Education & Politics

[john9blue]

I go to a Catholic college prep high school, and I'm going to major in engineering in college. My politics in a word would probably be Libertarian, which doesn't go over too well at school.

[suggs]

I'm more right leaning, because I hate fucking ultra communist liberals and their retarded ideals. Aside from hating hippies, I'm right leaning just because it seems to make more sense. The left is to idealistic and tends to overlook things in order to fulfill their retarded agendas (communism for example), if anything I would say that I am conservative only because I'm a realist.

I'm in high school right now, so my opinion isn't really worth anything.

I like the tone of your voice!

However, my opinion is worth everything, so just stick around me, and you'll be fine.

Great win the other night mate.
Good ol' Harry boy!

[MeDeFe]

Economically speaking I would probably be left of center in the US and right of center in Europe. (And that should really tell you enough about "left" and "right" to make you skeptical about the notions) On the one hand we need a working economy in order to sustain a standard even comparable to the one we have, on the other hand I don't think the letting the economy run freely whichever way it wants with no constraints will solve all our problems. Take healthcare, to a company providing healthcare you're only a good patient as long as you can pay your bills, the moment you can't you're not a paying customer anymore. Taken to an extreme the company wouldn't even have an interest in making sure you get well again until they've made sure you've had to pay as much as they can possibly make you. Education is similar in my opinion, privatized education might work, but only if there is already an educated population that is, across the board, affluent enough to be able to afford paying for it.
We're simply better off with the state taking care of some things, for the reason that the state (as an abstract, not as the sum of its' elected representatives) has an interest in the population being healthy and well educated.

On the Authoritarian-Antiauthoritarian scale I am definitely ant-authoritarian, for several reasons. The state is a means, not an end, an institution for organizational purposes that can make our lives easier. The state and the nation are not some metaphysical entities that encompass a "people" and everyone a member of this people goes "I'm an X, and I'm proud of it", yeah, great, two people had sex and you were born inside the borders of a specific country, what exactly did you accomplish to be proud of? They are human constructs with a historical background that can be traced back through time, no more. That doesn't sound so sexy, does it? Good, because, frankly speaking, a nation isn't. With this in mind the state provides the framework for a society, laws which are ultimately ratified by the society or its' elected representatives, law enforcement which is subject to controls and standards and so on and so forth. Take away the society and the state disappears.
Seen as such a weak construct, I am skeptical about giving the state too many powers and too much knowledge about the individuals living inside it. Once a state starts monitoring the behaviour of some people, no matter how good the reason, there tends to be a snowballing effect when the state wants to find everyone else who might pose a similar threat, either towards the structure of the state or towards the society. I am not saying that people who are known to be a threat should not be observed and stopped before they can cause any harm to others. But I am saying that it needs to be kept to a minimum, there's only a small step from "person A is planning a terrorist attack" to "person A falls into the same categories and displays similar behaviour as persons who have committed terrorist attacks in the past and needs to be watched" and then an other small step, and an other. And so liberty goes, one small step at a time and suddenly it's gone.