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Monday, 6 June, 2005
 
Playing for the Ponies

There were two things I was going to write about earlier, if I could think of more to say about them. In the end I couldn't, but I want to throw them out anyway. Two weeks ago at some point toward the end of the week I was watching some news show and there was a woman on - of a conservative persuasion registering her disapproval of the Senate compromise on judicial nominations. Mind now this is a compromise that is about to put Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the federal bench. They really don't come much more conservative. The left does not appear to be dancing jigs over this, Liberals Rethinking Senate Filibuster Deal. This woman was having none of it, her people can't compromise and won't allow republican legislators to compromise, because they don't have the right. These issues are Gods issues. Certain people need to be placed on the bench and start making certain decisions certain ways. End of discussion. This is brilliant in a low and not particularly illuminating sort of way. When finding yourself in discussion with others, declare your ideas sanctioned by God and your opinions, prejudices and position confirmed by heaven straight out of the barrel. Affirm that all adjustment will be done by others. I saw a new book come through cataloging the other day that made me think about this again, John Rawls' other book: Political Liberalism (Columbia Classics in Philosophy Series) (from publisher supplied information on this b+n page)

...Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines - religious, philosophical, and moral - coexist within the framework of democratic institutions...Rawls therefore asks, how can a stable and just society of free and equal citizens live in concord when deeply divided by these reasonable, but incompatible, doctrines? His answer is based on a redefinition of a "well-ordered society." It is no longer a society united in its basic moral beliefs but in its political conception of justice...

What Rawls is saying is that a modern democracy - non homogenous, pluralistic will not be able to find its ruling consensus simply within the culture, to fall back on it, but must explicitly synthesis it. This accepted notion of fairness, theory of justice, will be a political creation. Its unity and progress as a civilized culture, will be a test of its political sophistication and acumen.

The other thing occurred the next day. I was watching the Preakness, half watching it and trying to read something. One of the announcers - I never looked up to see who she was - kept returning to her main theme, which was that unless Maryland voters "put politics aside" and allow the gaming industry to bring slot machines in all this beautiful horsing around will fall away and the second leg of the triple crown will pull up stakes and move to Pennsylvania. Of course the gaming industry don't want to bring slots just into the racetracks, they want to bring them in all over the state. And not really all over either, they will end up in particular neighborhoods, along with related and allied gaming industry product. They will be in mine, but I do not believe they will be in hers.


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2005 Paul Bushmiller.
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