It's Monday. And since I've gotten to college, I've come to hate Mondays for the slow, rough, sleep-deprived days they are when your professors show you absolutely no mercy - on the day you're barely awake enough to keep up with the conversation even after downing a bottle of Fire in class.
What better time to throw my hat in the political ring? I might as well post some responses to the shit that's been going down on PI (that's Aroon and Soph's site) lately. And be forewarned: the short version of my take is that I largely agree with Aroon's ideas, but I'm not quite so forgiving about them.
As for Soph's ideas, I got lost in the third line because her shit's impossible to read. She tends to get caught up in what she's talking about and the result makes John Madden look as eloquent as JFK. Regardless to say, I'm not a big fan. That said, let's get it on.
Abortion: Pro-choice, no doubt. Aroon was right in clarifying that it's not pro-death, as the Hysterically Religious Right is ever-so-adamant about pointing out. It's a fucking choice. The people crying out to People for the Ethical Treatment of Fetii are the same people who cry about bans on smoking because it's your choice to cause your own death. Well guess what? Your young are yours, whether you like it or not. Regardless of whether life begins at conception or life begins at 40, children are nowhere near autonomous until adolescence. If you, legally, control what your kids do until the age of 18 because they can't think for themselves responsibly, what's the deal with abortion? If you want to have your little group of religious zealots say that it's bad by your version of God's memo to have an abortion, then choose not to have one. The Amish can exercise that kind of restraint - not taking up electricity though it's freely available, so why can't you, religious zealots? Oh, and by the way, to the aforementioned zealots: killing doctors who perform them is probably not cool in the eyes of the Fella Upstairs. I'm sure that's a very small minority, black-sheep-in-the-flock kinda thing, but still. Just making sure we're on the same page.
Gay marriage/civil unions/dynamic duos: Let it happen. First came abolition, then women's rights, then civil rights. Anti-gay-marriage people, do you see the pattern? Save yourself some effort and just give up the fight, and we'll all save ourselves some well-earned dollars and prevent some needless violence. Some gay couples will make better parents of children, and others will make worse. Nothing we can do about it. And between marriage and civil union, who gives a shit? It's different means to the same damn ends.
Iraq: Go read my seven-page essay on it. For the TLDR crowd: Bush went in as a political move. Back when I wrote it over summer 03, I gave the administration the benefit of the doubt on the oil issue. Since then, there's surfaced an executive order that said that the US takes ownership and control over *all* Iraqi oil-related fields/instruments/facilities. Oh, and that gas price spike you're seeing? Crude prices haven't gone up that much in the last month, kiddos. You're being screwed just like the rest of the world has been for the last half-decade. Go ask a Briton how much it is to fill up his tank in a typical sedan. Emma may know more on this, but I saw a forum poster two weeks ago at the CarAndDriver.com forums say it was the rough equivalent of $100 for him.
Environmentalism: Yeah, shit's going wrong, and not in just specific circumstances, either. Let me put this as clearly as I can: Bush is fucking our shit up. Before you scroll down to the comment button, let me explain that just because you haven't seen anything on the news about it doesn't mean it isn't happening. A lot of Bush's policies that Karl Rove knows won't be friendly are done completely under the table or tacked on the very bottom of ordinary, irrelevant-to-issue bills that get pushed through Congress by Bush's cronies down on the Hill. Executive orders, strong-arming whistle-blowers, that kind of thing. There have been three people who left the administration now who went public with the stories that Bush threatened to put potential whistle-blowers out of work. Also, many of these bad bad secretly-executed policies are environment-relevant. The bulk of those little tricks just simply lift environmental regulations that have been in place for years because they're expensive to corporations. We've already had an environmental disaster worse than Exxon-Valdez happen in this country just before Bush took office, and you haven't found about it because he covered it up. See what you miss by just getting your news from CNN?
Anybody but Bush: If any of you ask me one more fucking time, "Would you rather have Hitler/Stalin/Ralph Nader/[insert generally bad guy here] than Bush?" I will knock your candy ass down. Let me translate the ABBA party mantra into plain English: We'll vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is, and we really don't give a shit which one of the 437 [ok, 9] candidates gets nominated because they easily look very similar in comparison to Bush. The previous knocking down promise applies to comments about Al Sharpton as well, because it's a fucking given that he didn't have a chance. John Kerry wasn't my first choice for Democratic nominee, but I'd be damn happy to have him in office just to stop all the stuff that goes on in the point above. Laws are put on the public record for a reason, and anyone who tries to hide his policies as much as possible just has shit going wrong.
3rd-party politics: Most people agree with Aroon that this election is just too important to have a third party involved. The same was true in 2000, and in 1996, and 1992...... and basically there will never be a good time to get a third party in on the action. Historically, we've always stuck to two parties, and it makes sense since the ideological spectrum is a one-dimensional thing. There's no 'third' ideal way out there somewhere that a third party would want to attract members of the other two parties to. So, I'm content without a third party, let's just get some branches within our two-party system and all be happy.
Donation: Yeah, Soph completely missed the point of my little link in my profile for the ClickBack America campaign. And frankly, I'm not surprised she ranted on and on blasting her completely misconstrued idea of what I was linking. What's more, she found it lame that people just give money to causes they support (rather than 'being active' by volunteering at your local [insert good thing here]) and then patted herself in the back for giving a couple hundred bucks to Save the Children. One quote comes to mind: "What? No, I'm not going to go in there and just jump all over his couch, I've got a little more sense than that. ... Yeah, I remember scuffing my feet on his couch." But in response to Aroon's points on volunteerism and donation, I hugely applaud his views. Go read his stuff, and pretend I said it at the same time.
Done. Flame away.