Youth Politics

I don’t oppose the fact that ideas can be evil. If someone came up with an idea to kill lots of innocent people for absolutely no purpose, I would consider that idea to be evil. I’m just stating my definition of what evil can possibly mean. How then is socialism evil?

Socialism is the economic idea that the government would maintain the central source of power and should nationalize sectors of the economy to promote an even and fair distribution of wealth. This idea in and of itself does not sound like an evil idea. Yet, many people detest socialism and even use it as an insult. Sure some people are extremely proud of the capitalistic view, but that does not mean that socialism is necessarily evil. There’s a difference between disagreeing with an idea and thinking that an idea is evil or just plain wrong.

The problem is that so many associate socialism with communism, and in the United States at least, communism is looked down upon due to our dealings with the Russians, Cuba, and even China during the Cold War. Communist countries have, in general, had poor human rights records for instance. Other critics say that political and economic freedoms are suppressed and thus freedoms are taken away. As you may know the United States was founded on freedom, and a socialist model simply wouldn’t do. This is why the mere thought of socialism is looked down upon.

This doesn’t have to be true in other countries however. If a country and its populace agree to such an economic and political policy then so be it. Socialism itself isn’t what is evil, it is what people do with that idea that can be so harmful. For example, totalitarian governments use it as a way to gain power and have control over their people.

There are of course plenty of disagreements on which policy is better, As far as my stance, I know that I don’t consider socialism an evil in the world. I keep that in mind when I express my opinion. I do think it’s quite unrealistic, in the sense that power corrupts too easily, but that’s just how I see it.

Can a socialist society work? And what would have to be done for such a society to function? Can it be done with relatively little impact on personal freedoms? What do you think?

Comments are more than welcome!

Today and yesterday night my web server started to experience some hiccups, and, while my host was load balancing, killed my files server. As such, I didn’t get a post up but will continue to do so tomorrow. If you experience sluggish performance on the blog, well, it’s because of that problem.

Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

I am planning MAJOR changes to the blog’s design to get a more modern feel and an overall better look. I think it’ll be a lot more pleasing to the eye than it is now. Oh, and I’ve decided that after this week I will only accept blog comments in English. Google’s translator is cool and all, but really I’d like to keep it in English just for the sake of the readers and to save me some translation troubles.

That’s all, see ya’ll tomorrow.

The title to this post isn’t much of a surprise to anyone. However, I did want to put a throwback to one of my posts, Political Insults And Attacks, which was written when the election was still on.

And the barrage of insults does not stop, even after the winner was decided. And there’s plenty of people who don’t even like the idea of bipartisanship. Meaning, their party is absolutely in the right and that alternative ideologies are clearly worse.

One side hates that the other side pokes fun, but they both do exactly the same thing. The irony.

The whole point of the Israeli assault on Gaza is to cease the constant rocket attacks into southern Israel by Hamas fighters. I don’t think it’s going to work, and it hasn’t been.

If anything Israel is drawing negative attention to itself. Combat is being executed poorly as civilian casualties continue to pile up. Yes they have been hitting Hamas targets, but they have also been causing considerable collateral damage to the local populace. What’s more, now it’s said that Gaza is running out of supplies, and world leaders are calling this a big humanitarian crisis.

Here’s what I think will happen. International pressure will continue to build and force Israel into a cease fire. The surrounding Arab nations and Hamas are furious about this assault, and I can see a build up of arms to Hamas in order to escalate the bombardments into Israel. In the end I predict more arms and absolutely no resolution to the conflict. In fact, this can only end up making matters worse.

Every cease fire allows both sides to seize more arms. Israel isn’t going to give up its offensive too soon because they know that’s what it would mean to stop. At the same time, the civilian casualties continue to rise and world leaders are not happy about this. I feel like Israel is incriminating itself almost, despite their intentions.

It’s a tough, tough situation, but I guess we’ll see how it plays out.

Here’s a question I’ve been pondering lately:

Should the government protect us from ourselves?

I actually asked this very question on Twitter, and the responses were quite mixed. I sort of expected a clear-cut winner, but that was not the case.

If the government were to protect us from ourselves, it would mean that society could not undermine it’s own country, even if it wanted to. But what does this imply? This would imply that the government no longer represents its people’s wishes. That seems bad to me.

On the flip side, if the government did not go against the common word, the people would end up destroying the nation (again, assuming that was society’s intent). We already know that majority rule is not always ideal, and so it would be wrong to allow the majority to destroy a nation against the will of the minority. Maybe you disagree with me here, but that’s how I see it.

This is a fundamental question I think, because your viewpoint here determines what you want and do not want the government to be able to do. Those who strongly believe in the will of the people would argue that the government has no choice but to listen to the people’s demands, even if that demand is the destruction of the government/nation. Those who believe that people sometimes do not know what is best would argue that the government has the right to tell them what is right and what is wrong. I… am torn.

To me it seems to be a case-by-case basis matter. Sometimes I do want popular vote to matter, and other times I want the government to know what is best, especially since the people can never know all the facts or even pretend to. But where do we draw the line? How do we figure out what the government should determine and what the people should determine? At what point should the government stop even indirectly representing the majority? Should the government ever stop representing the majority of its people at all?

Comments would be greatly appreciated.

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