(no subject)

[proximoception]

I think everyone active here who hasn't unfriended me is at least broadly left-wing. Are there any respects in which you deviate from what's taken to be the liberal party line?

I ask because I can't think of any, for me, and it's making me feel pretty boring. Guns, drugs, military size and role, taxes, abortion, gay marriage, free speech, human rights, emission control, centralized education, socialized medicine etc. - same side on all. I think I come closest to illiberal on capital punishment, but not very - I think it's not an issue that needs much shouting about, compared to, say, prison reform, but the evidence that it's significantly preventative is pretty weak. It's just only killing a few hundred already probably quite miserable people a year, while other things are killing larger numbers of (initially) happier ones.

Oh, I do reject the criminalization of hate speech and adding prison time for specially identified hate motives. But that's an area where people define 'liberal' differently, surely? There's plenty of liberal in-house disputes.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I more or less agree with you on capital punishment -- I loathe it, actually, but see why people don't, and certainly I think it's not where political, ahem, capital should be spent.

I am for a two state solution and not against Israel being a "Jewish state." But for that to be just there has to be a two-state solution. Lots of my friends hate this view. But I guess it is standard liberal but not standard leftist.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

They hate the two state part or the Jewish state part? Presumably neither group's going to get completely kicked out and presumably neither will be able to embrace a completely secular state enforcing equal laws on all persons who happen to be in it (foreseeably anyway). So it's two states or more godawfulness. And if the U.N.'s permitting membership to any nations with state religions or legal ethnic distinctions I don't see what the objection would be to a Jewish one. Leftists after a global secular state should probably be starting with, like, that larger issue - the Israel one is too clearly a pragmatic question, what with people immediately dying and all.

But if you were a citizen of a Jewish state of Israel would you fight to abolish the right of return (as compared to merit or need-based immigration screening) and all other favoring of a specific religion or ethnicity by the government? In that sense I would be against a Jewish state.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the right to return. I'm very glad I have it. Which suggests an internalized fear of anti-semitism coming to get me and kill me, even here. But yes, most of my more liberal friends want a completely secular single state.

I guess I'd give up the right to return if that would make peace possible -- that is if the trade off were that so would the Palistineans. OTOH, if Israel were a Jewish secular state, why couldn't it make the laws it wanted as far as who qualified for naturalization? As long as anyone born in its borders also had citizenship?

I sure do hate the people running Israel, though.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That's why I make the citizenship distinction. In voting, we sort of identify with our government. If I was our government, I would do X, avoid Y...

So when judging foreign ones, you're either imagining yourself as a citizen under one or you're imagining yourself who's making such an act of identification, or yourself as your own government in its relations to that one.

If I were America I would try to influence a two state solution, whereas I wouldn't pressure anyone about the right of return. Just as I wouldn't pressure England about its state church. These are things you permit in other nations because they have a right to self-determine so long as massive amounts of harm aren't being done. Otherwise all mations would be waging slightly different, eternal, Trotskyite battle campaigns against one another.

But my own government has no such right, because I as a voter am responsible for it. This is magical thinking, but the whole system's based on it, it's the implied and only possible logic of democracy. If I were an Israeli, right of return would seem unfair and have to go. It could be replaced by "we will allow in anyone under threat" (or some pragmatic reduction of that), or "anyone who's a second cousin or closer relation of a present citizen," but I don't see how I could support "admission for any convert to Judaism or descendant of Jews." Obviously if there were imminent threat of some global pogrom that would need rethinking - you'd do what would save people. And there's nothing wrong with liking privileges you wouldn't have agreed to give yourself - e.g. we all liked spending money that moron Bush gave us in, what, 2002, despite its being an insupportable decision. Well, past a certain threshold where there's obviously blood on your hands. But those $300 were just a little greasy.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

I tend to take issue with the liberal platform for what it excludes rather than what it includes. But demilitarized, decriminalized bourgeois-liberal welfare state would be an awesome thing. I'd vote for that in a second.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

What's it exclude that you'd like it not to?

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Any questioning of the neoliberal paradigm.