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My political state

Posted by Joel Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:41:28 GMT

So, life hasn't been bad the last few months. For the most part, I've been spending the time fairly routinely involved in work and entertaining myself via various vices. Easily the worst of them is time spent on Reddit reading the various articles posted there and commenting on them.

This election has been a catalyst for my first true venture into understanding my political stances, and as such I've been doing a lot of reading and discussion. I have no firm upbringing, as my parents disagreed on a lot of political issues. My friends as well, growing up, were pretty diverse in their political leanings. So this particular election, with all the important stuff going on in the world right now, has forced me to do what I can to understand our history and where we should probably be going.

I call myself a moderate today. In college I would have identified as a libertarian, and I still lean that way, but I've come to understand more of the utility of government and not react to it reflexively. I've also gained a lot more respect for interventionist foreign policy, particularly after listening to noted anti-theist Christopher Hitchens.

This has disturbed a lot of my friends who nowadays are all fairly standard leftists. In many ways I feel unable to have discussions with some of them -- at least a few of them entertain the idea that 9/11 was a Bush administration conspiracy, which makes further levels of discourse difficult.

I've been (very slowly) reading Alan Greenspan's weighty book in which he covers the history of the last century or so from a very informed economic perspective. It gives great insight into the various presidents, and their motivations and ideas, and proposes where he thinks the world is going. It also paints a much clearer picture of the oft-misunderstood Federal Reserve system and what the Chairman's role is in it. I would recommend it to anyone who has an insatiable penchant for trying to understand the big picture.

My dad increasingly tries to keep me grounded and focused on my own life. I've been trying that more lately, perhaps because I've seen my increased focus on the Other take a toll on my personal goals. I don't think it's entirely without merit, as I think being an informed citizen is a personal goal, but it's true that I need to put the more tangible aspects of my own life first, and stop spending so much time focusing on these intellectual pursuits.