Politics and Housekeeping

Politics is a fascinating area of human endeavour; and I’m including Canadian, American and World politics in this. But I’ve avoided commenting on a lot of newsy items. There’s the political issues around the Hurricane and New Orleans (or NOLA as many put it). The Roberts Confirmation hearings are interesting to me as an exercise in representative democracy dealing with the power of judges. There’s plenty to comment on. So why haven’t I brought them up?

In the case of NOLA and the blame-assignment game, I have three reasons for limiting comments:

        1. There’s already plenty of comment from many different perspectives, many, if not most, of whom will be better placed to make intelligent and worthwhile observations.
        2. Much like Pearl Harbour and 9/11, the full story may never be known, and will only likely be mostly known several years after the event after painstaking sifting and cross-examination of the witnesses and documents. Any comment, even to agree with someone else, would be rushing to judgement (or hasty generalization).
        3. My immediate prejudice is to share the blame assignment all around. The idea that some officials and employees at the federal, state and local levels were all guilty of screwing up just suits my view of life. And that all the people in the path of the Hurricane are absolutely blameless seems doubtful to me on general principle. See this for example. Sissies and Yankees indeed!
        
As for the Confirmation hearings and multiple other items that I do follow but don’t comment on in the blog, I’m not sure but that some variation of the above reasons doesn’t apply. Besides the wealth (not to say surplus) of commentary on politics altogether on the internet, the relative ignorance that we operate in (“I only know what I read in the newspapers” Will Rogers--as rank a confession of indifferentism as one could hope for) should really intimidate we mere mortals from rushing to judgement. (Anyone care to diagram that sentence?)

And politics is the religion of our age. It’s getting to the point that we don’t talk politics unless we’re sure in advance that the people we’re talking to are going to agree with us. This can’t be good for democracy. Vigourous but courteous debate on the many issues of the day are essential to the continued well-being of democracy as a form of government. Since no one can be right all the time, we need each other to continue the search for truth and justice. Otherwise the loudest or cleverest simply take power and we no long govern ourselves.

Which really sounds like an argument to me in favour of talking politics on this blog. Well, I given myself something to think about.

On the minor housekeeping note, I’m now trying to post the blog entries off-line from my computer.