Unity before Justice

pls 2 define "justice"

treating ppl justly.

Religious e.g. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams not appointing gay vicar J John to the position of Bishop of Reading and persuading him to accept the lesser position of Canon of St Albans instead. Now if he was interested in justice rather than unity he'd say "Right you fundies, if you want to leave and go off and form a church by yrselves, go ahead, see if I care, give it yr best shot! This is my choice of bishop and I'm sticking with him".

where stet = archbishop and jon williams = gay vicar

but srsly what the fuck are you on about? do you really think it's that simple?

Religious or political types will do *anything* to avoid confronting the possibility that their institutions by their very existence might be putting unity before justice and that this fact might be putting the general populace off having any truck with them.

You don't get involved coz of apathy, coz of ignorance, coz you laziness they go. Fact is, ppl are very interested in politics and religion, many know a lot about it and many are very motivated. It is incidences like the one I mentioned above and the multiple e.g.s from party politics, e.g. all this bollocks about whips and toe-ing the party line and someone being chided for having a brain and thinking for themselves (shurely a good thing) rather than being a nodding donkey and following blindly (shurely a bad thing).

the question I am asking is -- is the unity before justice thing a necessary part of the institutions' existence? Could a political party or religious denomination still exist and *not* do it?

the "do you think it's that simple?" line is a v common one among political hacks who want to shut up the person in the street --- it's like they are going "there, there, this is *far* too complicated for your tiny brain to understand, leave the decision making to us clever indivduals who know what we're doing and put up and shut up".

and of course many ppl meekly respond by doing precisely that, which is what the hacks want. But I think we have a responsibility to stand up to those patronising voices.

a religion or a political party couldn't exist without a certain degree of coherence, no. both enact laws (of different sorts) and you can't finally have pluralism there. pluralism in debate but the end result can't be ambiguous. i don't exactly see how justice comes into it -- but anyway if justice was so simple to detect, what value would there be in 'thinking for yourself'? the only thing would be to make sure the whips knew what justice was, and made sure everyone toed the line. but it isn't so simple.

You can't have "justice" without "unity."

But if you just want to bitch about the Anglicans, I'm with you.

95 Labour MPs put what they considered justice above unity yesterday.

Justice is probably the wrong word here. Morality? Doing the right thing? Whatever.

"pandering"

i kid i kid, but y'know, if you hate militarism, probably time to leave the labour party.

if, by some miracle, every single MP of whatever party woke up this morning and thought to themselves "I can't do this anymore" meaning no that they couldn't continue to be MPs but that they couldn't continue to do the whole party thing, attend the conferences, pay subscriptions, define themselves under a name or (admittedly fading) ideological ideal, put that name on all the publicity when they canvassed, then try telling me that this wouldn't be an improvement. They would still all vote on issues, have a leadership contest to decide who's boss etc. They could just cut the crap.

Yes it's radical, yes it's weird, no it will prolly never ever happen. But if it did happen the world would be a fairer more equitable, more just place.

If you don't agree on the basis of it being impractical, fair enough. But my fear is that ppl will say they don't agree not on a/c of the impracticalities, but simply coz the ppl whose interests it's in to brainwash the public have done such a good job.

Ask the question - which country is the most democratic and you get different sorts of answers. On one level the answer is undoubtably the US, with greater freedom of info and more elected representatives at all levels than anywhere else.

But wait! you might say. The world has great inequality and we haven't even managed to do away with war yet and the US seems to be exacerbating the situation rather than helping to solve it.

And then you come to the second measure of how democratic a country is and that is how much by-in individual men and women have in the decision making process. In this sense Switzerland and Norway trump the US hands down - lots of referenda in the former case, lots of political parties and hence choice (which could be seen as a stepping stone on the road to the sitn I described at the top of the post, albeit by more realistic and dramatic means) in the latter.

"They would still all vote on issues, have a leadership contest to decide who's boss etc."

leadership of what? it would be known that anyone who backed the putative leader would be rewarded once his guy won, so a network of patronage develop and hey-presto you have a party system. it's practically inevitable.

and quite obviously the MPs would form groups based on shared ideological positions and again, they might form into a party. and in order to get votes they'd need a network of individuals outside of parliament. you know what? they could be said to belong to your party too.

the second half of your post is muddled.

this is the standard objection.
there are of course ways around this.
each voter is required to be silent on who they choose to support in the period leading up to the leadership contest and the ballot is a secret ballot, so no-one could be rewarded for their patronage.

leadership of what? the country.

"each voter is required to be silent on who they choose to support in the period leading up to the leadership contest"

genius.

I think this should be debated in a more open forum than (at present) two ppl going back and forth on a message board. I am attempting to do for politics what Michael Albert did for economics with parecon, i.e put forward some ideas for a fairer system that are incomplete and certainly not perfect, but at the same time generate useful debate.

i think you should be required to be silent in case you influence anyone.

not silent all the time of course, but just during the selection part of the process.

nationally? what about during bye-elections?