Crazy But Able

Over at Boing Boing, the not-that-big-but-still-interesting news is that the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee just voted to reverse their long-standing policy that the laws of Oregon are copyrighted. Of course copyrighting the text of laws is ridiculous, so in the body of the post, Carl Malamud says “This was democracy in action and was great to watch.”

Never forget that the original policy was also “democracy in action”. Nothing about democracy guarantees you good (or even mediocre) laws. Jim Crow is democracy in action. Plessy v. Ferguson is democracy in action. Democracy is, at best, only as good as the people who vote the legislators into power, and frequently, is a lot worse.

You may not like Guantanamo. But many people in this country think it’s a great idea. They are voters too, and their opinion is just as valid as yours, right? I mean, a majority of people in this country think gay marriage is wrong. What if you think it’s right? Who wins? They do.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on the ethically right side of an issue or not; if the majority votes against you you’re screwed. That’s a fundamental problem and is what is MOST worrying about today’s ultra-high partisanship, win at any cost politics. By demonizing our opponents, burning our bridges, and refusing to admit we are wrong, we can weaken or even lose our best defense against the evils of democracy.

I’m not even talking about gross corruption, nepotism. chicanery, gerrymandering and general tomfoolery. You get crap like that in any government.

Meta note: the post title was orginally a typo, but a felicitous one, so I decided to leave it.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.