My Political Platform
If I was running for something, what would I advocate?
Well, for one, I would need to attempt to generate headlines as a form of advertising, so there may be a certain amount of focusing on weird or taboo topics. Luckily for my hypothetical campaign, people are notoriously stupid on a number of fronts, and I'd be able to make controversial statements part of my platform without compromising. I'll start with a few details in this vein:
1. Public Nudity: Seriously. Maybe you can make some arguments against disease spreading etc, but I'm sure that those can be minimized by, say, requiring clothing on buses etc (if that's even a problem in the first place). The point is, if somebody wants to walk around buck naked on their lawn, nobody should have the right to stop them. Now, I'm sure many of you are thinking something along the lines of "It SHOULD be illegal because DEAR GOD, I do NOT want to see wrinkly old man penis". Well hey now. I don't want to see ugly people, but if we're going to let them out we may as well let out the ugly body parts that comprise them. Also, some of you will worry about traffic accidents caused by rampant neck-craning. Although this likely wouldn't be an issue (how many people have actually taken advantage of legal toplessness, for instance?), the important thing is that if you're THAT excited by a naked body part or two, you CLEARLY aren't getting enough pornography. Get yourself a better internet connection (more on that later). More importantly, though many will CLAIM that others' nudity harms them, I don't believe it actually does.
2. Public Sex: Certain concessions may need to be made in the name of preventing disease spread, but seriously. Sex exists, and people should learn about it. To me, that's the end of the story.
3. Legalize It: Who does pot harm? A few people who overuse, and maybe the occasional bit of dealer-related violence/theft/etc. The latter could be all but eliminated simply by making it legal. Given its widespread availability, the former likely wouldn't be affected either way.
4. Gay "Marriage" and Polygamy: Remove all legal references to marriage and let gays and evangelicals whine amongst themselves about what constitutes marriage. This has the benefits of not wasting taxpayer money on keeping track of useless things like morally indicting happy unions. Many will object that polygamy is exploitative of children, but this objection is unfounded since we already have child abuse and statutory rape laws (though they may need to be toughened anyway, I hear that 14 is the legal sexual consent age here, and that seems too young even for me to allow - seriously, a 50 year old and a 14 year old? Yeesh). Anyway... Some may also object that polygamy exploits women generally. While that may be traditionally true, if a woman allows herself to be exploited in that manner, that's her business. We should do all we can to prevent her from being forced into a non-consensual union (we have anti-rape laws already), and try to provide her the ability to leave if she becomes unhappy (we have laws against abuse and provide shelters etc already), but if 3 men and 8 women somehow manage to be happy having a menage-a-onze, who the Hell are we to judge?
5. Lower Governmental Salaries: This is partly a shameless attempt to curry favour with the general populace, but I also advocate doing it in a specific way that makes a lot of sense: Specifically, set salaries for all levels of government (PM, MPP, etc) to the mean (or maybe median) income of the adult population. This gives government a direct financial incentive to create policies that are good for both the people and the economy.
6. Legal Assisted Suicide: Those who want to die should be able to have that right. I do not believe there is value in a life lived because of the inability to die.
7. Legal Prostitution: I think it's already legal in Canada provided that you don't solicit on corners, but I think efforts like Vancouver's sex co-op should be encouraged, not legally obstructed. I've posted on this before, feel free to see plenty more discussion there if you are interested.
Moving on to some of the less controversial stuff,
8. Public Car Insurance, Utilities, Communications, and anything else that is either Mandatory or requires country-wide infrastructure: There are 6 provinces with private car insurance, and 4 with public. Guess which 6 cost the public more! Look at what happened to electricity rates when they were set to be privatized. Look at the 407 highway (privately owned). It's a friggin' ROAD, and it costs more. Look at the fiasco that is Bell's phone lines and the competition rules that force them to lease their equipment to competitors at cost. Sure there are other reasons as well (population density), but here's a hint: when there's zero incentive to build, it's no wonder we massively lag behind places like South Korea and Hong Kong in this area. So, why doesn't the government own/build/maintain the infrastructure, and lease it to anyone who wants to be an ISP? Might even make the government some money while you drastically improve service.
9. Open Source Funding: Take like $1 million a year, and hire a few hackers to help improve Ubuntu, Open Office, or whatever other software the government needs. All improvements would essentially automatically be made available to anyone else who wants/needs them (universities, the general public, businesses, etc), and all of a sudden we as a nation aren't spending insane amounts of money on an American product. Not that I have anything against American products generally, just that we may as well spend less, run something more stable, secure, and easily customizeable, and let's face it, Microsoft just often sucks. There are enough eager people to help create an alternative that they're doing it on their own already. We may as well help accelerate it for cheap.
10. Open Standards Required for Government-related Computing: Much as I may hate MS and closed source software generally, I do not wish to mandate open source everywhere. Open standards, however, should be absolutely required for anything public. Why should we require Canadians to buy an American product to access government documents? We shouldn't. We should mandate the use of formats that are open, preferably the most popular format used by the most popular relevant open source application. Over time, this would also help to eliminate issues like "My Wordperfect document won't open in Word" for the general public.
11. Smaller Government and Fewer Laws: Because not EVERY right-wing idea is completely stupid.
12. Some form of Proportional Representation or Instant Runoff Voting: Currently, if I want to help elect a left-wing government, my BEST strategy would be to start a moderately right-wing party in all seriousness, and hope to split the vote. Does anyone else think the current system is just plain broken? One potential way this could be implemented is to get voters to rank all the candidates in order of preference from best to worst. Then, say you have three candidates, and voting as follows:
40% of people ranked Stephen Harper first, then the other two
35% of people ranked Paul Martin first, then Jack Layton second, then Harper third
25% of people ranked Layton first, Martin second, and Harper third
In the first "round", all the first votes are counted, and whoever has the least is discarded. In our example, this would be Layton. In the second round, all ballots would be renumbered to exclude Layton, i.e. it would now look like:
40% ranked Harper first, then Martin second
60% ranked Martin first, then Harper second
This is of course a simplistic analysis, but it demonstrates how this voting method gets around the problem of splitting the vote.
And this concludes an extremely long post. If anyone has any suggestions/additions, they are most welcome. Criticisms are welcome, but not AS welcome. :)
Well, for one, I would need to attempt to generate headlines as a form of advertising, so there may be a certain amount of focusing on weird or taboo topics. Luckily for my hypothetical campaign, people are notoriously stupid on a number of fronts, and I'd be able to make controversial statements part of my platform without compromising. I'll start with a few details in this vein:
1. Public Nudity: Seriously. Maybe you can make some arguments against disease spreading etc, but I'm sure that those can be minimized by, say, requiring clothing on buses etc (if that's even a problem in the first place). The point is, if somebody wants to walk around buck naked on their lawn, nobody should have the right to stop them. Now, I'm sure many of you are thinking something along the lines of "It SHOULD be illegal because DEAR GOD, I do NOT want to see wrinkly old man penis". Well hey now. I don't want to see ugly people, but if we're going to let them out we may as well let out the ugly body parts that comprise them. Also, some of you will worry about traffic accidents caused by rampant neck-craning. Although this likely wouldn't be an issue (how many people have actually taken advantage of legal toplessness, for instance?), the important thing is that if you're THAT excited by a naked body part or two, you CLEARLY aren't getting enough pornography. Get yourself a better internet connection (more on that later). More importantly, though many will CLAIM that others' nudity harms them, I don't believe it actually does.
2. Public Sex: Certain concessions may need to be made in the name of preventing disease spread, but seriously. Sex exists, and people should learn about it. To me, that's the end of the story.
3. Legalize It: Who does pot harm? A few people who overuse, and maybe the occasional bit of dealer-related violence/theft/etc. The latter could be all but eliminated simply by making it legal. Given its widespread availability, the former likely wouldn't be affected either way.
4. Gay "Marriage" and Polygamy: Remove all legal references to marriage and let gays and evangelicals whine amongst themselves about what constitutes marriage. This has the benefits of not wasting taxpayer money on keeping track of useless things like morally indicting happy unions. Many will object that polygamy is exploitative of children, but this objection is unfounded since we already have child abuse and statutory rape laws (though they may need to be toughened anyway, I hear that 14 is the legal sexual consent age here, and that seems too young even for me to allow - seriously, a 50 year old and a 14 year old? Yeesh). Anyway... Some may also object that polygamy exploits women generally. While that may be traditionally true, if a woman allows herself to be exploited in that manner, that's her business. We should do all we can to prevent her from being forced into a non-consensual union (we have anti-rape laws already), and try to provide her the ability to leave if she becomes unhappy (we have laws against abuse and provide shelters etc already), but if 3 men and 8 women somehow manage to be happy having a menage-a-onze, who the Hell are we to judge?
5. Lower Governmental Salaries: This is partly a shameless attempt to curry favour with the general populace, but I also advocate doing it in a specific way that makes a lot of sense: Specifically, set salaries for all levels of government (PM, MPP, etc) to the mean (or maybe median) income of the adult population. This gives government a direct financial incentive to create policies that are good for both the people and the economy.
6. Legal Assisted Suicide: Those who want to die should be able to have that right. I do not believe there is value in a life lived because of the inability to die.
7. Legal Prostitution: I think it's already legal in Canada provided that you don't solicit on corners, but I think efforts like Vancouver's sex co-op should be encouraged, not legally obstructed. I've posted on this before, feel free to see plenty more discussion there if you are interested.
Moving on to some of the less controversial stuff,
8. Public Car Insurance, Utilities, Communications, and anything else that is either Mandatory or requires country-wide infrastructure: There are 6 provinces with private car insurance, and 4 with public. Guess which 6 cost the public more! Look at what happened to electricity rates when they were set to be privatized. Look at the 407 highway (privately owned). It's a friggin' ROAD, and it costs more. Look at the fiasco that is Bell's phone lines and the competition rules that force them to lease their equipment to competitors at cost. Sure there are other reasons as well (population density), but here's a hint: when there's zero incentive to build, it's no wonder we massively lag behind places like South Korea and Hong Kong in this area. So, why doesn't the government own/build/maintain the infrastructure, and lease it to anyone who wants to be an ISP? Might even make the government some money while you drastically improve service.
9. Open Source Funding: Take like $1 million a year, and hire a few hackers to help improve Ubuntu, Open Office, or whatever other software the government needs. All improvements would essentially automatically be made available to anyone else who wants/needs them (universities, the general public, businesses, etc), and all of a sudden we as a nation aren't spending insane amounts of money on an American product. Not that I have anything against American products generally, just that we may as well spend less, run something more stable, secure, and easily customizeable, and let's face it, Microsoft just often sucks. There are enough eager people to help create an alternative that they're doing it on their own already. We may as well help accelerate it for cheap.
10. Open Standards Required for Government-related Computing: Much as I may hate MS and closed source software generally, I do not wish to mandate open source everywhere. Open standards, however, should be absolutely required for anything public. Why should we require Canadians to buy an American product to access government documents? We shouldn't. We should mandate the use of formats that are open, preferably the most popular format used by the most popular relevant open source application. Over time, this would also help to eliminate issues like "My Wordperfect document won't open in Word" for the general public.
11. Smaller Government and Fewer Laws: Because not EVERY right-wing idea is completely stupid.
12. Some form of Proportional Representation or Instant Runoff Voting: Currently, if I want to help elect a left-wing government, my BEST strategy would be to start a moderately right-wing party in all seriousness, and hope to split the vote. Does anyone else think the current system is just plain broken? One potential way this could be implemented is to get voters to rank all the candidates in order of preference from best to worst. Then, say you have three candidates, and voting as follows:
40% of people ranked Stephen Harper first, then the other two
35% of people ranked Paul Martin first, then Jack Layton second, then Harper third
25% of people ranked Layton first, Martin second, and Harper third
In the first "round", all the first votes are counted, and whoever has the least is discarded. In our example, this would be Layton. In the second round, all ballots would be renumbered to exclude Layton, i.e. it would now look like:
40% ranked Harper first, then Martin second
60% ranked Martin first, then Harper second
This is of course a simplistic analysis, but it demonstrates how this voting method gets around the problem of splitting the vote.
And this concludes an extremely long post. If anyone has any suggestions/additions, they are most welcome. Criticisms are welcome, but not AS welcome. :)
posted by Gideon Humphrey at 9:37 PM
4 Comments:
Lesson 1: Don't call anyone stupid, especially people that may vote for you. ;)
Heh, there probably aren't any anyway. :)
Re: Public nudity & Sex. I think there is a legitimate arguement to made for preventing strange men (and possibly women) from doing things like masturbating in front of a 5 year old. Yes, sex exists, and I can see your point that we should just get over it and teach our kids at a younger age, so they can be smart about it. But I don't want to see someone jacking off onto a kid's slide with no repercussions.
Shrug. Masturbation happens. I figure there might be some health concerns with "jacking off onto a kid's slide", but I honestly don't think that seeing a strange guy masturbate is likely to harm a child. Particularly if early and explicit sex education is part of the school curriculum, particularly with emphasis on things like what is legal and illegal, and the fact that pornography, like all non-porn content, does not necessarily represent how people will or should act.
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