Oh hey. I just realised that I haven't outlined my full political views here yet. So, since we've got a new thread, I think it's about time.
Economically, I'm relatively leftist, though perhaps less so than I used to be. I think the top bracket of income tax should be around 60%, for instance, and I'm very uneasy about the wage gap between businesses' productive personnel and top management. I think copyright ought to be removed in its entirety; there are other ways to monetise creation that aren't as philosophically problematic and are less prone to abuse via regulatory capture. I'm also in favour of nationalising (or at least partially nationalising) natural monopolies, including several emerging ones (the internationalisation and oligopolisation of payment processors, for instance, allowed a lobby group in America to seriously damage the escort industry here; that's really problematic), and I support free - i.e., fully subsidised - basic public transport (trains, in particular).
On social issues, my primary driving ideology is libertarianism. I'm strongly in favour of free speech, including some types of speech which people typically try to claim are outside its scope. I loathe the very idea of hate speech laws, for instance - except for literal criminal conspiracy, I support the right to promote terrible ideology (and, in general, be dismissed as a lunatic). And I detest the crusade against paedophiles (which are NOT THE SAME THING as child molestors; I cringe every time someone says "convicted paedophile"), in particular the efforts to ban simulated child pornography. Live-action child pornography is bad because making it involves child molestation - arousing paedophiles is not an inherently bad thing. On a related note, I think there's too much societal stigma around sex in general, which is thought to substantially contribute to worsening rape trauma. The disconnect between the way we treat violence and sex in rating content is patently silly, for instance, and ages of consent over 16 are highly dubious (and lowering them even further is plausibly a good thing, though obviously comprehensive sex ed should precede the AoC in all cases). I mean, if you're old enough to want sex, and you know enough to safely have sex, isn't it being rather something of a nanny state to legislate whether you're allowed? Speaking of which, I'm not a fan of a lot of things under the "nanny-state" umbrella; generally, I hold that it should be legal to do stupid things, so long as the only one harmed is you. This applies to stuff like mandating people wear seatbelts (mandating installing them is perfectly reasonable) as well as the stupid ban on marijuana (I'm okay with controls on stuff like heroin, because a few doses' worth suffices for manslaughter or murder, but marijuana has a higher lethal/active ratio than both nicotine and alcohol). I'm also strongly against animal rights laws, except in the rare cases where non-human animals are possibly people (the dozen or so species that pass the mirror test, for example), and support legal abortion up to and including (agreed-by-both-parents) prompt infanticide.
I also dislike discrimination. All discrimination, including deliberate attempts to bias things towards groups thought statistically disfavoured. That's getting very far down the slippery slope of "ends justify the means". As far as religion goes, I think scripture classes in public schools are an absolute disgrace, and that religion/"tradition" shouldn't be involved in legal unions. I do think that man-woman couples should be given first preference for adoption over singles or same-sex couples, but that's because of biological issues (girls with no father, for instance, have very early menarche) rather than anything philosophical.
