embryo screening, a procedure used during in vitro fertilization normally undergone to weed out embryos that have genetic defects, suggests that three percent, or four clinics surveyed, have provided the procedure to help families create a child with a disability, specifically deafness or dwarfism. It is unclear, however, whether any deaf or dwarf babies have actually been born as a result of the procedure, and several experts have questioned whether the survey results are accurate at all.
It brings up an interesting debate over what constitutes “normal” and what restrictions ought to be made on genetic engineering. On one side is Cara Reynolds, a dwarf, who considered embryo screening before deciding to adopt a dwarf baby:
You cannot tell me that I cannot have a child who’s going to look like me. It’s just unbelievably presumptuous and they’re playing God.
On the other is Dr. Mark Hughes, who runs a Detroit laboratory that does the screening for many fertility programs nationwide:
To create a child with a disability because a parent wanted such a thing … where would you draw the line? It’s just unethical and inappropriate, because the purpose of medicine is to diagnose and treat and hopefully cure disease.
I come down on the side of the good doctor. What do others out there think about this, and the broader debate surrounding designer babies? What’s immoral and what isn’t? What’s the role of the government? Discuss.
Update: First, thanks to Salon.com for linking to us. Second, I wanted to add a few more thoughts that popped into my head as I went to bed after writing this post. I was trying to put myself in the shoes of a deaf person or a dwarf and asked myself if I, in the same situation, could pick and choose embryos I knew would turn out gay, would I? Again, it speaks to the same question of what is normal and what’s a defect. I can easily say that as for myself, I would never consider deliberately selecting an embryo with a hypothetical “gay gene,” though it is admittedly harder for me to argue that some gay or lesbian parents out there making that choice would be doing something immoral, even harder that he or she would be doing something that should be illegal (assuming other types of embryonic selection are available).
Ultimately, I think perhaps the appropriate line to draw would be to allow parents to deliberately weed out embryos with what medicine classifies as a disorder or a disease, but not allow parents to affirmatively choose specific embryos beyond that point for whatever reason.
One other thing I’ve noticed, and it’s been brought up at least once in the comments already, is the desire to group this sort of advancement as “eugenics,” compare it to the historical fascist regimes which have experimented with that process, and thereby argue it is wrong. Surely there’s a better moral argument out there against selective genetic engineering though, and one that goes beyond the other tired argument that it is “playing God”?
New Problems? New Solutions. The New American Party.
Thanks to former Daily Illini Columnist and Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska for the unique, bold ideas expressed in his vision of “The New American Party.”
In eighteen hundred and sixty, the
So in eighteen hundred and sixty, with the “peculiar institution” of slavery on the mind of every citizen, slave, and policy maker, a change was made. A man left that party because he realized
In two thousand and seven, as in eighteen hundred and sixty however, this system is failing us.
In the spirit of
The current Republican Party, since assuming control of the government in 2000, hasn’t had the opportunity to govern the way they promised in that campaign. The attacks of September 11, 2001 on
Yet the Democrats do not go blameless. Instead of encouraging bipartisan action and progress, the Democrats have played the role of antagonizing younger brother. Some Republican policies have been hopeful and moderate, but even those have been ridiculed, disgraced and ignored by the Democratic minority. Failing to offer counter-proposals of their own, they instead relied on the political life support of negative attack politics, only winning a Congressional majority due to the utter failure of the Republicans, not any successes of their own. Often directed by the fringe liberals and left wing ideologues of this country, the Democrats’ vision of a New America was an ugly one, when it was visible at all.
Libertarian and Green party politicians make small waves from time to time, but their platforms and belief systems are too narrowly focused to adequately handle the questions we must answer now. They generally receive votes out of voter ignorance or disgust with the two prominent options.
Therefore it is time again to challenge the stale politics of the two political parties and unviable third parties. It is time to advance a slate of candidates nationally – not to cater to strange or specific political issues, but to fix the problems that the Republicans and Democrats have proven they cannot.
This party will not be composed of eccentric and wealthy businessmen or delusional ideologues. It will be made of foreword thinking and progressive statesmen of both main parties, but most importantly, will receive its energy from
The New American Party will thrive on a platform that synthesizes conservative right with liberal left to produce moderate policy change on both domestic and foreign fronts. With the vision of the New American party, it is exciting to see how each individual issue on the platform flows into the next, and success breeds success. It includes:
- A recognition that the Iraq War has failed to secure the safety of our troops, our allies, and our homeland. A drastic military re-alignment and restructuring must occur. The post-World War II preconceptions that guide our military policy home and abroad must be set aside, but not abandoned, rather meshed with the realities and goals of a post 9/11
- Homeland security must also be restructured. The policy inappropriately labeled as racial profiling, rather, strategic security must replace the blind security policies that are failing us now at international hubs. All travelers will be scrutinized carefully, but guests in our nation from countries that support terrorism and radical Islam outright will be paid the highest attention, as will travelers who are egregiously breaking travel security rules or are in suspicious breach of travel protocol.
o Our seaports through which we receive a majority of imported goods must be secured. Bomb sniffing equipment and thorough and transparent examinations must be applied to all incoming goods.
- A committee composed of Republicans, Democrats, and New Americans will evaluate the constitutionality and effectiveness of the USA PATRIOT Act and will make recommendations for its renewal, revision, or retraction accordingly.
- The border with
- The amount of immigrants accepted and visas granted, not only from
- A law will be passed in
- A Congressional resolution will be passed reaffirming a woman’s right to a first or second term abortion.
These are the issues that currently force us to spend too much time in partisan deliberation and whose compromises and solutions are obvious. Any American who values their security, their civil liberties and the future of this nation can see that the New American platform has the moderation, foresight, hindsight and ability to protect us from ourselves and our enemies. A reconciliation of the best of the Democrats, the best of the Republicans, part Populist, part Libertarian, part European, but 100% made in
~By Chuck Prochaska
More on Atheism
Lally has just posted some excellent thoughts on “evangelical atheism” or “active non-belief” or whatever you want to call it. It’s worth reading.
At Least Condoleeza Rice Isn’t A Lesbian Or She’d Be In Real Trouble
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll just came out saying “more Americans express doubts about a candidate [for President] who served in Bush’s cabinet (59%) than one who is gay or lesbian (53%).” Ouch.
Other interesting results:
- 8 in 10 Americans say they would be “comfortable” or “enthusiastic” about an African-American or a woman running
- 53% say they would have “some reservations” or “be uncomfortable” with a Mormon candidate
- 19% say the same about a Jewish candidate
- 44% say the same about an evangelical Christian
- 66% say the same about a candidate over the age of seventy
Almost certainly the number of Americans out there who would actually have misgivings about these kinds of candidates is higher than any poll will ever indicate (people tend not to like to admit to their prejudices), but it’s still interesting to see that people are just as uncomfortable with Mormons as they are with gays. Ironic that Mitt Romney, who is basically pinning his presidential hopes to gay-bashing, must overcome the same prejudice against himself that he is now fomenting against others.