(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

[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.