The Past Is Prologue...

I moved over all the old posts from my old blog so that all of my relatively recent Internet writings are all in one place and have the cool Blogspot.com look. You can find them using the archive links on the right.

It's interesting how much I've changed politically in the past year or so. Looking at some of those older posts, I looked fairly conservative, though if you asked me I'd try to pull off a "centrist" sort of thing, because even back then I was beginning to distrust the Bush Administration.

Those who know me know today know that I'm a pretty liberal guy. Admittedly, I used to be more libertarian, and admittedly I did listen to way, way too much right wing trash talk radio in the 90s. Since I've been at college and become aquainted with liberal philosophy and shit like Abu Ghriab and Issue 1 keep happening, I've become rather solidly liberal. So, there was a shift there where at the beginning I could still trust right-wingers and today I can't stand them. These entries from 2003 and 2004 capture that transition, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to preserve them. That entry from February 2004 was basically the last gasp of whatever remaining trust I had in the right. When Abu Ghriab happen, those last gasps left rather quickly. I guess you could say that if nothing else, the Bush Administration has been an enlightening intellectual experience for me.

In terms of most policy matters, my views on individual issues haven't actually changed (I've been solidly for seperation of church and state for as long as I can remember, etc), but I did have to break through the "liberals will ruin our country" bullshit that I picked up from the claptraps on the radio. On a few things, like Affirmative Action and things like universal healthcare and education, I've become more open minded, but most of my views haven't changed. What changed was my confidence in which side I can trust to run the country.