What should we do?
This is where I fix all our social and political problems.
That might be exaggerating.
This is where I’ll share my ideas about what we should do concerning certain issues. Hopefully, anyone reading this can see why I chose the solutions I did by having read the belief structure detailed under the Way of The Braeden.
Let’s start off by addressing two hot topics, terrorism and immigration.
THE WAR ON TERROR.
I hate it when we declare wars on abstract concepts. It’s as though the war on drugs wasn’t ridiculous enough.
“Gee, Sir, seems like the war on rocks is actually going better than expected, analysts say it might someday end!”
“Really? That’s no good, what could NEVER POSSIBLY END?”
“I don’t know, Sir, how about the war on vanity?”
“Sounds great, MAKE IT HAPPEN!”
The fact is that you can’t win a war when there’s no one to fight. Is Terror going to show up one day and surrender? Will there just one day not be any more psychos in the world?
You MIGHT get violent Muslim fanatics to stop blowing things up if you nuked Mecca in retaliation; but even republicans won’t kill that many innocent people.
The fact is that to resolve the issues of terrorism AND immigration the solution is the same.
You ready? This is important.
CULTURAL INTEGRATION
When will people stop blowing things up and swimming across rivers? When they’d rather go to star bucks and listen to their iPods.
Help your neighbor fix his roof, and he’ll stop poking holes in yours.
This doesn’t mean you beat down his door and tie him up while you re-shingle, it just means that you leave him alone and do what you can to motivate him and help him when he’s ready. In the mean time, you do what you can to fix up the houses in the neighborhood around him who want help. Progress takes time. Let it. And for God’s sake, stop giving people guns.
The imperfect policy fallacy
This can be observed whenever a new way of doing things is dismissed on account of it not being perfect while a less desirable, but already existing policy remains in place.
Separation of church and state
Freedom of religion, right?
That’s supposed to be a big deal. And yet so many political viewpoints and stances are based entirely on belief in one religion or another. How many times have we heard people rant and rave about “traditional family values?” And how many people take offence? Let me ask you a question. How many people would take offence if every time people talked about needing to enforce “traditional family values,” they instead talked about needing to enforce their religion? After all, where do these “family values” come from?
Policy should never be based on religious viewpoints.
The equality of thought bill
I think we could save ourselves a lot of problems by passing a bill that says that anyone or anything proven to be sentient will be afforded the same rights and privileges that any other sentient being is granted. There will always be fear and prejudice towards one group or another, but the law should never support this. We’ve gone through fighting over gender, and color, and now we’re doing it over sexual preference, so what’s next? Perhaps rights of clones? Perhaps AI? Perhaps extraterrestrial life? What if dolphins undergo an evolutionary leap? Of course all these situations are probably pretty far off, but why not just take care of it now? If your iMac develops a crush on the TV, a love for blackjack, and is afraid of being turned off, maybe you shouldn’t own it anymore.
Victimless crime
Get rid of it! Don’t we have enough to worry about without having to protect people from themselves? Forget about weather it’s good for you, what gives us the right to lock two people up for trading money for sex? Or for rolling up a leaf and smoking it? Or for agreeing to bet on the outcome of a dice roll? What is more personal than a person’s body? And who are we to tell them what they may or may not do with it? Now don’t get me wrong, it should certainly be illegal to take chances that will inflict damage on other people, driving while intoxicated, for example, or even smoking in places not designated for smoking; but the legality of these pastimes is not affecting peoples uses of them. One of the biggest reasons for maintaining the illegality of drugs is the possibility of parents neglecting their children due to a drug habit. But do we really believe that someone who would be shooting up heroin with a baby in the crib were it legal will chose not to because they are afraid of the law? I don’t know anyone who wants to smoke weed but doesn’t because of the law.
You want to win the war on drugs? Legalize them.
Let’s take a look at the positive effects of eliminating victimless crime.
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Elimination of violence- most violence associated with victimless crime stems from the fact that someone involved in illicit activity has no other recourse when something goes wrong. You can’t call the cops if someone steals your cocaine, for example.
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Conservation of resources- we can save all the money and time we spend “fighting the war on drugs” and apply that money and those people to other areas.
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Regulation- no more cocaine cut with aspirin, no more prostitutes with AIDS, no more people overdosing because they look up how many tabs of X to take no the internet and get a bad “prescription.” No more people constantly arguing that this drug and that drug “isn’t really bad for you but the man doesn’t want you to know that hemp makes the best rope so they made it illegal and it actually raises your level of consciousness, blah, blah, blah.”
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Taxation- there’s a lot of money in victimless crime. Why shouldn’t the American people profit from it? That money is now pure profit for people who aren’t willing to find a way to get ahead within the system. Legalize these activities and there’s more money to fix all the problems no one wants to have.
Education, teachers, and law enforcement
Pay them more! For god’s sake, pay them more! Who can possibly be comfortable with the fact that the people we put in charge of our children are people who’s guidance councilors couldn’t find anything they were good at and told them they should be a teacher as a default? We’ve all heard the saying, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” How awful! And as important as those people who watch our children are, just as important are those people who are responsible for our safety, and who are capable of restricting our freedoms. I group these two professions together because there are two important things they have in common: the adoption of either profession should be fired from a love of others and a yearning to take responsibility for the welfare of others; and because the best thing we can do for either of these groups is to encourage a higher caliber of people to fill the ranks as they open. The best way to do this: higher pay and more prestige. Now I’ve heard the opinion that raising teacher’s pay could result in people becoming teachers for the sake of money rather than the sake of children, but I find this idea somewhat lacking, as I can’t imagine someone who would have been a teacher at a lower pay deciding not to for fear of the money, and also because were someone to be motivated by money and neglect the children, that would be quickly recognized and that person supplanted.
Using the plus side of socialism
The wall is down, the red bear is dead, and thanks to
reality TV we know that communism doesn’t work even in small groups.
So I think we can finally put our alarmist attitudes on hold for a moment and look at incorporation the better aspects of certain ideologies into practice. When I talk about using aspects of socialism what I’m really referring to is eliminating the need for companies that profit from providing services that people are required to have. For example, if you drive, you must have proof of financial responsibility, and for the vast majority of the populace, that means you must pay some company a lot of money every month to insure your ability as a driver. Another example is health insurance, which many people get through work, but that is still part of a group plan: a third party company providing coverage to the members of another company who qualify. So why do we allow companies to profit from what the law, or at least common sense, forces people to have? Why not simply have taxes cover such issues, thus saving the people an incredible amount of money by cutting out the profit margin. Of course, there would still be room for private, specialized organizations, as government sponsored health insurance wouldn’t cover things like plastic surgery or experimental treatments.
Why taxes are good and a flat sales tax is better
One thing I can’t stand is politicians who promise to do things they know are bad for the people because they know people will vote for them because of ignorance regarding that particular issue. Specifically, there’s a huge portion of the populace functioning under the supposition that lower taxes will help them out; but let’s look at what lowering taxes really does. First, the strength of an economy is represented largely by the strength of its currency, and the strength of the currency will be diminished if more money is printed. So, the best thing that can happen is for the currency to change hands as many times as possible before it comes to rest in the hands of a corporation large enough that the currency transitions from tool of purchase to an agent of guarantee. Now, some people feel that lowering taxes leaves more money in the hands of the people and thus allows more exchanges per dollar, but there is a problem with this rational. With higher taxes, there is more money that can be used for programs that contribute to the lower income bracket, and the money from these programs comes not only from the lower income bracket, but also from the higher income bracket. When taxes are lowered, the lower bracket people retain a higher percentage of their earnings, but miss out on the far more considerable portion of the upper class’s earnings that would be available should taxes be higher.
Also, one of the main reasons the poor remain poor is an inability to delay short term gratification, and specifically a phenomenon I term the Emiro effect. The Emiro effect dictates that no matter how much money you give some people, they will immediately find a way to spend it on one frivolity or another. This effect is difficult to combat, and one only hopes that in time it will be overcome entirely as the average persons sweet of habits improves, however, at this time, what this means is that when these people are given money, that money immediately moves up the chain, providing for at least one additional exchange that, while artificial, will not register as artificial for the purposes of the strength of the currency.
But of course there are myriad assorted problems with current tax law that no one can agree on, so let’s alter the shape of the box and see if we can’t make a system with fewer loopholes. Put a bit of simplicity back. I think the answer lies in sales tax. Rather than people being taxed based on income, simply raise the sales tax, after all, nothing is a clearer reflection of people’s lifestyle than the things they purchase, and this way taxes will be paid by anyone in the country, regardless of status as a citizen or the origin of their money. This will also seriously cut down on the resources necessary to keep track of taxes.
Why laws should never help those who can help themselves
Now some people feel that laws should not be structured to help anyone, but rather simply be as fair as possible; but does this really make sense?
I don’t think so.
Firstly, there are so many people who honestly don’t believe they have any sort of choice in their future, and without the belief that we may captain the ship of our own destiny, the decision to make of ourselves more than we are can never be made.
Secondly, most of the financially independent people in America today got there on their own. It’s only the very rich who leave generation spanning legacies of wealth. Knowing this, if someone has made themselves successful in America today, they don’t need any help! They will overcome whatever obstacles you put in their path to success because they understand the principles behind success, and they have the necessary habits to follow those principles to success. Because of this, policy should NEVER be made to benefit these people, because it is a waste of energy that could be applied somewhere else. Just to be clear, for everyone who benefits from a policy that applies to a specific group, there will be the reflection, someone who suffers from lack of those resources that are sucked up by said policy. Never forget, many things follow the first law of thermodynamics. If there’s a limited amount of it, it’s energy.
Why a surplus is great
A national debt will always be a plague on the economy. Look at the typical American family: so entrenched in debt that they can not save money for their future or even afford to pay for the resources necessary to better their family. Yet even though we observe this on a daily bases we continue to listen to people who tell us that it’s ok to get our country in debt. And why? For what rational purpose? So we can spend more money on defense so we can be six million times as militarily advanced as the rest of the world instead of five? Just put it off, let the surplus accrue interest, and use the dividends that come from having no obligations to accomplish such objectives over time. The same wealth building strategies can be used for a person work for a nation. It’s just a bunch of people, after all.
Justice system and prison, the problem of rehabilitation and the uselessness of punishment
What sense does punishment make? It is simply bringing more pain into the world. If a man kills another man’s wife, and we kill that man, does the widower mourn any less? Does that woman breath again? There is no such thing as punishment, there is only discipline, and vengeance. Vengeance is useless, and discipline should have a point, to modify behavior.
People seem to disagree on this whole death penalty thing.
My thought is this: if we know they can’t function in society, and we’re not willing to help them, let’s just kill them all.
Because we’re certainly not putting criminals in an environment that will result in them becoming good people. I’m not sure how many of them get out of prison and don’t go back, but I am sure that if you took non-criminals and put them in prison for whatever the average term is and then let them out, the percent that then committed felonies would be much higher than the percent of those who went to prison for legitimate reasons and then got out and did not.
That got a bit confusing. But the point is, and I think we all realize, that you can’t send someone to be abused, beaten and raped, have their rights and dignity stripped from them, join gangs and get tattooed to survive, and then think they’ll get out and work around their parole, education, and employment limitations and spend the rest of their life making an honest living. It may happen every once in a while, but it’s madness to think that it’s the logical conclusion of the events that went before.
So what to do? Change the system.
Use a five tiered disciplinary structure.
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fines
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community service
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canning
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imprisonment
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recycling
Now, let’s discuss, shall we?
Fines are the first defense against crime. It costs money to break the law.
Then we have community service. This is great because it discourages the very rich from breaking the law, after all, what does a wealthy man value more than time?
Canning! Singapore has a disturbingly low crime rate. No one wants to be beaten.
Imprisonment: we have this already, let’s modify it. People are evaluated by a team upon entering prison and every year there after, they are released when the consensus is that they are ready, during imprisonment there are no contact sports, no weights, no TV, no radio, and everyone is kept in solitary. People are social creatures, and a few weeks in solitary with no contact will make almost anyone jump at the chance to read a book or do something productive they usually would not be disposed towards doing. Prisoners are involved in multiple activities with other prisoners, but all activities are geared towards two goals, making the prison self-sufficient, and encouraging the prisoners to better themselves. Activities in the arts are encouraged, as are educational programs and reading.
Finally, we have recycling, because some people just aren’t playing with a full deck. Now, being one or two cards short is ok, but some people are missing whole suits. And if you’re just going to kill people whenever you can, and there’s no way to help you, it’s time to go back to the source and try again. I don’t consider it compassionate to keep a mentally impaired sociopath vegetating for fifty years because we’re too squeamish to pull the plug and allow him another go.
Gun control
Rednecks assemble! Here’s where I piss you all off. Guns should not be legal. I said it, so now I get shoved to the left of Michael Moore. Now an observant person may be thinking, “I thought anything that didn’t impinge upon the freedoms of another person should be legal?” and that’s true; but I cannot accept that it is the right thing to let anyone go out and buy the power to kill another person by pressing a button. Guns are made to kill, you can feel it every time you fire one, and that’s just not something that should be a part of a normal person’s everyday life. Now I know there are common objections, so let’s look at them.
Tyrannical government prevention: we live in the greatest country on earth and I’d like to think we have enough checks and balances to prevent this, but; realistically, I don’t think the weaponry that normal people possess is going to stand up to military hardware if something like that did come to pass, so I think this is a red herring.
Criminals will still have guns: I just disagree, that’s not the case in England or Hong Kong. There will always be some criminals who have guns, but they will be the exception and not the rule, and normal people aren’t defending themselves against this sort of criminal anyway. Right now, a much higher percentage of criminals have guns than non-criminals. I live in Texas and I don’t know many people who carry guns around.
We need them to hunt: now that’s just stupid. (if that offends you, try to imagine someone explaining to a grieving mother that while they are sorry her son is dead, it’s important that guns be legal so Americans can kill animals for sport and not have to go to the trouble of learning to shoot a bow and arrow.)
Marriage
Should be a title and not carry legal ramifications. Why do you need a license? Making marriage a legal issue just seems to complicate things. Want to make sure you don’t get screwed if your breadwinning significant other leaves? Get the house put in your name, if they don’t see and address your concerns, perhaps you need to re-think tying yourself spiritually to that person.
Sterilization
I don’t know if this is possible, but if there is a reversible way to sterilize men or women, I think it would be a good idea to have everyone sterilized, then “reinstated” at a time if their choosing. No more “accidents.”
Again, just a thought.
Military: self defense and super heroes
Are we our brothers keeper?
Or should we stay out of other people’s business?
How about both? Have the main branch of the military dedicated to defense, and have a secondary branch made up of people who are willing to take high risk assignments and believe that we have an obligation to better our world outside of our national boundaries. They would deal with issues such as genocide and mass murder that are unequivocally wrong.
The question of abortion and other things we don’t like to think too hard about
Our first entry here on our “touchy subject” list is abortion.
Here’s my issue with it. If people aren’t divine, aren’t special simply by nature of being human, don’t have souls, then killing a zygote or fetus is like killing a fish, something that people do for fun all the time. If they are, if we are all possessed of a soul, then the kid will just be shuffled off to the next step in its journey, or be off to eternal bliss in heaven, if that’s your cup of tea. Now don’t get me wrong, I think using abortion as a method of birth control (I don’t like condoms so I’ll make her get an abortion) is obscene, and I don’t support abortion in the third trimester, but I believe that the “abortion is murder” argument is logically felonious, and I’m not sure that most “pro-life” advocates have really thought their position through. |