Read on Twitter
About 40 people suddenly followed me. Let me briefly write down my political positions. I have done it before, but it is a good idea to do it once in a while.
Economically, I am moderately on the Left. I am disgusted more by Orwell's fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread (written when obesity was a sign of wealth, not poverty) than by Kipling's men being paid for existence and no man having to pay for his sins.
I believe that the fat man should be taxed, and the parents of the children should be subsidized from his taxes. The gain to the children overweighs the loss to the man, who now has to eat chicken.
Currently, the Federal tax code is bizarrely complicated, mentioning nonresident alien baccarat players and gas produced from Devonian shale. Why? Because of lobbying. How can a country claim that no one is above the law if the law is written by lobbyists?
It is the extreme complexity of the law, which only the very rich can exploit, that allows Donald Trump to maintain an obscenely opulent lifestyle while scamming everyone around him. It should be fixed. I like what I read about the New Zealand tax reform.
I also support universal health care. My corporate job came with membership in an HMO. Why doesn't *citizenship* come with membership in an HMO? All other developed countries, both Western European social democracies and East Asian Confucian countries, have it.
I am aware that health care coverage isn't the primary determinant of health; social and economic factors are more important. Universal health care won't suddenly make everyone healthy, but it is still the right thing to do.
Visiting Washington DC, I once wandered into a Black neighborhood, felt hunger, and asked a little girl about the nearest supermarket. The place was full of junk food and liquor and almost lacked normal groceries. Universal health care alone won't change this.
I was chatting with a childhood friend who is a doctor, and she said, "The system does NOT incentivize outcomes." I have read that it incentivizes too many medical procedures that do little to increase the patients' quality of life, especially elderly ones'. It should be fixed.
I support drastically shrinking higher education. The current system results in too many graduates (and a huge number of dropouts) chasing too few jobs, burdened by debt, which they have to repay by working in unrelated low-skilled occupations. This cannot go on like this.
The system as it stands is horribly inefficient. A future actuary doesn't really need to study mathematics (i.e. abstract algebra, real analysis, algebraic topology etc.). A future mathematician does, but how many mathematicians can society afford to have?
As the father of a 16-year-old girl who wants to go into medicine (she hasn't yet decided whether she wants to become a physician or work on medical devices such as prosthetics) and brother of a physician, I wonder whether medical education in the US can be streamlined.
In the 1950s-1970s, my grandmother taught pharmacology and workplace hygiene in a medical high school in the Soviet Union. In the entire United States, there is only one such school, the Marie Curie school in the Bronx. In Kharkiv alone, there were two.
@socialimpurity wrote, "I went to one of those "medical high schools". All the anatomy, physiology, and chemistry I could wish for. Plus practical hours in hospitals. Heaven." Why can't we have them here?
I like both renewable energy and nuclear energy. France is powered by a few standardized nuclear reactor designs; why can't the US be? I like new small modular reactor designs such as NuScale's; by Wright's Law, many small identical things are cheaper than a few big unique ones.
However, culturally, I am solidly on the Right. I detest progressivism with all my heart. Its axioms run contrary to all my knowledge about the world and to my moral intuition.
I do not see minorities as sacred. I do not see their "lived experience" as a valid source of knowledge, especially since it is affected by the media, education and politics. I know that activists do not represent their politics accurately.
The term "Latinx" is the perfect example. The overwhelming majority of Latin American immigrants either haven't heard of it or reject it, but using it is de rigueur among progressive whites such as Senator Elizabeth Warren because they defer to activists who promote the term.
The house next to the house next to mine was sold a year ago for almost $1.2M. Every day at 10-11am, I see an East Asian grandma, mother and infant go on a daily walk. Then I log on Twitter and read how the United States is a white supremacy that must face racial reckoning.
I work in a mixed Chinese-Indian-Russian team. I now work with another team, which is headed by an Arab, interacting with two Indians and a white American. All these people are my moral and intellectual equals, not sacred beings.
The antiracist discourse reminds me of Nazism. The concept of "whiteness" in it, the idea that a part of the population is evil by the virtue of their ancestry, reminds me of Nazism's "Judentum". I am also disgusted by this discourse's infantilization of minorities.
I believe that we are now experiencing a moral panic about police murdering citizens similar to past moral panics e.g. about child molestation. Both murderous police officers and child molesters do exist, but in numbers too small to justify restructuring the society around them.
So, here I am. Given that I am a totally boring 48-year-old software engineer-husband-father-stepfather-homeowner-former volunteer, these positions cannot be too exotic. I voted for Biden. If you don't like it, please unfollow me.
