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Every person who takes the time to examine their life honestly will find that there are ideas which inform their day-to-day activities. You could call them beliefs, personal philosophy, individual choice of governing bullshit, whatever. These are some of mine.

• I believe in liberty. More importantly, I’m a big believer in your liberty as well as mine. A freedom inequitably applied is nothing more, nor less, than tyranny.
• I believe that individuals acting in good faith can settle differences arising from the intersection of our freedoms peacefully.
• I believe that unless it’s 5am on a Saturday morning and you’re going hunting, walking around carrying firearms in public makes you look like a dipshit who never grew out of playing soldiers. I believe this goes double for cops and triple or more for people who aren’t cops or other FRs but are wearing a tactical vest or body armor.
• I believe that the scientific method is an excellent means for investigating and understanding the world and has an excellent record of producing useful results. I do not believe another method of understanding the world with a similar record of results exists. I am open to suggestions, but, please understand that such suggestions will be compared to the scientific method using the scientific method…so you’ll need to have evidence of some sort.
• I also believe that whatever gets you through the day gets you through the day. My beliefs aren’t any better than anyone else’s. They’re just mine.
• I further believe that if whatever gets you through the day isn’t leading you to be a kind, compassionate, and loving person, you should get something different to get you through the day because you not doing that shit is getting pretty old, y’know?
• I believe that encouraging diversity in an organization is both a morally superior and a strategically superior choice. This principle extends to organizations at most scales. It does not extend to bare metal hardware architectures. Looking at you, HP.
• I believe that systemic racism and white privilege are real, are present in society today, and should be a source of shame to any person of conscience. I believe that not confronting my own privilege would be cowardice. It exists, and I have, undoubtedly, benefited from it. I choose to look at the resulting imbalance as a debt to be repayed in a currency of anti-racism.
• I believe that if you shut up and listen to people, they will usually tell you exactly how they feel.
• I believe that if you actually pay attention to that and act accordingly (assuming you’re not an asshole) you wind up with a pretty decent guide to how you should act toward people.
• If that doesn’t make my position clear, just apply the following rule: You may safely assume that whatever group you wish to treat differently than you would treat the rest of the people around you deserve to be treated with the exact same dignity, understanding, empathy, and kindness you would wish to have directed toward yourself. This is not negotiable.
• It’s probably not attainable either. That doesn’t matter. It’s an ideal. I’m an idealist. Ideal with it.
• I believe that interactions between people are frequently more constructive when they are not transactional in nature. Trade has a place. It is not every place.
• I believe that the tendency to grossly underestimate the value of long-run investments in favor of short-run ones is the hallmark of both immaturity and Late Capitalism.
• I believe that free and open source software is the way.
• The management wishes it to be known that some items are considered settled and that he is sufficiently convinced that he knows as much about them as he needs to. Accordingly these subjects will not be given discussion time: fascism (support for specifically–I am as willing as the next fellow to join in a solid round of “let’s talk about why fascism and fascists suck."), “scientific” racism (Bell curve, &c., see previous), intelligent design (I knew more about the scientific proof of the creation of the earth and the flood and the crucial flaws that make evolution a fraud than you do when I was 10 years old. I got out and I can help you get out.), reactionless drives (arguing that they do/can work), MOND theories which don’t explain the bullet cluster observations, “there are only two genders”, EMACS (not today, Satan), climate change denial, men’s rights activism, &c.(note to self, change this to populate the list dynamically as I come to detest new things)