An Open Letter to the World (WARNING: Rambling Manifesto Contained Herein)

(This post started one way, and mutated and mutated– it was supposed to be more structured than it ended up, and what it ended up being was essentially a stream-of-consciousness reflection on the state of the world.  As a result, internal consistency may not be entirely ensured– I jump from place to place, and quite frankly, I didn’t get any sleep before I write this.  Take it for what it is, and read it when you have a long amount of time to spend.  About halfway through it, I think I have a bit of a religious experience in there, and that’s why I go on at length about the value of humanity there.  I’ll probably do more like this in the future.)

Dear World,

What can I say?  We’ve got a lot of problems.  Not between you and me, necessarily, but I mean… the World’s problems become my problems because I have to live here.  I don’t feel like blaming anyone for anything.  I don’t think any individual causes any single problem, but I think we all (including myself) at least contribute in some way.

On Obama, 1.25 years later

Well, Obama’s been in office for about a year and a quarter, and in that time, I’ve seen Hope and Change flood down the tube pretty rapidly.  Really, the guy made a lot of campaign promises, and he’s lived up to a lot of them on the aggregate, but only if you take every individual policy separately and break them down– and even then, many of them he’s only technically done.

So, we got our “historic” health-care reform bill.  No single-payer system, no public option, nothing except a mandate to make everyone buy into the same crappy insurance we’ve already got.  And boy is it crappy.  I had better when I was on my father’s military insurance, and the policies there were draconian, to say the least.  Instead, I get to buy into an insurance plan that won’t cover my needs, because almost no policy exists that covers my personal needs.

On Technology and the Advancement of the Human Condition

(This piece is going to be particularly long, because I’m going to cover a variety of subjects in one article to make up for my epic failure of “BLOGSPLOSION”.)

A constantly replicating problem for me during debates I have with people regarding the American political process centers around the notion of rights and what they mean to us.  There are many individuals who ironically refer to themselves as libertarians, who somehow believe that human rights are limited only to those things spelled out in the Constitution of the United States of America.  Besides being blatantly wrong by the very words of the Constitution itself (Amendment IX), it fails to account for the fact that humanity exists beyond the borders of the United States.

On The Iranian Election Situation

I’m not afraid to say that the situation in Iran, where people are standing up for their rights on the streets of Tehran, warms my heart just a bit.  In a sense, I can’t help but feel though, that most Americans who are joining me in watching this with such interest are just living vicariously through the Iranian protesters.  I don’t know too many people who are entirely satisfied with their government, and many people were raging mad over the 2000 and 2004 elections.  Likewise, I know plenty of people who are extremely angered over the actions of the WTO, IMF and World Bank in the developing world.  Seeing a large group of protesters drive run the Basij militia away with just rocks and the pure force of numbers is exciting, indeed, but we need to make sure that we’re looking at this critically.