Democracy
After yesterday I feel the need to start speaking up to a broader audience than my family and friends: hence this blog. The title of my blog is The 10th Justice, a reference to Judge Learned Hand. Judge Hand sat on the 2nd Circuit Court for almost 50 years and an image of him stands on my desk. I keep him there to remind me of what America is all about. Hand said in his Spirit of Liberty speech that "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not
too sure that it is right...". Right now our liberty is threatened by our own president. The partisan divide is widening. Maybe Judge Hand's neutrality, his careful consideration of the facts of the case can save us. He was never appointed to the Supreme Court because he was not a partisan. In the fourteen presidential election in which he voted, six times he voted for the Republican, six times for the Democrat and twice for the independent. In this age of taking sides we need to get rid of sides and look at each issue with clarity and reason and heart.
Freedom means never being too sure you are right, to slightly paraphrase Judge Hand. Freedom means having the ability to change your mind in the face of new information, to use reason to arrive at the best decisions on each issue. Democracy only works when everyone exercises their freedom to think for themselves. Today our country is facing a challenge of information. Even before the Russian cyber attack on our social media sites and online news, people were overwhelmed with information. Too much information obscures the truth. Look at the Enron scam. Every thing they did was in the public domain, concealed behind two million pages of legal verbiage/garbage. Almost every issue today - abortion, healthcare, guns, legalization of marijuana, sexual identity, etc. - is so jammed with conflicting opinions that the average person has little hope of making the best decision, of exercising their freedom of choice by giving an informed opinion.
Above I alluded to yesterday's news. I was referring to Trump's rants against reporters in which he calls them the enemy of the people. Trump is poisoning-the-well of accurate information. His tirades against the legitimate news agencies is like burning books, censoring speech, and altering historical facts. If his supporters believe him they lose the gift of facts - real facts not alternative facts - that reporters give us. Who are these reporters? They are people like you and I whose job it is to report what they see. They are not the paid participants in a vast deep state conspiracy. They are our neighbors, our family, our friends. But more than that they are Americans of the fourth estate who keep watch over the government as well as crime, weather, fashion, movies and all the things we need to know about to make good decisions in our lives.
Not only does Trump rant against reporters, he encourages violence towards them.He hopes that the threat of physical violence will frighten them into ignoring his bullshit. He continues this behavior AFTER the killing of six reporters in the Annapolis Capital Gazette shooting. In his speech in Columbus on August 1, he railed against CNN and followed it by telling the audience he wanted to keep them safe from CNN, implying CNN was there to hurt them as part of the fictional Clinton/Deep State Machine. Trump is overtly promoting conspiracy theories to provoke his supporters into an anti-fourth estate frenzy. He must be stopped!
Freedom means never being too sure you are right, to slightly paraphrase Judge Hand. Freedom means having the ability to change your mind in the face of new information, to use reason to arrive at the best decisions on each issue. Democracy only works when everyone exercises their freedom to think for themselves. Today our country is facing a challenge of information. Even before the Russian cyber attack on our social media sites and online news, people were overwhelmed with information. Too much information obscures the truth. Look at the Enron scam. Every thing they did was in the public domain, concealed behind two million pages of legal verbiage/garbage. Almost every issue today - abortion, healthcare, guns, legalization of marijuana, sexual identity, etc. - is so jammed with conflicting opinions that the average person has little hope of making the best decision, of exercising their freedom of choice by giving an informed opinion.
Above I alluded to yesterday's news. I was referring to Trump's rants against reporters in which he calls them the enemy of the people. Trump is poisoning-the-well of accurate information. His tirades against the legitimate news agencies is like burning books, censoring speech, and altering historical facts. If his supporters believe him they lose the gift of facts - real facts not alternative facts - that reporters give us. Who are these reporters? They are people like you and I whose job it is to report what they see. They are not the paid participants in a vast deep state conspiracy. They are our neighbors, our family, our friends. But more than that they are Americans of the fourth estate who keep watch over the government as well as crime, weather, fashion, movies and all the things we need to know about to make good decisions in our lives.
Not only does Trump rant against reporters, he encourages violence towards them.He hopes that the threat of physical violence will frighten them into ignoring his bullshit. He continues this behavior AFTER the killing of six reporters in the Annapolis Capital Gazette shooting. In his speech in Columbus on August 1, he railed against CNN and followed it by telling the audience he wanted to keep them safe from CNN, implying CNN was there to hurt them as part of the fictional Clinton/Deep State Machine. Trump is overtly promoting conspiracy theories to provoke his supporters into an anti-fourth estate frenzy. He must be stopped!
Thank you for paraphrasing, freedom means having the ability to change your mind in the face of new information, to use reason to arrive at the best decisions on each issue... I wish that premise had informed all of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's answers in his confirmation hearing. It seems his strict Constitutionalist upbringing does not include "...the ability to change (his) mind in the face of new information..."
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