Good Unifying Views re Social Issues

GOOD UNIFYING VIEWS

RE SOCIAL ISSUES

by John Spritzler

March 4, 2022

[The URL of this article is https://www.pdrboston.org/good-unifying-views-re-social-issues ; please share it.]

The U.S. population is bitterly divided right down the middle (close to 50% versus 50%) on the following "social issues":

Illegal immigration
CRT (Critical Race Theory in our public schools)
Affirmative Action--past and current
Transgender laws & policies
Israel/Palestine
Abortion
Same-sex marriage
Feminism/Patriarchy
Foreign policy, war
Sex-work/prostitution
Capitalism/Socialism/Communism
Elementary/Middle School controversial sexual content

The division is often "conservative versus liberal" but not always.

Why are we so evenly divided, despite the fact that the vast majority of us are good and decent people? The reason is because the ruling billionaire oligarchy (a.k.a. the ruling class) in our fake democracy* wants us--the have-nots--to be divided that way; its strategy is divide-and-rule. To make sure we're divided close to 50-50 the ruling class uses its mass media (it controls both the conservative and liberal media) to give us only deliberately divisive choices and to censor the views that 80+ percent of us would agree on.

Here are the views on these issues that 80+ percent of us agree on:

1. Illegal immigration

The ruling class should stop doing the things in central and South America, that it has been doing for decades, that force people there to have to cross the border illegally into the United States just in order to survive. Read about this here.

2. CRT (Critical Race Theory)

The ruling class should let schools teach the FULL truth about systemic racial discrimination; not only the fact that it (chattel slavery, Jim Crow, etc.) existed, but ALSO the fact--which the ruling class now censors!--that its PURPOSE was (and still is) to destroy the solidarity of ALL races of working class people in order to enable the upper class to dominate and oppress ALL races of working class people including white working class people. Read about this here.

3. Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action, meaning reverse racial discrimination against whites for the supposed purpose of ending racial discrimination against non-whites, is wrong because racial discrimination is wrong, and because it is wrong it is divisive. There are color-blind policies that can end racial discrimination against non-whites, policies that would be warmly welcomed by both non-white and white working class people; the ruling class should stop preventing these policies from being enacted. The ruling class should stop implementing Affirmative Action's reverse racial discrimination against whites in the name of "anti-racism": it divides us along race lines by making whites believe that anti-racism is code for anti-white. Read about this here and also here.

4. Transgender laws and policies

The ruling class should stop implementing laws and policies that purport--falsely!--to be about protecting transgender people from oppression but that actually only harm good non-transgender people. These laws and policies understandably anger good people and enable the ruling class a) to falsely accuse them of being bigoted transphobics and b) to use that false accusation to turn other good people against them in the name of opposing bigotry. There are ways to accommodate the actual needs of transgender people for safety and dignity and fairness that do not deprive others of safety and dignity and fairness, and the ruling class should allow these to be implemented. It should not be a crime punishable by a $50,000 fine and a year in jail (as it is in Massachusetts) for a woman in a public-access shower room to tell a person with male genitalia to leave! Women athletes should not have to compete, in sports where body strength is important, against people who were born males and developed male musculature. Read about this here.

5. Israel/Palestine

The Israeli government should stop funding HAMAS (which it does) and stop working to keep HAMAS in power in Gaza (which it does). The Israeli billionaires who control the Israeli government (as U.S. billionaires control the U.S. government--both are oligarchies) should stop oppressing and impoverishing Israeli working class (mostly Jewish, of course) people to enrich themselves. And Israeli billionaires should stop using the Israeli government to super-oppress Palestinians, which they do for the purpose of making Palestinians into the bogeyman "enemy of Israel" that the billionaires use (hence their funding of HAMAS) to frighten ordinary Israeli Jews into obedience to the Israeli government that oppresses them. Read all about this here.

6. Abortion***

Preliminary definition: the personhood of something, and only the personhood, is what makes the killing of it possibly (depending on the circumstances) murder.

Viewpoint: The personhood, and hence the degree to which it is murder to kill it, of a human egg before fertilization by a human sperm is zero. After fertilization the personhood increases gradually from zero percent to 100 percent of the personhood of a living healthy adult human, reaching 100 percent when the fetus is born as a baby and it is as much murder to kill it as it would be to wrongly kill an adult human.

The morality or immorality (i.e., the extent to which it is murder or not) of an abortion depends on the relation between a) the magnitude of benefit (or avoidance of harm) to the mother and b) the magnitude of personhood of the fetus. The greater the former compared to the latter, the more morally permissible is an abortion, and vice versa. It is a judgment call, about which good people may disagree, to decide if the particular circumstances make a specific abortion morally acceptable. A law making abortion legal before the first trimester and illegal after that unless it is required to save the life or protect the health of the mother or if the fetus won't be able to survive even if it is born live is a reasonable law, but good people (none of whom are murderers!) may differ about the specific choice of the "first trimester" time point. Read about this here.

7. Same-sex marriage

Same-sex marriage should be legal but only with the following condition:

That it be illegal to deliberately conceive a child with a gamete (egg or sperm) from a person who, at the time of conception, does not fully intend*' to raise the child and know and be known by the child as its co-primary**' parent (mother or father as the case may be)***'.

To understand why this proposal about same-sex marriage would unite 80+ percent of the people, including people who today are bitterly opposed to each other (and to read the asterisked footnotes), go here.

8. Feminism/Patriarchy

Ordinary men and women are not enemies of each other; they share fundamental positive values that are the opposite of those of the ruling class (which consists of both men and women). Ruling class policies (governmental or in the private sector) that discriminate harmfully and unfairly** against women or against men should be abolished. Ruling class (or ruling class-funded) propaganda that portrays men, just for being male, as the enemy (oppressive patriarchy) of women, or vice versa, should be prohibited. Read about this here.

9. Foreign policy, war

Our foreign policy should be based on the following principles:

a. Have a very strong self-defense force at home against any potential invasion by enemy military forces or missiles, etc. What this would require is open to discussion, but whatever it requires we should make sure to have it.

b. Give as much support (ideological and material) as possible to the pro-egalitarian forces in nations ruled by anti-egalitarian regimes, so that egalitarian revolution spreads. Note that the stronger the egalitarian revolutionary movement is in a foreign nation, the more risky it is for that nation's anti-egalitarian government to attack us, because it would increase the risk of a revolution in that nation, just as the persistence of the Russian government in waging war during World War I led to the Russian Revolution in October of 1917. Our best ally in any nation is the egalitarian revolutionary movement there because egalitarians don't wage war against egalitarians. Read here how most people are egalitarians.

c. Never deliberately direct, or threaten to direct, violence against non-combatants. This means destroying our nuclear bombs unilaterally. It also means never invading other nations to direct violence against non-combatants as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Iraq.

Note: By very publicly destroying our nuclear bombs and never using violence against non-combatants and by supporting egalitarians everywhere in the world against oppressors we make it crystal clear to the egalitarian people in any nation whose government might consider attacking us with nuclear bombs that such an attack has no moral justification and is an act of pure evil. That government would know that it would sharply increase the risk of being overthrown by its own people if it attacked us with nuclear weapons. The likelihood it would use nuclear weapons against us in this case is very small, much smaller than the likelihood--if we were armed with nuclear weapons and it feared (regardless, of course, how much we promised never to do so!) our launching a first nuclear strike--that it would retaliate against us with nuclear weapons if it thought (perhaps mistakenly, even, but such a mistake is quite possible) we had launched a nuclear first strike against it.

d. Be economically as self-sufficient as possible, and trade (barter) with non-egalitarian societies on the basis of mutual agreement as long as this does not contradict item b above.

Read about this here and here.

10. Sex-work/prostitution

People who engage in sex-work/prostitution should be referred to as "People Unjustly Driven by Economic Hardship into Prostitution" or, for short, "PUDEPs" (in a manner analogous to the way academics refer to categories of people such as Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM) or People With AIDS (PWA)) and they should not be stigmatized as immoral or in any way bad people.

Nobody (as is unfortunately the case for the vast majority of prostitutes in the world today) should be forced by economic hardship into prostitution.

The unfortunate fact that many people today are driven into prostitution by economic hardship should not be normalized by words that aim to make it seem as if prostitution was just another kind of work like carpentry or hairstyling or physical therapy: it is NOT.

Laws should aim to make life less oppressive, not more oppressive, for people unjustly driven by economic hardship into prostitution.