Leaderboard

I just had a dream that made me go WTF but which I in retrospect have to admit was really freaking cool. I was watching a Star Wars spinoff show in which Doc and Roger of The Whiteboard fame were somehow the main characters. They stole a flying APC by fast talking the pilot, then started modifying it literally on the fly while being pursued by Stormtroopers on speeder bikes. Roger was in the engine, taking things apart and putting them back together in what he called 'more exciting' ways and Doc was calling suggestions of how to proceed to him while putting the flying APC through wild aerobatics and returning fire on the Stormtroopers. They somehow lost the pursuit and landed the APC at a place that looked like a small airfield and barracks with random tech scattered about. As they left the APC Sandy got into their faces and asked them, "Are you two idiots trying to start a war?" and Doc replied, "Well, technically we are already in the middle of one." Then I woke up and went WTF one more time when I realised with what terrifying ease you could fit Doc and Roger into the Star Wars continuity.

The horror stories of saccharin were a lie, or at best a serious misrepresentation, to begin with. Kind of like the horror stories of birth control pills causing cancer in lab animals. (The claim was true... for one specific strain of lab animals, carefully selectively bred to have an elevated probability of developing cancer when injected with a nearly-lethal dose of the medication. You know, it's a lot easier to study cancer if you have a reliable way of getting cancers in front of you to study.)

This is the internet. That is all we do.

Well, what is the alternative to government involvement in healthcare and education? You see, it is simply the case that many who are poor, unemployed, sick or disabled will simply die or live horrible lives without a strong welfare state to assist them. Some conservatives believe that private charity will be a adequate replacement for social safety net, but that is a view that is lacking in historical understanding. History shows that private charity was wholly unable to care adequately for the unfortunate. It was the kind of horrors Dickens wrote about. I have no pretensions of objectivity in this. I have myself received a public education, uses government funded healthcare, visits the library weekly and has even lived on a disability benefits for a few years. My life would probably have ended rather quickly if I lived in a libertarian country. This experience informs my political views, an important part of which is the principle that society has a responsibility to care for the unfortunate and that taxation is acceptable to fulfil that responsibility.

This is simply wrong. There is no other way to set economic, or really any political policy than by ideology. Politicians today like to claim that their policies is beyond ideology and solely informed by pragmatical concerns. Their policy is "whatever works", as Tony Blair liked to say. The problem with this is that a political policy can only be said to work if it achieves a result you want. And what results you want of course depends on your ideology, the values and principles that you hold. Denying that you have an ideology when you are a political actor is merely obscuring the values that underlie your actions. Conservatives, liberals and socialists all have different value systems and therefore want different results. Politics always raises questions and they need answers. These questions range from foundational and general, like "what is a good society?" and "how shall we achieve that society", to specific matters of policy. Answering them in a coherent and (nota bene) consistent way requires a system of values, an ideology. Philosophically, you can't consider each issue separately from the rest. Political action requires reasonable justification, and that justification must rest on a rational, coherent and consistent philosophical worldview,