This is about to get completely out of hand.

Face it, any political group will want to censor what they don’t like, even if the group’s fundamental ideology is freedom. As stated, liberals and conservatives simply censor differently. Luckily our liberals aren’t as extreme as in other parts of the world so we don’t suffer from their lack of rights yet, though our conservatives have gone a little far (and this is the main issue that made me dislike Clinton).

I really hope Obama’s administration is more sensible than this. I liked his greater understanding and appreciation of technology as opposed to other politicians, so that makes me a bit more optimistic that he won’t give in, or at least not entirely.

(And I have to say, it is unbelievably pathetic when parents want the government to do their job for them. That’s a straight-out admission of your own failures and inadequacies as a parent. Embarrassing.)

Good parenting starts at home and the result of bad parenting is a very lucrative business.

As a taxpayer, it costs the equivalent of a year’s tuition, books, room and board at Harvard for each person we lock up. What are we paying for? Well, I always thought the goal of prison was to rehabilitate a person so they could re-join society, but in many cases it does the opposite and they are locked up again. Don’t get me wrong. My old man worked for 35 years as a cop before retiring, and some people are just plain evil and need to be locked up. But if the idea of incarceration is not achieving its end goal, what’s wrong? It’s incredibly costly and produces no productive output. It would be better to find some way to put the demand wedge on early childhood “facilitation” over the more costly “rehabilitation”. A focus on developmental psychology would be useful.

Point is, parents, and NOT government need to more adequately teach “If you play with fire, you get burned”. Involving Government presents a slippery slope where legislating morality becomes the ideal. But by doing so, it has at tendency to create a sanitized society and kids lack learning from experience.

Think about the effects of Prohibition. Many of our founding documents were created around the vice of beer- Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin all were fond of the firewater. But because alcohol was seen as a vice to the Hoover administration, Prohibition was legislated. By legislating to the “socially acceptable” ideal, children lack growth in the area of learning social norms and boundaries. Remember: during Prohibition, people still got their beer, and many people died or went blind because of the toxicity of the alcohol. This is similar to the back-alley abortion argument.

So now interests want to enact internet filtering. But in doing so, they are attempting to centrally-legislate what is a threat commercially under the argument of “For the Children”. But, this just feeds back into the broken rehabilitation argument outlined above. Filtering has promise, but it should be considered at a home-level where the intervening parties are the parents.

So what do you do?
We use this program called “SafeEyes” and have it setup to send a text message when Junior is visiting questionable websites. It’s very effective too- Whenever my wife or I get the dreaded text message, it’s like a reminder that I need to give a ring to check in and see if everything’s okay. And my wife and I don’t point fingers because that will just cause animosity. We just let him know that we love him, ask how his day went and talk. So that’s our intervention strategy. We still provide free will. Don’t judge, let Junior do what he needs to do, and overall it’s worked out real well too. Our trust level has grown to the point where he’ll call just for the heck of it because he knows he can trust us.

I realize that some may think this is hypocritical but the thing is that if we don’t intervene, someone else surely will.

It seems the best solution would be a return to the nuclear family, and two-way communication.

The major problems with our current political system is that the system fosters internal rivalry between supposed different ‘factions’, whether those be Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal, wacko-nutjob/wasted-hasbeen, or whatever.

I propose that all candidates are posed with a series of current and potential future issues, and each one is required to submit a brief position on the various issues. The language is then ‘summarized and cleaned’ so that the individual can’t be identified by their use or mis-use of language.

Voting then takes place by the voters being presented with the same issues, and the various responses from the candidate, the voter then selects the response that most corresponds with their beliefs. The responses are tabulated (voting machines can count like 1+1=2, right…. just kidding, we all know they use the 1+1=2 for you, 1+1=3 for me math /sarcasm) summarized and the candidate who most corresponds to the individuals beliefs is then selected and a vote is cast for that individual.

None of this, “I’ve been a Republican for life and that’s all I’m going to ever vote” crap. Lets stop voting based on internal prejudice and upbringing and start voting on the things that matter, the real issues.

I’m sure nothing like this would ever happen, but it would remove most of the bias that comes from party affiliation or distance from the middle (left wing/right wing) and replace it with the candidates stand on the issues.

Of course this all assumes that what the candidates state as their position is actually factual and not a load of malarky. The problem is that we all know that 80% of what comes out of politicians mouths are lies… (these stats are real, except that 67% of statistics are made up on the spot, so this might be true).

An added benefit would be that AFTER the election the position statements would be public record and they could be held accountable for changes in those positions…. Not that “We the Sheeple” (tm pending) ever hold politicians accountable for what they say they are going to do.

I’d patent the idea if I thought that there was any chance that this type of system would ever be implemented….. Lets make it a public web service instead, so the positions are aggregated and summarized from various media and public records, and then once you select the appropriate positions that correspond with yours, it shows which candidate most fits in with your own personal beliefs.