Thursday, August 25, 2005

IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOUR DEFINITION OF THE WORD 'BULLSHIT' IS. And I thought it was hard to be a law perfesser:
After ranting near incoherence all day, one of the commenters finally expressed himself in a way that gave me a clue what was pissing him off so bad. He read the phrase "a further good has been created" to mean that I thought that it's worth it that the man died, because a higher good had been created, offsetting the death, as a sort of crude utilitarian observation. The phrase "a further good" just means there is a second good thing that has resulted, not that the good made it worth killing an innocent man, as if I would have, if I knew in advance what was happening, authorized shooting the man in order to produce the good! That's quite a bizarre misreading, but I'm spelling it out in case you happen to be reading it that way. Why would I say such a thing? Before posting and ranting based on such a misreading, you ought to stop and consider whether I would say something so absurd. Or do you think making a hasty judgment and acting with hostility is good way to act? Because that would be a tad hypocritical.
IOW: I couldn't have possibly meant what I said because why would I say such a thing?

Like Perfesser Volokh's recent treatise on homosexual recruitment, this reminds us that while any thug can just beat up common sense, it takes a law perfesser to parse it into carpaccio.

Of course, the head of the guild, the Ole Perfesser hisself, should immediately start spending eternity in a T-group for suburban gearheads, preferably in some plutonium-lined tank where their "So, how does oppressive liberal regulation affect your rig, Zeke?" bullshit cannot contaminate the general discourse.

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