Political issues important to you

You're replying to Plisken, not me. 

I'm an atheist.

I love how you're too scared to debate me.

- An increase in the Catholic Church's power over western nations, as well as internal changes to the Church itself

Gandhi was assassinated by someone just like him. An Indian equivalent of antifa.

I suppose some Indians would prefer remaining a British colony than to admit Nationalism was a good thing.

Ghandi was assinated by someone just like him. An Indian equivalent of antifa.

It's used to divide people and causes oppression on ethnic/religious lines. 

strategic calculation to unify people.

nationalism then was a strategic calculation to unify people. 

No, Gandhi was assassinated by a far-right extremist. The polar opposite of Antifa.

(1) I believe that climate change (i.e., global warming) exists, is human-caused, and is a significant threat. Therefore, I strongly support significant climate change mitigation policies, including a significantly higher gas tax, a tax on carbon emissions on all households and corporations (exempting some low-income and lower-middle class households), significant investment in clean energy, and stronger, enforceable international agreements to attempt to limit global land-sea mean temperature increase at 2.5 degrees Celsius at least.

(3) I'm also very pro-immigration -- in particular, I would make it much easier for skilled immigrants to come into developed countries (at least if I'm assessing this exclusively from the perspective of what policies would maximize benefit to those very developed countries). I think unskilled immigrants are also generally an economic good, but that's something I'm much less sure about (due to effects such as lower trust in communities, economic effects like loose labor markets causing wage depression and unemployment for local workers). 

(5) I support really strong animal welfare legislation. I believe nonhuman animals have much more moral worth than is accorded to them and the sheer amount of suffering inflicted by factory farming is despicable. I support really tough regulations to protect animal welfare and to reduce meat consumption, including ethical warning labels on meat packaging, potentially sin taxes on some forms of meat, and so on, complemented with significant subsidies for consumers of vegetarian/vegan products. This would reduce net suffering and help combat the effects of climate change and environmental destruction caused by meat consumption. Moreover, I support strong legislation to protect wildlife from human encroachment and devastation. 

(6) There are very real threats to democratic structures facing countries like the United States, including voter photo ID laws, limiting the number of voting days, attempting to make voting as hard as possible for low-income and minority individuals, gerrymandering,  and so on. Those are virtually authoritarian threats that need to be countered. Moreover, right-wing populism spreads rhetoric of hatred against minorities and actively blames them for unrelated societal problems and undermines critical democratic institutions such as the judiciary and the press. All of these threats to democracy and democratic values need to be fought in some manner (we could start by electing right-wing populists such as Bolsonaro, Duterte, and Trump out of office; creating independent commissions that control redistricting for elections; etc.). 

On a personal level, though not by the same magnitude on a utilitarian level, I care about social justice issues (e.g., sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement, racist police brutality, racial and gender inequalities in general, affirmative action). However, these don't quite make the cut in terms of sheer importance. 

I also agree with you on the importance of preserving the Federal Reserve's independence, but I don't think it's seriously threatened at the moment.

Your proposed taxes are terrible ideas. I agree that we ultimately need clean energy prices to be lower than fossil fuel prices, but I don't see how that leads you to believe that we should be artificially inflating fossil fuel prices. It's not economically sustainable. Instead, invest in clean energy (through subsidization and further research) to bring its prices down below fossil fuel levels. We should also look more seriously into technologies that can directly scrub greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Immigration may be be economically beneficial overall, but I'm an immigration restrictionist purely for sociological reasons. Immigration is clearly damaging to social cohesion, regardless of whether it's "skilled" or "unskilled." For that reason alone, it needs to be kept to a bare minimum. 

Eww. Identity politics is poison. I will never vote for any politician who buys into it.

Or is Luddism really the future for humanity?

That's fine, the world can revert back to the feudal era when egalitarianism was a fantasy, and only the people in power would have fossil fuels and nice things.

But every time they talk, it's about warming.

Why are they afraid to talk about warming?

However, there's good evidence to suggest that a higher gas tax and carbon taxation (e.g., the $40/ton of CO2 emissions proposal) would be effective in reducing CO2 emissions. I don't see why these wouldn't be "economically sustainable." In fact, as far as I know, the majority of economists think gas tax holidays are bad policy and carbon taxes are good

In fact, the $40/ton proposal was created by conservative economists, who suggested that the tax be made roughly revenue-neutral by returning the proceeds "to the American people on an equal basis via quarterly dividend checks. With a carbon tax of $40 per ton, a family of four would receive about $2,000 in the first year. As the tax rate rose over time to further reduce emissions, so would the dividend payments."

I think immigration is probably damaging to social cohesion. I think the economic benefits of skilled immigration, nonetheless, outweigh those harms. I'm less sure about unskilled immigrants. I also think there are some evidence that racial diversity also has sociological benefits (e.g., contact hypothesis), but I haven't read the research on that idea and don't know enough, so I'll default to agreeing with you on "social cohesion."

Another thing, though, is I'm also unsure, on a moral level, about what level of obligations countries have to noncitizens. People generally agree that development aid is a good thing. Should that principle extend to creating policies for the main reason that they would benefit the immigrants themselves? I agree that countries have a greater obligation to their citizens -- the question, though, is the extent of obligation they have to immigrants and weighing the benefits to immigrants against the possibility of harms to the nations themselves.