From: andie nachgeborenen
I will forward you a draft of the paper, I don't seem to have it on e-form at the office.
^^^^ CB: OK
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I think we can see there is a difference between Nazi Germany and antebellum America, despite the lack of universal suffrage and the existence of slavery, America was a sort of democracy and its laws, even its bad ones, received some democratic legitimacy insofar as it was one.
^^^ CB: I'm not sure why we would want to find any legitimacy in the Fugitive Slave Law. That a theory would give the result legitimizing the Fugitive Slave Law merely discredits the theory, rather than legitimizing the FSL.
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I should emphasize I was talking about legal legitimacy -- part of the point is that the FSA were just as morally illegitimate as the NL, and it may well have been right to resist them on moral grounds the way the Underground Railroad did. But the question is whether and under what conditions morallyt illegitimate laws can be legally legitimate. My answer: insofar as they are enacted under more or less democratic conditions.
^^^^^ CB: My paper for Don Regan in philosophy of law was on civil disobedience by a judge against an immoral , racist law. It was based on an essay by Rawls
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Cuba, etc. I'll defend Cuba against US intervention, and I've said here repeatedly tahtw hile I make no apologies for Castro's dictatorship, I also am not sure that I see what alternative the Cubans have that would avoud turning their country into another Central American landfill like Nicaragau after the collapse of the revolution. But this just goes to Carrol's point that some dictatorships are better than others, not that Cuba isn't a dictatorship. It's not a model for us. Which isn't to say that it hasn't got positive and negative lessons, like every country.
^^^^^ CB: Nah, Cuba has democratic mechanisms as democratic as the U.S. , especially the U.S. antebellum. The U.S. model of the core democratic procedures is not the only legitimate one. It is not accurate to describe Cuba as a dictatorship in comparison with the U.S. Flat out: calling Cuba a dictatorship is slander.
Democracy's first principle is popular sovereignty. A country's democratic level must be tested against this principle first.
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Sure, I know that Europen social democracy is built on a foundation of blood and robbery. But my point is that now it's rather nice, whatever its history, and one might support capitalism (if one did, which I don't) in its ESD form rather than its US/Brit form, and that would be much less objectionable. Despite the inroads on ESD in recent decades, and the anti-immigrant sentiment, etc., there is no question that if we had what they had in Holland, we'd think the revolution was over, and we'd won. And we'd be damn near right. A Swedish Communist once told me that Sweden was a harder place to be a Commie than the US -- whereas here the Commies are reviled, hated, and marginalized, there, the workers mostly don't see why they should bothered to go to the trouble of causing social upheavel when they have everything they could want. So the Commies are respected, get elected to parliament, and have no political prosects.
^^^^^^ CB: I wouldn't measure countries' democracy quotient in isolation from the rest of the world and history.
It's like the descendants of a mafia don who have gone legitimate. NOW they are fine people. But their abiliity to be nice now is built on the bones of their ancestors' victims. They owe reparations.
The current high democracy of Holland is a luxury bought with others' suffering in the sense that their prosperity underpins their mass satisfaction. It is not that others shouldn't emulate democratic practices, but that material prosperity is a premise for their high democracy, so yea, G-8, send some wealth to Cuba and Viet Nam as a predicate for more democracy.
Venezuela is going through all the liberal proceduralist hoops, but it wouldn't be able to retain this government without the military defense of Chavez against the rightwing. So the liberal proceduralism is premised on military strength, which is not liberal proceduralism.
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Maybe you are partly right about the reasons for the fall of the USSR. Gorby, whatever his other limittaions, took the nuclear danger deadly seriously.
Jk
^^^^^ CB: Maybe. I didn't mean that as the only or even main reason. I can see it as entering in the general mix- get out from under the nuclear gun.
I don't think Gorby wanted to dissolve the SU or socialism. Chris Doss posted a recent interview with him in which he says he was not the one who dissolved the SU.