Political Viewpoints

[Missing? NO!]

Title. This is a question that I've been curious about for a while. My personal thoughts on this topic are below.

I tend to be all over the map in terms of my political viewpoints, but there are a few things for me that are pretty consistent. Listed out below...

• Individual liberties should be protected. Protection of liberties is of the utmost importance.
• People should be able to live their lives without their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc, hindering them or benefiting them in any way.
• Though the government has financial problems, these need to be solved with smarter spending of our own money, rather than more taxes.
• The environment should be one of the highest priorities for a governmental administration.
• Assault weapons should be banned. Weapons in general should be controlled in a more meaningful manner.
• Privacy should be protected.
• Education should be affordable for all.
• Countries should focus on issues at home before turning their attentions abroad.

I could go on about my viewpoints, but those are the main ones that I can think of right now. Typically, my viewpoints tend to line up with that of a libertarian, to an extent. However, I've never voted for a libertarian candidate, as I don't trust any of them to win an election, and I'd rather not throw my vote away. I tend to vote democrat because I trust that they'll protect individual civil liberties more, but I wouldn't say I fully align myself with their viewpoints. I'm actually fairly dissatisfied with their management of the economy and their lack of regard for privacy. I would fault them on corruption, but corruption seems to be an issue of both main political parties, rather than just them.

This can be a heated topic at times especially in our current political climate, too. I don't think any of us on this site are at risk of getting into extremely heated arguments with one another, but, before we discuss, I'll make you all aware of the description of this board, that states that "some issues may be sensitive".

Would love to see what the political makeup of this site looks like. I included as many options as I could think of, but there may be some that I missed.

_{As a side note... I'm actually really surprised this topic has never been posted in this forum before! I would have thought it would have came up at SOME point.}

[Parzival]

• people can have rights

• privacy is good

• healthcare shouldn't kill people in pursuit of profit

[Sherkel]

Hmm. I have a lot of viewpoints and am very opinionated about them, but when it comes to creating policies affecting an entire population, a ton of things need to be taken into account that I haven't studied, and so in the end I don't have any political viewpoints. I can maybe take one of those online tests to see how my general views on life and morality combine with the factors lying between ideas and policy and where that would place me on the compass if more people are interested in this discussion.

(I also come here in part so that I specifically don't have to be in these kinds of discussions, but I'm not sure how true my behavior is to that...I did just post in this thread, after all. )

[Zowayix]

The poll question is interesting: it refers to USA political viewpoints specifically. I've always thought that the political climate over there is a lot different, to the point where the conservative party here are probably considered left-leaning from a USA perspective, and the fringe racist parties are probably considered centrist. But anyway!

I actually don't have that much consistent political views, mainly because there's still a lot of stuff I don't know about. But I'll always believe things among the lines of this:
- People deserve a "fair go", for lack of a better term; deserve basic human rights and s**t, also education and not being shot and things like that
- People with disabilities and chronic illnesses etc deserve dignity and respect (I actually might be inclined to think disability pensions etc should be part of the healthcare system, and not the welfare system)
- Essential services (healthcare, energy, water, etc) shouldn't be sold off for profit, and are better off being managed by some organization who doesn't have profit as a motive (perhaps a government would be suitable for that)
- Hate speech doesn't need to be protected, and we can go without it
- Consumers deserve rights over large corporations

That's not necessarily the only things in politics I agree with, it's just all I can really think of right now. Sometimes I'm like "oh yeah that sounds agreeable for sure" but those ones are just what I find myself fighting for.

The weird thing is I get considered an "extremist leftist" or whatever, especially the first two things. It's kind of odd to me, because I don't explicitly consider myself a communist or socialist for believing in those things - I've never actually read up on communist/socialist/etc literature, after all. But if people want to say "You're a communist because you believe that", I'm just like s**t okay I guess I'm a communist then, if that's indeed what that term is used to mean, and nothing else. Just kind of weird, because I don't really know what my political orientation is exactly, the labels get shifted around so much.

[Missing? NO!]

- People deserve a "fair go", for lack of a better term; deserve basic human rights and s**t, also education and not being shot and things like that
- People with disabilities and chronic illnesses etc deserve dignity and respect (I actually might be inclined to think disability pensions etc should be part of the healthcare system, and not the welfare system)
- Essential services (healthcare, energy, water, etc) shouldn't be sold off for profit, and are better off being managed by some organization who doesn't have profit as a motive (perhaps a government would be suitable for that)
- Hate speech doesn't need to be protected, and we can go without it
- Consumers deserve rights over large corporations

It's weird because these seem all like pretty basic things to want and need. You'd think that wanting your fellow countrymen to all have a fair shot at life regardless of circumstance would be a universally-popular thing to want, but there's a lot of people out here that think otherwise, and that some people are (putting this INCREDIBLY simply here) "too costly" to deserve a fair shake at things. Even just looking at healthcare -- the fact that people can be denied care due to preexisting conditions is ridiculously inhumane. The healthcare provider, in that essence, is saying "look, I know you have no control over your situation, but we can't help you. You're too expensive." Why should people be punished for things they have no control over?

The poll question is interesting: it refers to USA political viewpoints specifically. I've always thought that the political climate over there is a lot different, to the point where the conservative party here are probably considered left-leaning from a USA perspective, and the fringe racist parties are probably considered centrist. But anyway!

And yeah. I wrote it out like that because those were the political viewpoints I'm most familiar with. Tried to make it as general as possible, but words have different meanings in different parts of the world...

[Evie the Bird Mother 🌸 ☽]

From my limited understanding it's like; the left used to be about bottom up, people first - so human rights first; individual respect and dignity. However, it later became associated with communism/forced labour/indoctrination those kinds of things after communism. Additionally on one hand positive Marxism; that the lower are abused by the state but we can solve this; on the other hand the negative stereotype of people being labelled as 'entitled brats', and state corruption (Animal Farm).

I have always been left-wing, a liberal; but for a lot of people these qualities are feared.

"the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behaviour, or political views."
- Why is this feared? We want to be free - if the state is forcing violation of human rights (as in your dignity) we should challenge them. If people (regardless of their class) are rioting it is a bad sign; and we should listen to them and the one in power should admit that they may be wrong (not then, e.g. the leader ignoring all of them).

At the same time, it feels history tends to segregate what is "good" and what is "bad". It is not so much that being left-wing is good/bad nor right-wing good/bad; just that these are complex issues, no point of view is necessarily right or wrong and sometimes we need to "meet in the middle". This should not matter about whether you are left-wing/right-wing or not; just that we are all different people and our ideas of politics, religion and culture should not affect our dignity. Additionally, I worry about both democracy and populism. They are not accurately representative of all groups: The state can manipulate democracy, while the lower class can manipulate populism > Brexit - there is no clear consensus but the state is trying to get us to leave the EU anyway (so called 'democracy').

(I feel concerned about how things have turned out in US/UK personally. And it's like... rarely can society can say every party has elements of truth - it may be inevitable that people become partial to one ideology - yet these are people, and we shouldn't be restricted to the restrictions the ideologies impose - for example, the wars that are going on reflect needs for a sense of mutual human dignity - yet from labelling theory perspective, if the US state are regarding them as "bad" it is only making the matter worse)

[Sherkel]

Felt bad enough to do the thing.

[Evie the Bird Mother 🌸 ☽]

Felt bad

Bad in negative sense or 'powerglove its really bad' sense? If former sorry to hear you were sad.

[Sherkel]

Bad as in uninterested enough in other things at the time to go along with the fad. I appreciate it.

[Evie the Bird Mother 🌸 ☽]

Bad as in uninterested enough in other things at the time to go along with the fad. I appreciate it.

[Epsilon]

Here's me


I don't like the idea of putting political viewpoints on a chart much anyway. It's uselessness is evident if you're an ML, you get libertarian left simply because you have socially liberal views and don't hate people.

[Sherkel]

I don't like the idea of putting political viewpoints on a chart much anyway.

I kind of like it because it seems pretty arbitrary what issues and questions end up becoming politicized. I don't like how it promotes the idea of taking one look at someone and liking or hating them before speaking a single word with them, but I guess the same could be said for naming the parties. It's still a good thing people take results of the D&D alignment test with a grain of salt. (because I totally didn't get chaotic evil or anything.)

[Epsilon]

Good take on Andy Ngo