Notes on Politics, Law and Language

My notes on politics, law and language:

1. If the message is jumbled no one cares about the economic plan.  But to have an unjumbled message is not so easy.  To state and receive any message depends on a shared vocabulary, shared cultural values, shared political understandings, differences which are recognized because the underlying foundations of language are shared.  Shared goals and moral values are required for shared foundations of language.  You can play football with goalposts at either end of one stadium, but if the goalposts, the lines and the fields are a thousand miles apart there is no game.  Then there is only politics and law, with players harsh and frustrated with each other and the game itself.
2. Politicized court cases will be re-politicized.  What starts politically ends there, after a detour through the legal system.
3. It only makes sense to pass laws if they’re going to be enforced.
4. Money is political. The value of government money is changing.  The government’s language about money tells you where the value of money is going. 
5. Any party, group or community needs organizing principles.  The principles are expressed in language.  The language has to shape and define the word jumble of subjective expectations of the individuals comprising the intended group, to have any definition at all.
6. Conflicting principles result in larger judgments, which are the conclusion to court cases brought for political purposes.  The larger judgments are about the jumble because they go to identifying the foundations.  The larger judgments serve as definitions for moral language which is necessary and useful for organizing principles.
7. ‘Speaking academic’ is not a matter of truth or falsity; it is only a dialect of English. Rappers, street hippies and New York City real estate developers have the same capacity to observe events, but they will express their opinions differently than Ivy League professors or New York Times’ op-ed columnists.
8. The philosopher Wittgenstein was wrong to call language a game, because language is more important than that. It is through language we hear about Jesus. But Wittgenstein was right in asserting that no one gets to unilaterally make rules about how language is used or what words mean. The language-game is a shared enterprise among people who often vehemently disagree and there are no proof-tables available. Either you understand what someone else is saying or you don’t, but the players don’t get to throw penalty flags in the game.
9. As the philosopher Kant pointed out, if you assert there is no God, it’s impossible to find a purpose in any of this. The squirrels and Blue Jays in my yard look for no higher purpose between them, seek no meaning to their existence, have no shared political understanding, bring no court cases, do not pray and cannot hurl invective.   With no language there are no principles or foundations.
10. I don’t have to remain in a political settlement with anyone who is canceling me.  Canceling me is the act of asserting my language and goalposts are a thousand miles from theirs. But no matter how angry I grow at another human being, he or she is not a squirrel or a Blue Jay. Related through Adam, even if I am screamed at, or scream back, we remain cousins –  if beyond the scope of discussion, within the scope of prayer.
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