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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (62580)	4/30/2008 6:48:04 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544347

By the way, that thing about women's studies at the end of your post? Where did that come from? How did the feminists get dragged into this? I'm sorry. I was distracted last night. I thought I had mentioned women's groups as an example in an earlier post. I remember typing it. Must have edited it out or hit a wrong button. Or maybe it was a figment. I was referring back to it, what ever it was, or wasn't. Environmentalists aren't perfect. They can and do make mistakes, and I'm sure that they sometimes oppose things which on balance might be better for their constituents. I'm sure you could say the same thing about almost any political group. I think I can explain it better this morning. IMO, it's not about mistakes but about roles. You mentioned environmental groups doing their jobs. It's not their job to find balance. Their job is to be advocates. They play their role and others play theirs and the net result should be balance. Here's an example--criminal defense attorneys. (My distraction last night was that I was trying to watch Shark on TV.) Their role is to advocate for their clients and they are supposed to do it zealously. But there are other players in the process, not just the defense attorneys. If they all do their jobs, the net result should be balance, in this case manifested by the innocent defendants getting off and the guilty ones going to jail. We want the criminal defense attorneys to to defend zealously but we don't want them to win every case they pursue. We don't want the murderers to get off. Same thing with advocacy groups. We don't want the black advocacy group to win when it goes after someone for racism for saying "niggardly," for example. Zealots want it to win but centrists don't. And we don't want environmental advocacy groups to win every case they pursue, not when their zealotry, which is the manifestation of them doing their job, will result in unbalance. Not unless we, ourselves, are zealots. This discussion started with Dale suggesting the location of the center for energy policy. Advocacy groups, when they are well established, well funded, and inbred true-believers are out there trying to do the equivalent of getting the serial murderer off because that's their job. It's important that they play that role. But if you want them to win everything they pursue, then you're a zealot, not a centrist. Which is OK to be, but not what Dale was defining.