A Political File on Bizarrity
Preamble: Here are three examples of why I hate politics.
Item 1: recent oddities in the embryonic stem cell issue. Apparently there's an appearance of President Obama undoing his own work of freeing up legal funding and whatnot for it. However, there are claims that President Clinton reinterpreted the offending restriction. Never mind my question, since when is the executive branch an interpreter. The confusion then passes from "Did President Obama read what he was signing?" to "Does anyone truly know what the law is?" Even if our leaders up there have decided what it will mean as far as they're concerned, how are the rest of us supposed to know?
Bridge: The founding fathers made some deal of fuss over the need for citizens to know what their government is doing. Part of it was so that the government couldn't get away with becoming a tyranny. Part of it was simply because laws that aren't known are morally indistinguishable from arbitrary acts. Whatever the purpose, I think it is criminal to steal my valuable time by requiring that I do extensive research simply to know what my government has really done, and between this and the preceding arguments of the founding fathers I'm inclined to believe that the government invalidates its authority when it makes things muddled like this.
Item 2: The creators of our government had certain ideas about certain things making the government invalid and perfectly open to being replaced. They even put in the Constitution a limitation on the definition of treason that was restricted to actually making war on or aiding enemies of the United States, nothing whatsoever about peacefully seeking to replace the government or secede from it. Yet tell someone that secession may be a valid solution to the problem of our government wrecking its own function and authority with muddles like the above and they will, even if they acknowledge you may be right, attempt to remind you that you're talking about treason -- even though it's quite arguable through the way the founding fathers' opinion on government authority got put into the Constitutional definition of treason that it really isn't.
Side note: All those of you Conservative journalists types who would like to smear liberals as traitors need to shut your traps too. I say that as someone sympathetic to Conservatives, by the way.
Nonbridge: And now for something completely different, or rather not different at all but on a totally different level.
Item 3: It is obvious that politics and law are worse when they are muddled and unclear. Logically that can only mean that to make them better we should make them clearer. Yet one of the favorite responses of anyone from any political persuasion to an attempt to go farther in doing so than they are willing to is to say that politics has always involved misleading, lies, yadayada. Never mind the fact that if I simply wanted things as they have been I wouldn't be arguing that they should be some other way in the first place, let alone the fact that it's self-evident that to make politics clearer is to make it better.
Postscript: Did I mention I hate politics?
Item 1: recent oddities in the embryonic stem cell issue. Apparently there's an appearance of President Obama undoing his own work of freeing up legal funding and whatnot for it. However, there are claims that President Clinton reinterpreted the offending restriction. Never mind my question, since when is the executive branch an interpreter. The confusion then passes from "Did President Obama read what he was signing?" to "Does anyone truly know what the law is?" Even if our leaders up there have decided what it will mean as far as they're concerned, how are the rest of us supposed to know?
Bridge: The founding fathers made some deal of fuss over the need for citizens to know what their government is doing. Part of it was so that the government couldn't get away with becoming a tyranny. Part of it was simply because laws that aren't known are morally indistinguishable from arbitrary acts. Whatever the purpose, I think it is criminal to steal my valuable time by requiring that I do extensive research simply to know what my government has really done, and between this and the preceding arguments of the founding fathers I'm inclined to believe that the government invalidates its authority when it makes things muddled like this.
Item 2: The creators of our government had certain ideas about certain things making the government invalid and perfectly open to being replaced. They even put in the Constitution a limitation on the definition of treason that was restricted to actually making war on or aiding enemies of the United States, nothing whatsoever about peacefully seeking to replace the government or secede from it. Yet tell someone that secession may be a valid solution to the problem of our government wrecking its own function and authority with muddles like the above and they will, even if they acknowledge you may be right, attempt to remind you that you're talking about treason -- even though it's quite arguable through the way the founding fathers' opinion on government authority got put into the Constitutional definition of treason that it really isn't.
Side note: All those of you Conservative journalists types who would like to smear liberals as traitors need to shut your traps too. I say that as someone sympathetic to Conservatives, by the way.
Nonbridge: And now for something completely different, or rather not different at all but on a totally different level.
Item 3: It is obvious that politics and law are worse when they are muddled and unclear. Logically that can only mean that to make them better we should make them clearer. Yet one of the favorite responses of anyone from any political persuasion to an attempt to go farther in doing so than they are willing to is to say that politics has always involved misleading, lies, yadayada. Never mind the fact that if I simply wanted things as they have been I wouldn't be arguing that they should be some other way in the first place, let alone the fact that it's self-evident that to make politics clearer is to make it better.
Postscript: Did I mention I hate politics?
Labels: Common Nonsense, Darkness be Gone, Good Grief, In the News, Liberty, The Forgotten Commentators
posted by Shakespeare's Cobbler at 3/16/2009 02:09:00 PM
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