Political Context

The positions on this page are my own political commitments, held as a private individual: not as a researcher, an engineer, or a representative of any employer or institution. They shape where I put my advocacy energy, but they are not premises anywhere else on this site: no citation, method, or conclusion in my research and technical work traces back to this page. The wall runs in the other direction too: my spiritual life is personal and individual, these stances are not derived from it, and no position here asks anyone to share it.

Progressive, Human Flourishing, Planet Flourishing, Freedom of Information and Education, Equality & Freedom, Diversity, Inclusion, Global Mindset.
Key Figures: Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, Beauvoir

Social contract theory (Locke, Rousseau) is the frame I keep coming back to, the same one behind my worldview: we owe each other the conditions to flourish, as well as accountability when systems fail people. I hold that frame with the critique attached, as I do on my worldview page: Charles W. Mills showed how much of the contract tradition was built while excluding most of humanity, and that is a flaw in its construction, not only in its application.* Human Flourishing & Planet Flourishing are the point; parties and policies are just tools toward them. My drives come first (flourishing, reliable information, education), my stances follow from those drives, and any party alignment follows from my stances, never the other way around.

A Leftist/Progressive and a member of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America): while I live in the US, I want to support work that aids people and workers here. I served in the Air National Guard.

'Leftist / Progressive' and the DSA are just shorthand; the beliefs in the lists below are the actual position, and the label follows the beliefs. I keep this separate from my information advocacy on purpose: science, journalism, & education should answer to evidence, not to any politics, mine included.

If you'd prefer a quick reference for my USA Political Stances...

Pro

• - Rights & Equality: Diversity · Choice · Trans rights · Queer Rights · Gender Equality · Gender Affirming Care (developmentally appropriate, per major medical guidance) · Freedom of Religion · Freedom of Expression / Speech · Acknowledging & Accepting Irregular / Diverse Family Structures · Consent · Reparations for indigenous, marginalized individuals/groups, and/or POC
• - Economy & Labor: Taxes · Work / Labor · Unions · Corporate Regulation
• - Health & Wellbeing: Single Payer Health Care · Exercise · Therapy · Mediation · Meditation · Regulation and Medical/Prescription Use of Substances
• - Environment & Infrastructure: Environment / Conservation / Balance with the Planet & Long-Term Care · the existence of climate change / global warming · Mass / Public Transit · Pedestrian Friendly lifestyles/environments
• - Science, Education & Accountability: Education · Science · Art · History · STEAM · Explainability · Peer Review · Revision & Accountability · Arts / Trades / Civil Service on equal footing with STEM
• - Safety & Public Life: Public Safety · Free Spaces · Gun/Firearm Safety & Regulation & Restrictions

(Net Neutrality used to sit in this list; it now lives with my information advocacy, because open pipes are for every political belief.)

Anti

• - Hate & Harm: Hate Speech · Gun Violence · Fascism · Human Trafficking · Sexual Assault · Religious Discrimination · Child Endangerment · Starvation / Food Shortage
• - Environment: Furthering climate change / global warming/pollution
• - Power & Integrity: Billionaires · Misuse of STEM · Misinformation · Plagiarism · Unregulated / Unethical Use of AI

I am pro higher academia and pro higher standards of education, full stop. That said, I want the Arts, the Trades, and civil service on equal footing. The capitalist favoring of STEM over everything else is not good for everyone, and maybe especially not for STEM itself: critical thinking is what makes a scientist worth trusting, and you do not get it by starving the humanities. The access side of this argument, trades, cost, and disability access, lives on my advocacy page.

AI is a tool, and workable policies sit in the middle, admitting what we know and what we do not: we can't un-invent what already exists, we shouldn't let it run wild, and we shouldn't be afraid of it... but we also can't lean on it as if it were finished or trustworthy.

Environment: My biggest frustration is the environmental cost. US data centers used about 4.4% of the country's electricity in 2023 and are projected to reach 6.7 to 12% by 2028 (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the US Department of Energy); worldwide the share was about 1.5% in 2024 and is projected to more than double by 2030 (the International Energy Agency), with cooling & water as real constraints on top of the power draw. That does not sit well next to the rest of my stances, and I will not pretend it does. So the work I actually care about runs on several fronts: more efficient learning and better architectures, honest gains in computational capability (speed, complexity, and where they fit, quantum & better GPUs), and cleaner power, storage, and cooling to run any of it. The tool should help protect the environment, not tax it.

Governance: I want the fight over control to be honest instead of tribal. Governance is a live question, and the December 2025 executive order pushing national AI policy over state laws is one front of it; 'ban it all' and 'let it run free' are both lazy answers. I lean toward regulated, ethical, explainable use (see the Anti list above), with room for well-scoped limits where the risk earns them.

My own work: I build systems for a living: machine learning, retrieval, and generative pipelines, with natural-language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) at the center of most of it, building and tuning models across a range of roles. To me GenAI is first and foremost an extension of NLP and LLMs, which are themselves a branch of machine learning: a tool, one I both use and help build. I want the field regulated because I work in it, not despite that. In my own work that means disclosing AI assistance, judging outputs on methods and evidence, and counting the energy bill above as part of the honest cost of the tool. Engineering already holds itself to high ethical and review standards, and GenAI changes none of that: you are still responsible for what you ship. As a software engineer I find the shift genuinely interesting, because the understanding computer science demands has not changed while the typing itself can be handed to agentic models. To be plain about how I use it: for logic, NLP, and coding tasks, run agentically inside a harness with tests and review, on top of enough computer science and software engineering to judge what comes back. That is not vibe coding, even if both are technically ‘vibing’ with an AI; the difference is the understanding underneath and the verification after. And I do not point it at art or fiction: where AI touches my writing at all, it is disclosed technical drafting under review, never creative voice. Used that way it enables far more than one person could build alone, and it raises labor questions I think deserve careful management: workforce effects, but also workload and what counts as reasonable working hours.

And I care where the training data comes from, and whether the people who made it get compensated. The US Copyright Office is working through exactly this, and the wave of author and artist lawsuits and settlements says it is not abstract. Provenance & consent belong in the same conversation as capability.

I served six years in the Air National Guard, and I still believe in civil service. My pride in the US is philosophy pride, not nationalism: pride in the Enlightenment ideals of 1776 (Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire) held right next to a plain accounting of where we have failed them: systematically, in policy, and as humans. The 1619 Project (The New York Times Magazine) is, to me, the kind of fuller, more systematic accounting that this honesty requires.* Accountability, empathy, reparations, and revision are strengths, not weaknesses; the failure mode is hubris, being unwilling to learn, or staying closed to whatever challenges you. New Deal Democrats understood that; the ACLU keeps the receipts.

The American 'melting pot' reads to me as an argument that we were always meant to be global citizens: science & information are for everyone, and democracy & human flourishing are the same philosophy at different scales.

Ethics, morality, and boundaries now live with my worldview, not my politics.