Been a little downtime, my laptop fell off my end table last week and went kaputski. The joke of it all being that I had two hard drives in it, one I booted off of, which was about a month old, and the other that came with the laptop which had started going bad but was still in working condition so I kept it to store a few extras things on. Guess which one of the two hard drives was completely bricked? Anyway, it was no big loss since I have quadruple redundancy (4 identical computers with nearly identical filesystems) so all I lost was the mobility of my laptop and the tabs I keep open in firefox. Anyway, I'm back, and on to today's two cents.
Since I don't have a profile setup yet I'll preface the real content of this post with an explanation about myself. Politically, I've always been very liberal, socially and economically. It used to be that I approached my political beliefs with the understanding that while Marxism was utopian in theory, basic human nature would prevent it from ever being implementable and therefore largely useless as a political theory. This meant taking note of observations made by Marx and other scholars and applying them in vastly smaller scale than across the entirety of life. Socially speaking, I was very center of the road. I grew up in a house with a very religious mother, though not in an oppressive manner. My mother raised my sister and myself in a Baptist church with good people, though we were never really strictly denominational so much as the community there was fabulous and she wanted us around good people. I am now atheist, having accidentally outed myself over facebook to my Dad awhile back and then him accidentally outing me to my mom earlier this year. I am now 27, and I'd say the first time I first contemplated anything like a non-christian universe was probably around age 16, and the transition to atheist was a gradual process and not really triggered by any one event so much as my own contemplation and observations of how the religious right has risen to power and gone against everything their religion stands for by preaching hate. I don't hold Christianity responsible, I hold man responsible, who in Christianity's own admission, is fallible. As an example of my intellectual transition, when I was in my teens I was of the mindset that homosexuality was not so much evil, but unnatural and illogical, but I didn't hate because of it. I was weakly siding with Don't Ask Don't Tell supporters because frankly, I was 14, didn't know any better and the only gay person I knew was my uncle who I never really saw. As gay marriage became more and more of an issue, I was more of the mindset "let them have civil unions" though I frequently pointed out to people that marriage was a financial transaction long before it was anything religious. This was the compromising, naive kid in me. As I became more and more of a thinker I eventually reached the final conclusion of supporter of gay rights, equality, marriage, the whole 9 yards, for all the often cited reasons like "What two consenting people do is no business of mine" and "Who the hell am I to say two people can't love each other," not to mention the fact that childhood friends came out of the closet and I met other friends who are gay/bi/transgendered and they are often better people than many I see preaching hate from the right ever could be. So along with this gradual religious perspective change came a shift in the source of my political thinking without actually changing the final conclusions. By this, I mean that the basic instances of political stance I have are roughly the same, except now, instead of coming at it from a view of Marxism and its unimplementable, lofty ideals, I come at it from a realization that Libertarianism is equally perfect in theory but unimplementable in practice. In fact, the faults of each are very similar. Marxism is an attempt to level out society but this is impossible because human nature will always create hierarchical arangement and you can never achieve said faux-equality. On the other hand, for libertarianism to work everyone has to be starting from the same point, but that is equally impossible to implement, you will always have someone with family and friend connections or inheritance that gives an unfair advantage to someone else. There isn't anything that can be done to change that and I'm not particularly fond of the government trying either.
So, now that that is all setup, its time to get into the core issue I wanted to rant about. Today a friend of mine posted how he wanted to see Andrew Napolitano asking questions during the republican debates instead of neocon fox news shills. This friend of mine has a bachelors in political science and has been a Ron Paul supporter long before most people knew who Ron Paul was. He is a very scholarly fellow and I really enjoy discussing pretty much anything with him and he is equally open to hearing my point of view. Anyway, for anyone who isn't familiar with Napolitano, he's a very libertarian person, and not the good kind like many of my friends but rather the bad kind who sees the government as inherently evil and that anyone doing anything in support of government, particularly democrats, is trying to stomp out freedom and kill capitalism. When trying to think of a way to describe him, it occurred to me that this view of two basic types of libertarians is similar to the two basic types of atheists that I have met. You have the quiet atheist person who likely doesn't speak much of his or her atheism unless the topic comes up. They are everyday people, your neighbors, your friends. They don't dislike you or your belief and think that religious or non-religious self discovery is a very personal thing and should never stop being evaluated. Then there are the militant atheists who give the rest of us a bad name. They treat religious belief as the enemy and think anyone with any sort of religion is deluded, brainwashed and or stupid. It has been my experience, through watching Napolitano on his show and other shows that he falls into the latter militant libertarian category and like militant atheists who are giving the rest of us a bad name, he gives other Libertarians like many of my friends a bad name.
As always, I write this as I begin to fall asleep and in said state, am not much for proofreading, so please be forgiving in that sense.
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