Right: Death Penalty. I was vehemently opposed to it in my youth. Having grown up and seen the monetary cost in not applying it and with such over application of the Prison system I can see why there is people and areas in the US in favour of it.
Funny story: back when Canada was debating abolishing the death penalty, someone in the senate ran some exhaustive calculations and realized that it was actually cheaper to NOT have the death penalty.
Here's the thing: judicial costs are expensive. Death penalty means extra judicial costs. A couple of years ago there was this woman from Florida who had killed her own daughter, and the prosecutors decided to go for the death penalty. Because they went for the death penalty, she got extra lawyers assigned to her from the state. Like...I think her lawyer fees over the fairly lengthy trial ended up costing something crazy like $1 mil - $2 mil (paid for by the state). And that doesn't count extra prosecutor costs, extra judge costs, extra executioner costs that come with a death penalty trial.
By comparison, how much does it cost to keep a prisoner? $20 a day or something? So...life in prison costs about $200,000? Oh, and you don't have to pay that cost upfront (and if Starcraft has taught me anything, it's that you can take big economic advantage of delayed purchases).
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Aaanyway...some of these shifts date back to like...high school, but...
Left: Death Penalty. See above
Left: Drugs/prostitution. Turns out prohibition isn't so effective.
Right: Videogame carding. At first I was like "gosh, carding people for M-rated games sounds fine." Then I realized that there's no laws about carding for R-rated movies, videogames actually have a better rate of carding than movies, and what the US government actually wanted to do was to ursurp the ESRB, because they thought the hot coffee scandal meant that they would be able to do a better job than the ESRB, because how could the ESRB miss something that you required a gameshark to unlock?
Direction: I now want patents to go away and die. Or at least software patents. And I want public domain to actually be relevant again. I don't know if this is left or right, but it's certainly a change of position for me.
Right: freedom of speech in videogames. So like...last I checked videogames are classified as a toy, which means unlike Saturday Night Live, we can't do parodies as free speech. If someone puts an imitation star wars kid in their game, star wars kid can sue (this happened). Sex and nudity pretty much gets shut off as potential topics because the US government doesn't like them, and pressures them into being AO rated (which means most stores will not cary the game).
Right: City Garbage workers are better when they're not unionized.
Hard to classify: Environment. Which is to say, I lean left on environmental issues, but for quite a while they dropped fairly low on my priority list. Not that my position had necessarily changed, but I was not a fan of parties and politicians that listed the environment as the #1 single most important issue (since it was maybe #5 for me). I'm looking at you, green party...Al Gore...Stéphane Dion. Republicans taking the line of "Global Warming is not real", though, kind-of shifts where the right-left line is. Yes, global warming is real you idiots. You could pull the skepical face 10 years ago--I know I looked at the data 10 years ago and felt a lack of rigor and precision, but climate scientists have a lot more damning evidence these days. The real question is whether we should be spending money and resources on fixing global warming, or spending money and resources on fixing this recession. I vote recession as the higher priority, which isn't to say environment won't get any funding, but I don't think it's the highest priority right now.
Left: LGBT issues. So like...fun fact, I used to be mildly homophobic >_>. Not to the point of wanting to deny people rights or anything, but if someone told me they were gay, I would be mildly uncomfortable, and put a little more space between me and them. And there were some rights I maybe wouldn't defend because they seemed a bit of a stretch from my world view at the time (like protecting gender expression in the workplace for everyone, not just people with a very specific note from a doctor/psychologist). I'm basically across the board left now, in terms of what should be protected by discrimination laws, etc.
Oscillating: polygamy. At first I was like "doesn't sound so bad as long as everyone consents." Then I had a conversation that went "well, the reason we outlaw it is that it tends to come with a lot of other human rights violations. Like isolated compounds where they kick out the boys, and make the girls mary their fathers." And that sounded pretty bad, so I was against it. It didn't help that all the examples I'd heard of were very gender imbalanced. And then I had a polyandrous coworker, and she (and her husbands) seemed to be perfectly well-adjusted. So now I'm more for some kind of recognition of it. If her second husband gets sick, she should be able to visit him in the hospital, for instance.
Extremely complex: Feminism. Where to even begin with this one? Even in the time that the DL has known me I went from pretty resolutely second-wave feminism, to pretty solidly third-wave feminism. Is that a...move to the left? Move to the right? Hmm...if anything third wave is almost across the board more libertarian than second wave. But regardless, the subject has felt increasingly complex (and it seems just recently: increasingly heated). Something that bothers me might not bother the woman sitting next to me, and something that bothers her might not bother me. What is worth fighting for, and when does that cross the line into censorship? And how do we deal with modern issues facing women, which are mostly cultural rather than legal--changing laws is easy (and somehow doesn't prevent an overall 30% wage gap). Changing culture requires getting people on your side, and getting people on your side also often means not being too heavy-handed.
And I think there's still a lot to understand. Like...you know the old comic debate, "female superheroes are drawn so unrealistically." "Male heroes are drawn unrealistically too!" "That's different, that's a male power fantasy." All fairly straightforward and well-understood. What about the other way around? Depicting a male to have sex appeal to women is a fairly well-known quantity (and tends to be similarly unappealing to most males; see: Legolas, Robert Pattison...). But I don't feel there is a particularly well-defined female power fantasy. Here's an interesting thing: I and a lot of women I know, enjoyed Bayonetta. And I realize there isn't consensus here; I know there's a small minority of people who take offense to Bayonetta (although not any women I've personally talked to so far, now that I think about it...).
right: unmanned military drones. Don't misinterpret this, I'm still very far left on military in general, and am still in favour of a 98% defence spending cut for the US. But I find myself defending unarmed military drones, which is weird because they seem like a highly unpopular program. From what I can tell, though, they actually put a lot of pressure on Al Quaeda. No, they barely ever killed anyone remotely important, but they provoked a reaction where, for instance, Osama Bin Laden sealed himself in an underground compound with no communication to the outside world. To use a starcraft example, it's like Zerg using mutalisks to keep opponents pinned in their base unable to attack. It doesn't have to deal actual damage to be effective. I'm often critical of US military operations partially because of the low return on investment (was Iraq really worth $700 billion and 1 million lives?) But from what I can tell drones actually have a decent return on investment.
Left: genetically modified food. So...I used to be generally entirely in favour of the technology. I looked at the science, it all seemed pretty reasonable. Now, recently I've been eating gluten free (because my sister went gluten free and reported significant improvements, so I tried going off it as well, and felt much better). Widespread wheat allergies seem to be a relatively new thing--and one theory is that genetically modified wheat is largely to blame. Well that's cool, maybe I'll just get myself some non genetically modified wheat. Anyone know where I can get myself some of that? Oh, all the seeds have been intermating, and now legitimate 1990-grade wheat is actually pretty hard to get, you say? Well bummer. I'm also starting to come around to the opinion that it's silly the US doesn't have GMO stickers like the EU does.
