I've been engaged in several debated recently on rec.gambling.poker about various political topics, and felt like sharing my views on a few of those topics here:
1. Healthcare reform (in the USA) is going through a lot of debate right now. For some damn reason, the naysayers point to ridiculous claims and point to the Canadian system (which is itself in dire need of repair) and ask "Do you really wany to be more like THAT?" My answer to them has always been the same, and I hope that eventually it will sink in. Nobody in their right mind should want to emulate the Canadian system. What should be done is for the USA to take their current system, which features the most (and arguably best) doctors in the world and model it after the best systems in the world (France, Italy, Japan), while using good old-fashioned American ingenuity to improve upon the weak points and thus create the best system in the world.
The simple facts are plain to see for anyone who cares to look. The USA spends the most money per capita on its current healthcare system, yet ranks at the bottom of the so-called "first-world" nations in many simple indicators of healthiness (life expectancy, infant death rate, maternal death rate during delivery to name a few).
2. Nobody is ever going to solve the abortion question or the gay marriage question (without a complete re-definition of what marriage is) to the satisfaction of everyone. They are simply red herring arguments and are designed to distract the population from the much more important issues that go unnoticed and unreported upon. Arguing about them is, for the most part, a waste of time and energy. The same goes for the creation/evolution political debate.
3. Global Warming is as issue that needs attention. It is not, in my layman's opinion, as bad as the worst of the alarmists say (I personally feel that Mother Earth has the capacity to fix almost anything with time), but neither do I think that the naysayers are correct in saying that we should do nothing. Recent history is full of global solutions to problems that seemed impossible to solve at the time, namely, the fear of all-out nuclear war, the energy crisis of the late 70s, CFCs and the resultant hole in the ozone layer, the garbage problem, and now global warming.
It behooves us in general to reduce air pollution, because we have verifiable scientific basis to know that air pollution is bad for human life (Have you ever seen Los Angeles from the air? Several Asian cities are even worse). So why not encourage people to reduce their own 'carbon footprint'? Why not create tighter (if not ruthless) standards regarding factories? Most importantly, why not use the current world's goodwill towards the new US administration to try to create a framework whereby everyone could play by the same rules? Kyoto was a nice idea, but was fatally flawed from the get-go. Let's do it right. We only have one Earth.
Until Next Time,
Fell
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> Nobody is ever going to solve the abortion
ReplyDelete> question or the gay marriage question
> (without a complete re-definition of what
> marriage is) to the satisfaction of
> everyone.
True, but irrelevent. Hardly any issues are solved to the satisfaction of EVERYONE, but for lots of issues, we reach a consensus that's accepted broadly enough to function smoothly in society, without causing great distraction.
Take religion (please). Among the population, there's complete disagreement on religious issues... yet we have a broad consensus that as much as possible, one's choice of religion should be a private matter without government involvement. Everyone disagrees about what books are good (either artistically, or practically beneficial). Yet we function smoothly under the broad consensus that individuals should be able to read what they want.
In general, the consensus in America is "live and let live." What we have in the gay marriage debate is two sides, neither of which seems even AWARE of the "live and let live" option. The extremes speak most loudly, dominating the public debate, while the consensus of the masses (live and let live) gets drowned out.
The Mormons etc shout that THEIR definition of marriage must be accepted by everyone. This is well known. The Liberals are very very much the same, only with a different definition that they want to impose on everyone. (In Calif, a turning point in the gay marriage proposition election was when SF mayor Newsome was filmed telling a crowd, "It's coming, whether they like it or not!")
On the other hand, if we took the position that marriage ought to be a personal, spiritual matter, in which different groups and religions could define it differently, without anyone being forced to accept anyone else's definition... then I really believe we'd have a broad consensus.
Religious fanatics are a small minority in America. The much larger block is religious people who are passionate about their own religion, don't want to force it on anyone else, yet are very wary of any hint that others are interfering with their religious beliefs. And even among Berkeley liberals that I've talked to, the idea of getting government completely out of the marriage business is often accepted... as if they never considered the possibility before.
Abortion is trickier, since it hinges on the great unanswerable question of what a "self" is. I wrote about it here:
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/12/abortion-philosophy.html
Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/