What is your political affiliation?

Registered Independent,
Leaning libertarian-right

I am against the democrats social spending, disguised as a program, used to control everything.

Registered Democrat,
tax-and-spend liberal

I believe that taxes (especially on corporations and the extremely wealthy, but also my own) are too low and the services government provide are too few. In my view, the role of government is to provide a level playing field and enforce justice.

Registered: Unaffiliated

I’m not particularly impressed with the Democrats or Republicans lately. I don’t match up with either very well in my views.

Traditional Conservative:

Lower taxes, smaller government

I too am not impressed much with either party lately.

My view is that the role of government is to preserve freedom.

I’m part Progressive, part Libertarian, all liberal (note the small “L”). I think we’re paying about the right amount in taxes, but that it’s being totally misappropriated and wasted. If I were in charge, the first thing I would do is cut our military budget by 2/3 and pay down the debt to the point where we’re not paying billions of dollars in interest. I believe government should protect the weak, not corporations. And, I believe government should otherwise leave us the heck alone.

I am registered as unaffiliated. I’m probably closest to a Rockefeller Republican – small government, lower taxes, no legislating morality. But the current Republicans are so far from that ideal that there’s no way I’d register Republican. And the Democrats—I’d respect them if they actually had liberal convictions and stuck to them (even though I mostly disagree with them), but for the most part, they’re a bunch of poll-watching demagogues with no real convictions.

I don’t think taxes are too low, but I think the money is poorly spent. A lot of it is spent in ways that make it obvious that Something Is Being Done without actually doing anything; I’d rather it were less obvious and more effective, if I had to choose.

No aff, have to take it issue by issue.

Anarchist
(no party these days)
Registered democrat, which doesn’t mean much.
Believe the best forms of social organization have less hierarchy and even distribution of power. Participatory democratic decision making processes are preferable to markets and top-heavy representative government. To the extent the state is useful, I’m at least as far a sferik above, the whole point is to provide for the general welfare. Policies that get my support are policies that devolve power to democratic mechanisms that account for imbalances of class, gender, race and other social hierarchies.

Universalist – Green Imperialist

Political parties are arbitrary constructs. Science is currently our best means of observing what works sustainably in nature. Imbalances of ability, class, gender, race, wealth, power—in other words, everything that makes us different as individuals—are a given, observable in every species, and preservationist policies can only sustain present diversity (stasis) by sacrificing potential for future diversity (dynamism).

Genetic engineering and cloning mean that we are now on the verge of human speciation. E.O. Wilson, an eminent American biologist, argues that we are no longer Homo sapiens; instead, we have already become Homo proteus, capable of changing ourselves at will. If you think racial issues and the problems of The Bell Curve are troubling now, then just wait until you’re trying to compete with genetically engineered Ultras for that promotion.

If we choose to survive, then we must choose to get over ourselves and our gripes and put on the mantle of universal perspective. In spiritual and political terms, we still believe that the Earth is flat and at the center of the Universe. It’s as if ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ will be around forever! It has become fashionable to mistake uniformity and stasis for fairness. A better definition for fairness is that which works for a system in perpetuity—not burdening a system to maintain stasis for its own sake.

Omnis ars naturae imatatio est. It would be a good thing to pay better attention to extant complex social systems that have worked in nature for millions of years, such as those of ants and other social insects, in order to extract the best lessons of their systems and apply them to ours. Ants and termites have farming and have been building the equivalents of arcologies since before the dinosaurs. Read some E.O. Wilson. 18th century bureaucracies can’t keep up with the dynamism demanded by our technological progress—they’re for Luddites who like to sit on patents and powder their wigs.

It would also be a good idea to pay attention to and fund societies with a long view, such as The Long Now, that are trying to undo some of the damage caused by the pathologically short, though incredibly fashionable, attention span of the Harvard Business School.

But for now, since both Democrats and Republicans are stasis-afflicted (Dems being too concerned about sacrificing the needs of the many for the sake of the few… and since Repubs worshipping the oil-enfranchised in some kind of bizarre Neo-Puritan money-orgy while we’ve had viable renewable energy of various kinds for decades) I’ll have to go with Green Imperialist. Put solar tiles on every building, invade those in need of education, plumbing and medicine, politely sterilize problem areas and plant trees with the sole objectives of limiting suffering and making a sustainable future possible.

As it says in my profile: “I’m liberal in both the new-school and old-school sense of the word, and my politics focuses on better living through bioengineering.” That’s a long, and more descriptive was of saying that I’m a transhumanist. I’ve found the T-word gets three reactions.

• ”Huuuh?”
• “So, you’re into transsexuals, eh? Yuk yuk yuk.”
• “Unnatural! Unsustainable! Transhumanism is nothing but a rich man’s scientistic cult!”

The third reaction sucked the fun out of blogging for me.

I’m a left-leaning moderate Independent. I chose this path because being pro-life I didn’t feel comfortable remaining a Democrat but had nothing in common with Republicans other than being pro-life.