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Willravel · 09-03-2008, 11:00 AM

Compromise isn't always a good option.

If someone wants to warp my children's understanding about how the world works, compromising isn't an option for me. And it has exactly nothing to do with wanting to control anyone. It's fighting for the freedom that comes from having better and more information. My children are not going to be ignorant to the way the world works because of some entitled teacher's religious perception of the universe. If I wanted my children to learn about God, G-d, or Allah, I'd take them to a church, temple, or mosque. If I wanted my children to learn about mystic runes, I suspect there's also a place for that (and I'm not suggesting that religions or spirituality that involve mystic runes are any less legitimate than Abrahamic or other world religions). There are no shortages of places that can teach my children about religion. Public school is not a forum for religious evangelism, though, and enforcing that reality is not unreasonable and it's not in any way about control.

The problem is that we're pretending like the US is just filled with two types of people, "right" and "left". It's a dishonest oversimplification and it leads to partisanship. There are as many types of people in the US alone as there are grains of sand on a beach. There are 300 millions tiny little political parties. Some parties are similar, so there are allegiances to tackle common issues, but "us and them" is unreasonable. Look at DC_Dux and I. We're both liberals, right? Oh, it's not that simple at all. We disagree on the Senate and Congress, we disagree on abortion, we disagree on a thousand things. We're two very different flavors of liberal. We still respect each other, and still are able to come together for common issues, but we're not the same at all. We're not even registered with the same political parties. Moreover, I suspect there are some conservatives that I have more in common with than most liberals. Recently, I've helping a woman that's trying to CARB's anti-idle laws in California, and she's deeply conservative. We've found a common ideal and we're shoulder to shoulder trying to deal with it.

My second point is that the "you're both" equally responsible thing should be "we're all are". I don't make policy, I only try to vote for the person most close to my own personal politics.

09-03-2008, 11:00 AM	#9 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Compromise isn't always a good option. If someone wants to warp my children's understanding about how the world works, compromising isn't an option for me. And it has exactly nothing to do with wanting to control anyone. It's fighting for the freedom that comes from having better and more information. My children are not going to be ignorant to the way the world works because of some entitled teacher's religious perception of the universe. If I wanted my children to learn about God, G-d, or Allah, I'd take them to a church, temple, or mosque. If I wanted my children to learn about mystic runes, I suspect there's also a place for that (and I'm not suggesting that religions or spirituality that involve mystic runes are any less legitimate than Abrahamic or other world religions). There are no shortages of places that can teach my children about religion. Public school is not a forum for religious evangelism, though, and enforcing that reality is not unreasonable and it's not in any way about control. The problem is that we're pretending like the US is just filled with two types of people, "right" and "left". It's a dishonest oversimplification and it leads to partisanship. There are as many types of people in the US alone as there are grains of sand on a beach. There are 300 millions tiny little political parties. Some parties are similar, so there are allegiances to tackle common issues, but "us and them" is unreasonable. Look at DC_Dux and I. We're both liberals, right? Oh, it's not that simple at all. We disagree on the Senate and Congress, we disagree on abortion, we disagree on a thousand things. We're two very different flavors of liberal. We still respect each other, and still are able to come together for common issues, but we're not the same at all. We're not even registered with the same political parties. Moreover, I suspect there are some conservatives that I have more in common with than most liberals. Recently, I've helping a woman that's trying to CARB's anti-idle laws in California, and she's deeply conservative. We've found a common ideal and we're shoulder to shoulder trying to deal with it. My second point is that the "you're both" equally responsible thing should be "we're all are". I don't make policy, I only try to vote for the person most close to my own personal politics.