MotherEarthPolitics

I gotta admit, before I heard of, and later saw videos of his assassination I didn't pay much attention to Charlie Kirk. I had heard his name, and knew that he was a podcaster that Republicans admired, and that he was a Trump supporter. But I didn't know how young he was(31 at the time of his death), or the fact that he had established a multi-million dollar organisation called Turning Point USA starting at the age of 18 with his "Prove Me Wrong" open debate booths. Maybe that lack of knowledge from my end, is a commentary on the echo chambers each of us often find ourselves in, whether you're on the Left or the Right. In any case on Sept 10th morning, I woke to the disturbing news that he had been assassinated in a public setting at Utah University. The personal reports on social media were coming in hard and fast, with normal news outlets struggling to keep up. My friends, in the US that are devout Christians seemed to have a visceral reaction, willing God to pe...

 While watching political videos these days, you're bound to come across a video, usually from a right-wing pundit, saying that colonisation was and continues to be a good thing.  They'll talk about how it brought industry, manufacturing, technology, knowledge and education to peoples that previously lived without it, and how it raised their living standard as a result.  While the above is true, colonisation has always been and continues to be brutal in nature. Let's take the US, New Zealand and Palestine as examples. Colonisation usually starts by a foreign group of people invading a place and laying claim to the land. This was practised by Spain and Portugal as well as the UK in what they called the New World, and they simply claimed the land in the name of their king.  The concept of owning land was often foreign to the natives of the land, so they didn't realise the implications of selling it or giving it away to the colonising nation, but several generations lat...

Watching the political polarisation, especially in the US, I'm amazed by how differently those on the political Right see the world, from the way the political Left sees it. Because of these differences in viewpoints, the country, and to a lesser degree the world, is becoming more and more polarised every day, which is now starting to manifest itself in political violence. The extreme viewpoints on these topics that are proliferated  through social media and media outlets that are getting more brazen with their wording, will often overshadow the more moderate and educated voices on both sides. It's a powder-keg, and it's scary to watch as it gets worse. So how did we get here, where the political environment is supercharged with negative energy, and people are taking a tribal approach, not to solve the problems, but to blame and ostracise the other side? How can we have a functioning society if it's so divided? Well at the root of these differences between left and righ...

I consider myself left of the middle, so align my values closer with Democrats than Republicans. But since at the time of this writing, the ideology between the parties is so polarized, that it seems there isn't a middle remaining to be seen, I'm going to delve into trying to understand the ideology of those on the right, in an effort to better see where they're coming from, and which of their points actually have some validity, and whether their differing views are logical on a completely objective frame of view, or whether they're influenced by other more subjective underlying belief systems. I'm going to try and be as positive here, without considering the very extremes. In that effort, I'd like to start by identifying what I consider the 7 pillars of Republicanism. To be clear I'm not saying that all Republicans subscribe to all of these pillars, simply that the more pillars one identifies with the more likely they'll consider themselves a Republican...