Here I'm just going to list all of my political positions as they come up so that I can "debug" the idiocy I find around me. I'm not big into politics so much as these are similar to my philosophical conceits in so far as if I write them down I can just reference them once in order to have everyone know what the position is and then I don't have to think about it again. A bit of a "this is the solved intellectual problem related to this bit of rhetoric and no amount of arguing will change my mind so skip it" and then I can work on something else.
You have this weird situation where the Israelis will always win via force of arms and the Palestinians will always be able to win via guerilla action (unless you kill all of them which would make it so that the Israelis look so incredibly bad that everyone in the middle east attacks them and the world stops buying their products and puts on embargoes). Essentially neither side can win in a way that they get to claim victory because neither is willing to capitulate to the demands of the other and there is no moral victory in terms of getting support from the international community - annhilation of either side would amount to genocide. Further, if the Israelis want to claim any sort of morality at all keeping what amounts to a concentration camp in Gaza as it relates to their own history is rather ridiculous. As I see it the only solution is to have both sides believe in something greater than their respective religion, which given their consitution (small c) as it regards to religion, is an incredibly tough thing to do. I believe in a two state solution such that there are two states contained within one larger state that incorporates both Israel and Palestine, much like the United States has 50 states. The way that you would enforce this is that you would have laws that would apply to both jurisdictions and laws that would apply to the country as a whole, with a mixed military. To pass measures that would effect everyone would require what amounts to something similar to a 2/3 majority in elected representatives from both jurisdictions, and there would be universal laws that would apply to everyone on humanitarian grounds. There would be rules about where people could live based on where their relatives have lived in the past and there would also be rules based on freedom of travel and work within the country. Those are the 'requirements' as I see it for this particular problem. In practicality I don't know how the horse trading or sausage making would work, but that's the only long term solution that I see that will end violence.
Walls don't work. As has been demonstrated before. So that's dumb. At the same time a country, despite what many people on the left may think, has a right to protect its' borders. My solution I believe is the easiest one. That is if someone is convicted of a violent crime (such as a felony that could cause someone to be hurt) and they are convicted by a jury of their peers in the jurisdiction that they live in then if they are an illegal immigrant you have them deported after taking down their biometric information and having them serve jail time (if needed). If they come back into the country then you make it so that if they attempt to register with the government using the same information you have them deported. Anyone that's coming into the country legally would just be tested for illness and if they can work. The benefit of this approach is that you would have to have a jury convict someone of being in the country illegally and you wouldn't have to pay for a separate police force - while it would weed out people that the community knows and believes are criminals. I believe that over time you would have that people that were conservative immigrants that were law abiding would tend to move out of communities with large amounts of crime and then the court system would step in and manage to clean things up. Immigration seems to be one of those problems that's rather easy to fix with this heuristic in a way that would make most people happy using the legal system that already exists.
I don't like identity politics personally as it doesn't mean that much to me. Gay marriage seems like one of those problems that takes up more time than say making sure that everyone has medical care and clean food and clothing. I'm not against people that are gay in particular (you go you!) it just doesn't seem to be something that's as culturally relevant than it used to be in terms of being an oppressed minority (so you're gay - Ok). I like weird porn and have never had sex and people seem to want to make this a gender identity thing within the ghetto that is San Francisco and I find the notion bizarre. I personally don't understand it at all.
There are certain things that people like which it is damn near impossible to prevent them from having - guns, abortions, and (certain) drugs. (Here I am adding a caveat to drugs merely because there are drugs that are so terrible, such a meth and fentanyl that they essentially become community problems that rip apart a city and result in plagues. Those things everyone ends up hating because it destroys the fabric of society - so there are limits, similar to the right to bear arms doesn't mean everyone gets a rocket launcher). In the United States there is not only a largely rural population but two of the largest unregulated land borders in the world. You can either spend every possible resource you have tracking people coming in and out of the country (and in the case of abortion what they do with their bodies) or you can say "there are some things for which the government doesn't have control". What I find so weird is that on the right and the left there are people that like guns and abortions respectively but neither side has the position of "while we may not like these things, the solution of governmental intereference is worse than the problem it is attempting to solve". Which I find weird.
Food, clothing, and shelter are the absolute limits of the necessities of life. (I would include access to education in terms of libraries, and healthcare in terms of hospitals - to limit yourself to only stating a couple of the absolute limits in some sort of Mosesian "thou shalt" is essentially impossible, but you can use the term of "if it walks like a humanitarian necessity, and talks like a humanitarian necessity" then it probably is). Any part of society that doesn't have these things ends up becoming upset or violent including segments of society that don't necessarily fit in (minorities, illegal immigrants, and so on). If you organize your society through a max-min heuristic (such as laissez faire capitalism) and then are surprised when groups of people that don't have access to these necessities become violent then you haven't been paying attention. At the same time those people that believe in political causes that support a minority group that they belong to where their main complaint would be resolved if the larger society was organized in such a way so that they had access to these necessities often mask this larger problem in rhetoric espousing a certain cause and so the main problem becomes muddled - it ends up becoming a referendum on whether their subgroup or culture is worth having these necessities which may or may not be true. In any case, that's my belief on that.
The United States and many other countries have a declining birthrate while worldwide the birthrate is declining. This happens to be an artifact of the money problem in which in a modern society having the children pay for the healthcare of their elderly parents in a world of declining resources ends up being something of an inverse pyramid scheme. One of the ways to fix this is from immigration from foreign countries, but many of those are beginning to see declining birthrates as well. One idea is to bring back prositution as a cultural norm, but closer to a concubine model, specifically geared to seeing if women can help couples to conceive. While internet pornography is wonderful, it is a "weird" cultural norm that is relatively recent and may not be a useful survival strategy for the human race.
Sending money overseas to fight other peoples wars kills US citizens just as much as sending soldiers, it just does it by making jobs disappear or building war factories. If the US wants to get involved in a war it should be willing to send troops to the effected area because soldiers dying as a known figure is harder to hide than children dying of preventable illness in America or social welfare being spent on bullets instead of bridges. I'd also like to see an extension of the model bank idea where you commit to offering a bribe to end wars by publicly creating documents that would propose favorable trade deals on conditions of mutual end to hostilities - there's no reason a carrot can't be used rather than a stick. One idea I had is that if Russia and Ukraine stopped hostilities you would take the border region between the two countries and fill them with modular nuclear reactors and then put the electrical equipment and power stations on both sides of the border thereby helping both countries and making future wars much less likely to occur (also it would mitigate the use of heating oil and pipelines which would be good). If you were going to bury the reactors in the ocean you could put reactors off the coast of Israel and then have a shared Israel/Palestine share power to the rest of the middle east. That would increase global security without increasing global weapons output and also increase overall production. I'm surprised no one has seriously proposed this kind of thing before.
I've done a wide array of drugs, but all in moderation (to the extent that that's possible with some drugs). I've taken cocaine twice, done mushrooms once, acid three times, molly twice, smoked marijuana a half dozen times, have never been a habitual smoker (I think I'm just too lazy to sustain the habit) or drinker (same). I like drugs not only in that it can be something that's fun to do on occasion, but that it's one of things that allow people to freely express themselves and experience life. The way that people abuse drugs, especially the poor who are often doing it while they die, is horrific. Every beginning of the month when the checks clear hundreds of people will be up and down market street doing drugs that will kill them as their bodies fall apart. Every Saturday morning they pick people off the street a block from the main library that are dying of overdoses. As far as I can tell drug abuse in San Francisco is a suicide cult.
So right around the time BREXIT was happening I got drunk (damn near blackout drunk) in a bar in Peru? Columbia? and someone asked me what I thought of the BREXIT position. I said there were a large amount of positives and negatives to the idea. On the pro-BREXIT side you had to understand that at the time there were a large number of refugees that were coming from the middle east and living in France (to the point where they were having problems at refugee camps at the border of the two countries - or the port rather). What would happen is that because England had some of the laxist immigration and settlement requirements and had a strong currency for having been on the Euro (which would make the currency arguably stronger than it should have been) people from the middle east would settle in England and then send remittances back home. On the pro BREXIT side you had people in the outlying areas outside of London that were anti-immigrant for reasons that might have a veil of racism, but also were completely rational. They're way of life was being disrupted not just for social reasons, but because people were using the remittances to become wealthy back home and leaving thereby making them worse off. The people in London liked being on the Euro because it meant more trade and investment and so investment bankers and the wealthy would have their incomes go up. Being on the Euro essentially was a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich being sponsored by Europe and helping the middle east. Whether you were pro BREXIT or anti-BREXIT the question wasn't so much a matter of which is better in any sort of partisan sense so much as how you wanted to organize society as a whole. Wealth transfers to London could be good or bad depending on whether this would increase investment or make the country happier as a whole. Maybe geopolitics would stabilize with more remittances. Perhaps both of those things were bad because it would mean that the average British citizen outside of London would be worse off.
So clearly, not English. And also Boris Johnson is the Donald Trump of Europe albeit with less of a tan and worse hair. At this point much of this is old hat - people probably don't care about this anymore - at least it's not in the news. What are their populists called (Tories?). Anyway the bill ended up passing and then because it was such a shit show it ended up causing the troubles in Ireland flaring up again because people on one side of the border became wealthier than the other (because there was now a tax on imported Irish goods from outside of England that had to be converted into pounds). This is one of those secondary effects that no one had even thought of or considered at the time, but to me the solution would be to say "if it comes from Ireland then you should allow all goods that are made in Ireland to have a specific exemption". So it would be an anti-tarrif or a "Made In Ireland" incentive that would increase domestic production. This is again one of those things where everyone that's involved in the whole thing are going to bring up old history that make everyone upset when the underlying cause is wealth disparity. And bad policy making with way too many moving pieces and special interests attached. I feel kinda sorta maybe a little bad about talking about politics in a bar overseas and then having it happen after I was blackout drunk but someone asked me my opinion and I gave it because, well, they asked. I claimed no special rights or insight other than being an objective (not Randian objectivist but objective) political thinker in the way that I think people outside of the country might be and gave my beliefs as best I could. One of those weird things.