Eugene Volokh has expressed interesting feelings about bringing pain and death upon his fellow man: In 2002 he at least considered the "slippery slope" argument against torture ("Once torture is legitimized in principle to save thousands, it becomes much easier to urge it to save one important person...") before telling us that "abstract arguments about moral high grounds or stooping to the enemy's level do more to weaken the argument against torture than to strengthen it." But by 2005 he was ready to let his freak flag fly:
…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging…
…I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness.In an update he relented, and thereafter devoted himself to more humanitarian causes, like promoting the death penalty.
And here's Volokh on Obama not wearing a flag pin:
Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument... Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful.The message is clear -- Obama no longer loves America! (Wingnut rejoinder: He never did!) Oh, and yeah, Volokh thinks homosexuals are trying to recruit.
As for his Conspirators: From 2007, here's Ilya Somin discussing "Dating Across Ideological Lines," which sounds like it could be a fun topic until Somin actually outlines his argument -- "I. Why People Overestimate the Undesirability of Cross-Ideological Dating" and "II. Defensible Limits of Political Tolerance in Dating" -- and dishes out passages like
Whether or not such pragmatic considerations are weighty enough to prevent a relationship will vary from case to case. However, it is important to recognize that they should in fact be judged on a case by case basis.There's a guy who never got enough wedgies as a kid. Also, Somin frets about socialism (which he links, via Hugo Chavez, to Hitler): "The spectre that once haunted Europe and the world may have been defeated and discredited. But we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through its heart." If only capitalism hadn't taken a header into the loo!
Then we have David Bernstein, a reliable Bush bagman back in the day ("W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise"), though by the beginning of the Obama era he was telling everyone Bush v. Gore? No one I know agreed with that! And you might get a kick out of his argument with Kevin Drum over whether or not he said the term "Likudnik" had become an anti-Semitic slur (spoiler: he did). Bernstein used to wonder a lot "why Jews tend to despise Republicans," but maybe they were just embarrassed by Republican Jews like Bernstein. (Or by Volokh, who, when Howard Dean said the Democratic Party was comfortable with Jews because Dems believed "there are no bars to heaven for anybody," spent hundreds of words arguing that surely there must be some "traditionalist Christians" in the Party who disagreed. No, baby, we had Andy Cuomo run 'em all out!)
As for Orin Kerr, here's my favorite quote:
Now, I wouldn’t in a million years compare torture and wiretapping with gay rights. Obviously, the subject matter is totally and completely different. But...These guys are often described as libertarians; I think it's the gay and torture things. Anyway, congrats on the new assignment.
UPDATE. In comments, Jon tells me "I know Orin Kerr sorta well (we're both law professors), and notwithstanding that he hangs out with some really questionable folk at VC, Orin is not a nut." Good news! brandonrg asks why I didn't mention Todd Zywicki. OK, here are two old alicublog posts that touch upon his considerable mendacity.
UPDATE 2. Commenter Vatnisse asks: "Isn't [Conspirator Ilya] Somin the guy that got all pissy and defensive after not scoring all that well on Charles Murray's absurd manliness test?" Why, yes, yes he is ("I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions").
Ann Althouse thinks your humble interlocutor is a "hack" because I lack "the grace to say you know, these guys pretty much are libertarians." Who said they weren't? My disrespect extends to them and to libertarianism, which is just a niche brand of conservatism for people with social anxieties anyway. There's no conflict between their beliefs and those of any other advocate of Maximum Freedom for the Rich.
Eugene Volokh has expressed interesting feelings about bringing pain and death upon his fellow man
ReplyDeleteI'm just going to leave this here: http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/07/you-know-how-when-people-explain-jokes-theyre-not-funny-ok-but-this-one-clueless-libertarian-got-on-the-subway-and/
ReplyDeleteI read Dean's comment as "there are no bars [in] heaven for anybody." And was confused since I thought the Dems were the "wet" party.
ReplyDeleteGreat, now the "reasonable centrists" will be mewling, "Even the liberal Washington Post..."
ReplyDeleteMy favorite Volokh moment is when he oh so thoughtfully recanted his previous support for torture and was feted by certain smarmy, gullible liberals. I'll let Bitch PhD describe:
ReplyDelete"anyway, so now he’s changed his mind. Sort of. On the grounds that the opposition would make it very difficult to run a legal system. Not, mind you, on the grounds that it’s fucking disgusting (I know, just like a girl to get all emotional. That’s not a substantive political argument! Next you’ll be saying that it “makes you feel sick,” and we’ll be able to accuse you of being Victorian. Which of course is a substantive political argument, because we say so).
And apparently a number of people seem to think that this is real big of him. This is how low the bar is set? It’s reasonable to debate whether or not torture is ok while tut-tutting the inexcusable level of personal abuse that someone advocating torture gets, praising him for his usual even temper?"
Thoughtful conservatives are great!
His online dating profile.
ReplyDeleteThat announcement underplays, a lot, the degree to which VC was a playground for the ACA-is-unconstitutional-and-we'll-figure-out-why-later movement. Anyway, I guess the Post figures Volokh for Ezra Klein is a good swap, which tells you a lot about the Post.
ReplyDeleteHobbies: Racketball, devising positions on torture that will convince people that I'm not quite a monster, popular literature.
ReplyDeleteThese idiots are seriously morphing from a rigid proto-fascist ideology into a full blown pathology and probably need professional help. Were they all not loved as children? WTF?
ReplyDeletethat press release roy links to should be titled, "wapo finds a way to keep fucking that chicken."
ReplyDeletehere's zizek:
In a way, those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It thrives only if it is sustained by what Hegel called “objective spirit,” the set of unwritten rules that form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.
For example, a clear sign of progress in Western society is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, he would appear so ridiculous as to disqualify himself from any further consideration. And the same should hold for torture.
Wasn't planning on going there anyways, and know that I know my friends won't hanging out there. . .
ReplyDeleteDid Jeff Bezos get a deal on Amazon Prime for having these guys phone it in from planet loony?
ReplyDeleteThis is one of my favorite Volokh posts of all time.
ReplyDeleteHey, this is the very same newspaper that gave Box Turtle Ben Domenech a job, urk, writing, if one can possibly be charitable enough to call it that. After that hire, nothing they do surprises me.
ReplyDeleteOTHER MEDIA OWNERS ALSO LIKED: Ace of Spades. John Yoo. Powerline Blog. 50 Shades of Grey.
ReplyDeleteI can remember a lot of liberal and libertarian bloggers referring to Volokh as one of the reasonable ones. Hell, there are still plenty of libertarians who cite him as a legal scholar - I'm sure Ed Brayton has. Then again, I can also remember many of those same bloggers referring to fucking Trevino as one of the reasonable ones. The best explanation I can come up with is that, during that "with us or against us" period, good faith was so rare on the right that left-of-center bloggers accepted any token offering, no matter how insubstantial. And, in the years since, the relentless political cycle has washed out any memory of what Volokh said in the past.
ReplyDeleteEither that or bloggers are idiots in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Heaven_There_Is_No_Beer
ReplyDeleteWhat in the what? WAPO, why buy the cow when those guys spurt their milk all over for free. Maybe these guys have Amazon-friendly positions on drones, taxation, and streaming video?
ReplyDeleteWell, I always feel a little sorry for the Post at times like this. Every time they try to buy themselves a little popularity with the right-wing machine or get their share of that conservative grifter cash gusher, they look like fools.
ReplyDelete"Sorry being a titled aristocrat isn't working so well for you any more, Madame Post. But someone should tell you the whoring thing isn't making your situation any better..."
Christ on a cracker, I am so fucking sick of rank authoritarians who somehow manage to gull the media into labeling them as libertarians. You'd think they'd have learned over the last century and a half that the people who scream the loudest about "liberty" are the ones most likely to crush it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Richard Cohen exercised his apparently limitless control there to force the paper to install another Lightning Rod of Cluelessly Offensive.
ReplyDeleteOften purchased with this item:
ReplyDeleteColossal Offshore Tax Shelters For Dummies
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Plutocrats
The Care and Feeding of Useful Idiots
Destroy Democracy in Thirty Days!
Holy crap.
ReplyDelete1: So we hired Dave Weigel and then it turned out he had ideas about being an actual reporter of the sort that only a tenure at Slate can train out of you, and also he did not think Matt Drudge was a great guy.
ReplyDelete2: Right, that blew up in our faces. So then we hired that Jennifer Rubin character. She always seemed like a straight-up psychopath with endless war written all over her. What the hell went wrong?
1: Well, it turned out that beyond bathing in the blood of Arabs, she was pretty ideologically rootless and totally willing to latch onto any politician who would flatter her.
2: So that means...
1: Yep, Romney. Can imagine anything worse if you want to appeal to conservatives that a pundit who constantly fellates the Republican candidate for President.
2: Definitely a mistake. But you're sure these Volokh guys will work out?
1: Well, one of them straight up said it would be immoral to spend taxes to prevent a killer asteroid from slamming into the planet. So y'know...
2: Probably too lefty, but worth a shot?
1: You know it. *straps bulletproof vest tighter, takes another slug of whiskey*
"In an update he relented..."
ReplyDeleteOnly because someone convinced him that punishments featuring drawing and quartering, flogging, flaying, etc., might be considered questionable modes of jurisprudence and arouse objections among others. (Not HIM, mind you.) Which would make it hard to find juries willing to impose them and--alas--run up the expense of having a judicial system.
IOW, he came out against officially-imposed brutality because it was *impractical.* Its possibly corrupting effects on the citizenry--if sadism is sanctioned by the state, how bad can it be?--are lost on him.
Of course, you could argue for the corrupting effects of still having a death penalty, by pointing to Volokh's position and argument as an example. Isn't it ironic? Dontcha think?
It's like someone rushed into Fred Hiatt's office and said they were in terrible danger of having part of their paper - Ezra Klein's WONKBLOG - become generally recognized as Not Being Shit, which would tar the brand image ("Completely shit, all the time") that the WaPo has been meticulously building lo these last three-plus decades.
ReplyDeleteLike the skilled executive he is, Hiatt moved fast and immediately sent Klein packing. But that wasn't enough - he saw that up the coast the NYT's Kellers had taken turns kicking a terminal cancer patient around. How could he top that? His main competitor had stolen a march on him while he was dealing with that unseemly outbreak of actual non-shit journalism. He'd need reinforcements. Men who could write the most sociopathic shit imaginable. Krauthammer was good, but he was just one guy. He needed a team, experienced, battle-hardened, able to shit up a website around the clock if breaking news necessitated it. The solution was obvious.
The Volokh Conspiracy.
That's Sasha Volokh -- Eugene's brother.
ReplyDelete"I. Why People Overestimate the Undesirability of Cross-Ideological Dating" and "II. Defensible Limits of Political Tolerance in Dating"
ReplyDeleteIII. When Can We Have Sex, Communist Bitch?
IV. Is it Now?
V. Why Marxists Don't Return Phone Calls and Texts
VI. Stop Shoving Your Opposition to Invasive Ultrasound Wands Down My Throat
VII. How About Now?
Long-time reader, very occasional commenter: I know Orin Kerr sorta well (we're both law professors), and notwithstanding that he hangs out with some really questionable folk at VC, Orin is not a nut. Notwithstanding the pull quote, the linked blog post is not nutty. Orin's a conservative, so I mostly don't agree with him. But if I had a question about how the courts have interpreted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the Stored Communications Act, say, there are only a few people in the country to whom I'd give comparable trust.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Orin Kerr is nearly as bugfuck as his cobloggers, but at the same time I long ago lost the ability to be shocked that a law professor was both knowledgeable and cogent in his subject matter and yet politically a straight up wackjob.
ReplyDeleteSuddenly the roll over of wapo from kaplan to bexos makes sense. Cant wait till they are bought out by kfc. The cross marketing potential is yummy.
ReplyDeleteHell, Adler is still beating that horse. He is responsible for an argument recently laughed out of court where he claims the plain reading of the ACA prohibits money going to subsidize people.
ReplyDeleteOrin is definitely different from the others.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, at Volokh, they do allow a pretty vigorous comment section.
As to sharculese's main point, I suppose it's possible Glenn Reynolds knows something about the law.....but that's hard to believe
Aw, and Bernstein had just banned me from commenting there last week.
ReplyDeleteI would like to take this opportunity to vigorously assert that my comment was most definitely meant to apply to neither Reynolds nor Alehouse Bench.
ReplyDeleteHow could you leave out paid hack Zywicki?!
ReplyDeletehe usually does a good job of calling out bullshit in guest posts. Just did it with Sandefur, and his takedown of Groseclose was excellent.
ReplyDeleteUsually, but Bernstein banned me last week and wouldn't offer an explanation.
ReplyDeleteThey really do have some great "this has to be a parody of libertarianism, right?" posts now and then, but never as good as mises.
ReplyDeleteVolokh got very pissy when someone suggested Rudy Giuliani was "milking" the 9/11 thing in 2007 (I know, right?)
ReplyDeleteLong after the image of Li'l Dubbie yelping into a bullhorn ceased to be America's live-action 9-11 superhero icon, they still think Rude Rudy single-handedly rescued the Nation from catastrophe...and yet I still have to deal with piglets that declare it's wrong to even mention Sandy Hook in a debate about gun control.
I think the series of posts by Groseclose, the strong response from Orin Kerr and the complete dismantling of Groseclose's hackery in the comments deserves a call-out.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.volokh.com/author/timothygroseclose/
as does the dismantling of Maggie Gallagher
http://www.volokh.com/author/maggiegallagher/
holy shit 2005 was 9 years ago :(
What a joke that these guys represent anything like the "top legal minds in the country."
ReplyDeleteThe whole site is a complete fraud. They are a bunch of assholes who worry day and night that a crumb might fall off the table and go to an undeserving poor person, or, worse yet, a, poor, Black person.
Special pleading for the rich, fellating corporate scumbags, Israel uber alles, anti Europe on general principles, anti privacy (go figure that one!), fighting over who deserves the "credit" for losing the Obamacare case, anti communist hysteria and absurdity....these are the various sub specialties of the Conspirators.
Personally, I got kicked off the board because, in the words of supposedly good guy Orin Kerr, I was not "generous" enough in my comments. Not that anything I said was factually incorrect or an unfair or ad hominem attack. No, I was not "generous" enough to dickhead Bernstein when he attacked the BDS movement with respect to Israel in what would have been a substance free post except that it did feature some guilt by association. You see, I pointed out the use of guilt by association and the lack of anything else. How ungenerous of me!
So called libertarians, who are so selfish as to begrudge society one penny of their money in taxes which cannot be justified under Ayn Rand's crackpot theories, they turn around and demand not just fairness and accuracy but "generosity" from mere commenters on their site.! And by generosity it was clear that what was actually meant was sycophancy. Yet another right wing circle jerk, and desperate to remain as such. With a veneer of free thought on a few, carefully chosen and cabined issues. A nice microcosm of the so called libertarian movement in general.
They will fit in fine with Rubin and Krauthammer and the rest of the pigs at what used to be the Washington Post.
"…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call
ReplyDeleteit a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a
slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging… "
I made the mistake of clicking the link. Just imagine me kicking myself for getting out of the boat. Jeez, what a tool.
Hes one of the few bloggers i know who actually begins some essays with. "P.s. I am not a crank."
ReplyDeleteWho is this HTML Mencken (that you linked to) and is he/she still in the demolition business? I want with all my heart to point him/her to Kleiman's new-ish comrade-in-smarm Humphreys, and watch with glee as the dust and smoke rise majestically to the heavens. Those who have been able to withstand the stench know Humphreys as Smarm Master, more peevish, more glutinous, more offensive, and sadly more prolific than Smarm Novitiate (by comparison) Kleiman.
ReplyDeleteHTML Mencken briefly came out of retirement last year, but it didn't seem to take. :(
ReplyDeleteYou can find HTML Mencken in the archives of Sadly, No! just use Da google... I miss him/her too, a lot.
ReplyDeleteIf you think about it for a minute it's actually kind of impressive how quickly the standing of Maggie Gallagher imploded. In the early spring of 2012 Salon feted her, and not without reason, as marriage equality's most formidable foe, and yet less than a year later her cause was basically in shambles, and she has yet to recover.
ReplyDeleteThat said, critiquing Maggie Gallagher is like shooting fish in a barrel and also why the fuck was Volokh giving her a platform in the first place.
Only because someone convinced him that punishments featuring drawing and quartering, flogging, flaying, etc., might be considered questionable modes of jurisprudence and arouse Team
ReplyDeleteCanadaMarc-Edouard Vlasic Jersey among others. These idiots are seriously morphing from a rigid proto-fascist ideology into a full blown pathology and probably need professional help.there are only a few people in the country to whom I'd give comparable trust.
Isn't Somin the guy that got all pissy and defensive after not scoring all that well on Charles Murray's absurd manliness test?
ReplyDeleteNow, I wouldn’t in a million years compare torture and wiretapping with gay rights.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I just realized that this phrase is very much like "I'm not a racist, but..." in that whenever somebody says "I would never compare X with Y" they mean "I am totally comparing X and Y".
Not that X and Y aren't often comparable;
I'm not really sure Yoo and Holder are doing comparable things here, but I do kind of think Kerr's argument is coherent enough to deserve a more coherent reply than just sticking out your tongue and going "Thbbbbtt!"
Republicans and Jews, Part II: I have received many e-mails purporting to explain why Jews tend to despise Republicans.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like the very long title of a very ill-advised Hollywood sequel.
That Jeff Bezos wants to sink his money into something evil and self-destructive, but doesn't have the somatic fortitude for a hard drug addiction?
ReplyDeleteConspicuously missing from that list is "Safe words".
ReplyDeleteI want to take this comment for a moonlight stroll, but I know it will only break my heart.
ReplyDeleteAnother in the long line of fantastic left-leaning blogs that have gone dark. I miss HTML--and Quiddity, and the Editors, and Gilliard and so many others.
ReplyDeleteThere's a guy who never got enough wedgies as a kid
ReplyDeleteI'm totally against wedgies. Having said that, a few more towel-snaps might not have been amiss...
I'm just going to leave this here.
ReplyDeleteOne of them absolutely did that and thers absolutely documented it but I can't figure out how to find it in his archives right now.
ReplyDeleteBitch, PhD. posts occasionally in Crooked Timber using her real-life name, Tedra Osell.
ReplyDeleteDid not know that. Thanks.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5wVZwdHmRY
ReplyDeleteI think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the
ReplyDeleteEarth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an
illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective
Protecting people's right to fucking live on a planet not rendered into a thousand molten chunks of rock is immoral? If I were a judge, and her family came before me for a writ of involuntary commitment to a mental health facility, I'd sign off on it on the basis of this statement.
Oh ghod yes, The Editors! And actually, Gavin at Sadly, No! was terrific too. I still treasure his post from 2009 on whining conservatives:
ReplyDelete"Aha, so they’re the victims of a Time Warner conspiracy to silence [trips over lamp cord] — agh, liberal lamp-trip unfairness. [grabs shelf, chinaware falls] Shit, dish-crashing liberal victimizer scheme-plot, with the [cat dashes under feet] gaaah, [falls through glass coffee table] fnaaagh, Soros-funded sneak-assault on [shelf falls on head] nuh! [cat runs across wreckage pursued by dog] Vince Foster [cat and dog knock over brass pole lamp, clatter out of pitch-dark room; phone rings]"
Don't be fooled, Sasha is Eugene's brother, not sister.
ReplyDeleteUnsurprisingly, until the addition of Nita Farahany a few months ago, the entire Volokh roster (all 20+ of them) were men. Prior to that, to their credit, they at least had two men with names that *could* belong to women (Sasha and Randy), which must be an accomplishment when you're that retrograde.
Maybe had the WaPo found a way to make money slavishily serving the lickspittle left, they wouldn't have been bought by somebody who has a different idea about how to make money.... Naah!
ReplyDeleteI welcomed the crew to the WaPo meself.
ReplyDeletehttp://s30.postimg.org/8e8qlszap/In_Brazil_you_can_always_find_the_Amazon_in_A.jpg
~
Just seeing if I am banned yet.
ReplyDeleteHeaven for the climate, Hell for the society.
ReplyDelete1.) A feeder site of dense, poorly-written, legalistic libertarian arguments
ReplyDelete2.) ?
3.) Profit!
Bernstein is a cock. He banned me once too, so I deleted my profile and then re-created it and -- boom -- I was back in business
ReplyDeleteAs I suspected....I can't decide, as a former law student, if Reynolds or Althouse would be the worse professor. I typically think Reynolds, because as we see he can't even accept comments. At least Ann pretends to listen
ReplyDeleteDoes the Wall Street Journal make money?
ReplyDeleteThe Wall Street Journal, which was a shrinking business when Murdoch bought it, with its profit margins whittled to almost nothing, is now a highly-proficient, well-executed information product – no more, no less.
And oh, yes: with significant new investment, it loses more money than it ever did.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/rupert-murdoch-wall-street-journal
No. So what was your point?
~
Oh-ren Care? These names are very foreign. And they're not even French.
ReplyDelete"the people who scream the loudest about "liberty" are the ones most likely to crush it."
ReplyDeleteCandidate Obama. QED
"Fred Hiatt's halfway house for necon unemployables"
ReplyDelete--Chas. Pierce, regarding the writings of Michael Gerson, "former word-'ho for the worst president ever
You are 100% correct. Bezos knows nothing about business and we don't need to wait for results to pronounce this move a failure because one time he said that somebody who had tortured and murdered 20 children is not that sympathetic a person.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what non-selective outrage would look like. A locked ward in a nuthouse, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteidgi
ReplyDeleteNRO, y'mean?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that is why I am not really a libertarian anymore. Obviously, if there were an asteroid headed for us, the govt would be justified to tax to prevent it, even if there best shot only had a 1% chance of working. I only keep this name because it sends shivers down the spine of European lefties, apparently. They seem to think of libertarians as skinhead nazis who wear nicer clothes.
ReplyDeleteWe'll know more when Bezos replaces the funnies with a "L'il Minarchist" section. Bold, yes, but fortune favors etc.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I am skeptical not because "one time he said" etc. -- really, how petty that would be -- but because their writing repels the attention of non-academics, and of anyone else who doesn't enjoy crap prose.
All for cruelty for thought crime. Not so much for rape and murder of children.
ReplyDelete"They seem to think of libertarians as skinhead nazis who wear nicer clothes."
ReplyDeleteWhereas in America we know them to be conservatives who would rather be regarded with curiosity than with contempt.
Wow, you sure gave the straw bogeyman living rent free in your head what for!
ReplyDelete1) You suggested that the WaPo is unprofitable because it slavishly served the left. How promoting wars and Social Security cuts slavishly serves the left is a question I have.
ReplyDelete2) Now you've diverted your argument: The purpose of the paper is to promote policies that favor rich people. That's my argument, so I agree. But why should any others of us support further income transfers to the wealthy from the rest of us?
~
Say, moptop, I know jokes don't exist in the libertarian universe (who needs them, when you can have logic puzzles?) but maybe do some outside reading sometime.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that is another reason I am not one anymore. I am a conservative who is socially liberal. One does not have to be a libertarian to be desire a live and let live environment. God knows we conservatives know a little something about being cast as the "other" in the psychodramas of more than a few. I live in Vermont. I get to see this first hand. Yet even without the political approval of my liberal friends, I am pretty happy all-in-all. Go figure.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if you could show that, once the impending asteroid impact became known, all hell would break loose and lots of rights be violated by looters et al. during the ensuing anarchy, I could justify the taxation as a way of preventing those rights violations; but this wouldn’t apply if, say, the asteroid impact were unknown to the public.
ReplyDeleteY'see? The only reason tax money should be spent on asteroid deflection is to keep the et al. from stealing Sasha's stuff before said stuff is vaporized (along with Sasha) in the asteroid impact.
I can roll with that: The reason that it's okay to use tax money to give the et al. health care under ACA is that they otherwise die very expensively in ERs across the nation of preventable illnesses but not before they transmit said illnesses to Sasha, making it impossible for him to enjoy his stuff and exercise his right to acquire more stuff.
We will call this the Sasha-Centric Model of World Wellness and always carefully point out how maintaining the model protects Sasha's stuff from the et al. Onward!
Yeah, because we all know that Fox News has been such a failure while MSNBC plays in every living room in the country.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously. I can wait and see on this. I am not predicting success for the WaPo. But the failure was untenable to anyone besides somebody who could afford it as a hobby. By refusing to "let the readership win" and stick to the Democrat Party line, the WaPo became dispensible. Liberal Opinion can be found anywhere in the mainstream media. What made the WaPo special? Nothing anymore.
Well it looks like the new WaPo powered comments section, which was the interesting part of Volokh, is already swamped with the usual type of idiots who comment on news websites.
ReplyDelete"Do some reading" Wow. That is an original one. I have read Atlas Shrugs...
ReplyDeleteBut maybe he was joking too? Making a suggestion that a few wedgies weren't out of place in this case? Or do you have quote somewhere that shows he had a plan to institute torture before execution somewhere?
I would never compare this comment to gay rights, but I totally support both of them.
ReplyDeleteYou don't need to support it. I never said you did. Yes I did change my argument a little to make my position more clear on this. If the WaPo is already a right wing rag, why do you care what happens to it?
ReplyDeleteWell, you're certainly having fun here
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure that Salon "feted" her with an article that basically made the point that she was opposed to same-sex marriage--or, really, any relationship option besides one man, one woman, and kids in wedlock only--because she got knocked up in college. It portrayed her as a sad woman who wanted other people to be miserable because she couldn't process her own baggage. Marriage equality's most formidable foe was Ken Mehlman, who helped get anti-equality amendments passed in a majority of the states (in order to get GWB re-elected) before deciding that he'd milked that for all it was worth, came out, and tried to make up for it with a few fundraisers when the wind changed direction.
ReplyDeleteThey aren't a right-wing rag. They are a DC Villager rag, which means a lot of technocratic, generally centrist-to-slightly-left, often-Broderist editorials.
ReplyDeleteI am, I kind of like it here. Not the drooling autotrophic level of commenting I am used to seeing from the left. And I haven't been banned yet,, which is surprising to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping for a conglomerate with Chik-Fil-A, Duck Commander, Paula Deen's House-O-Butter, and so forth, all headquartered in a remote rural compound with watchtowers and constant perimeter patrols... not realizing that the locals have quietly destroyed the roads and bridges leading to it.
ReplyDeleteWell, there's me, poster child for autotrophic liberaltiasis. Though I don't post that much, really. Too weary from drooling into the envelopes for my fan mail to Nancy Pelosi.
ReplyDeleteLOL
ReplyDeleteI'm uprating for the wonderful memories. Sadly, No! was one of the great treasures of earlier years. Even just the refrain still makes me laugh.
ReplyDeleteI'd remind you who are the hacks but I'm getting the sense that you might not have sufficient long or short term memory, or hell, the reasoning skills, to retain the information.
ReplyDeleteEven better--they set the thing up to overnight Butter Drenched Duck Fillet Bottles of Wine with Lawn Jockey Negro Holders by USPS and then discover that rural delivery has been ended by act of Republican Congress.
ReplyDeleteBarnett's pre-decision victory lap at VC was hilarious in retrospect.
ReplyDeleteThat is such a fascinating piece. I don't mean to insult any non-neurotypical persons in the audience but it reads like something my high functioning Autism spectrum cousin would have written when he was young and stupid (not now that he's older and has kids and a steady job, btw). "Rights violations" is clearly a totemic word which can't be understood or analyzed or expanded to include something as simple as "being alive" as its first principle. So: you could tax people to preserve their absolute right to own things but you couldn't tax them to preserve their existence because, obviously, duh, living is not a right. QED.
ReplyDeleteWhut?
ReplyDeleteIts like a reverse pyramid scheme--each lousy writer and thinker you add to the bottom of the pile makes your own columns look less stupid.
ReplyDeleteT'is here in all its 37 points on the 0-99 Murray point scale glory:
ReplyDeleteFor example, I not only have “attended” a Rotary Club meeting, but actually gave a speech at one when I was 17. Maybe I should get extra credit for the latter. I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions.
Wow, you sure told him! Now, hush.
ReplyDeleteI say with the founders that an eroto mania for sadistic voyeurism in defense of the little chwildren is no vice!
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm just reading less "lefty" blogs these days, but it's somewhat comforting to note that Althouse has kind of fallen off the radar these days, although it seems that she's still obsessed with other women's bodies, and not in the good way.
ReplyDeleteNon-Reality Outrage?
ReplyDeleteThe blog post that Volokh published by MG on whether or not marriage requires procreation in a "marriage minded society" was just jaw droppingly illogical. She basically said "I don't want to know anything at all about the repressive history of marriage in societies that really take heterosexual procreation as foundational because that would make me sound ridiculous--don't lecture me about societies in which married couples are forcibly separated because one is infertile, or people are put on trial or tortured to prove their fertility, because thats not what I'm talking about when I talk about the importance of procreation to marriage as an institution." Then she says that although she is totally opposed to sex and procreation outside of wedlock she is not advocating a system where illegitimate children would be repatriated to married couples. Yes, she said "repatriated" like they were illegal aliens from the land of ideal married parents.
ReplyDeleteFewer. You are reading fewer, not less.
ReplyDeleteOTOH if their goal was to expose just how stupid and banal the whole anti-SSM argument really was (Dale Carpenter has been blogging about pro-SSM stuff there for a while), they did an excellent job.
ReplyDeleteQ.E.D.
ReplyDeleteI reed alot
ReplyDeleteMaybe I said this at the time but the entire idea of the scoring sheet read like some weird, David Lodge style parody of academic one upmanship--his game of Humiliation (I think that is what it was called) comes to mind in which you gain points by confessing to not having read important books in your field.
ReplyDeleteIf you scored really high on the Murray scale you'd be so déclassé and socially outre that you wouldn't be in a position to affect the larger political climate or debate in the first place. But presumably Murray thinks you take it merely as instructional, like "ten weird traveller's tips for going into the heart of darkest whitelandia." "Test your knowledge of white people's culture before you go!"
I am torturous but not narrow.
ReplyDeleteErm, the ACA was unconstitutional based on the merits it was sold to the public. Really. It's in the decision.
ReplyDeleteYou've discerned it was unconstitutional based on parts of the decision that it was constitutional?
I am not for cruelty by the state "for the rape and murder of children." Is that somehow controversial just because Volokh and the other sadists like to let their freak flag fly? Participating in the torture of another person makes you a torturer, celebrating it makes you a celebrator of torture. Surely you grasp that every torturer and murderer in human history, whether they work as the public hangman or are John Wayne Gacy, can find an excuse for why in this case its a noble pursuit. The opinions of someone who rejoices in the torture of another person and publicly claims the mantle of justice while doing so are absolutely of difference from those of the meanest sadist who derives pleasure from the death of his victims.
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna hate myself in the morning, but I had to unhush you for this...
ReplyDeleteslavishily serving the lickspittle left
If they're "slavishily serving", then *they* are the lickspittles. Yeesh.
Wasn't for adverbs & adjectives, you'd be sitting in front of that keyboard, fingers twitching, mind racing, mutely panick-stricken...
<3
ReplyDeleteHydrate!
ReplyDeleteI haven't been able to ban you because a) we don't ban people just for being incredibly stupid, we prefer to point and mock. And b) the goal posts you were shifting were whizzing past my head so fast I had to duck into this slit trench.
ReplyDeleteIf you actually knew anything about business you'd know that the WAshignton Post has been a loss leader, in a strictly financial sense, for the Kaplan For Profit College and Test Corps Biz for years. Now they've been sold to Bezos. Whether he can turn them into a serious profit center is doubtful not because he's not a good businessman but because they haven't been profitable in a concrete sense for years.
This has nothing to do with liberal/not liberal it simply has to do with the economics of newspapers. No one would even bother to argue your embedded point that to criticize the WaPo is to (oh, the lese majeste of it!) criticize Bezos as a businessman. Businessmen have been buying newspapers as vanity projects, loss leaders, and influence peddling vehicles since they stopped chiseling them out of rock and started in with the moveable type.
"Anarchist with a suit and bank account" (originally "Anarchist in clean clothes") is how I've seen 'em for decades now.
ReplyDeleteThe question answers itself--if the WaPo is an influence peddling scandal sheet meant to push right wing propaganda into every home in Washington, DC then all right thinking non-right wingers should be concerned. ITs not like the poisonous miasma rising from a right wing propaganda spill doesn't affect all of us. Like Freedumb Corp in West Virginia the toxins fall on the just and unjust alike.
ReplyDeleteI'm going with Morlock.
ReplyDelete99 score on the murray scale, pictured below.
ReplyDeleteI've got to go with Tguerrant on this. Non selective outrage is an NRO cruise that has been invaded by Evangelicals. The outrage-off would be so voluminous, vociferous, and generalized that the entire boatload would die of ruptured spleens.
ReplyDeleteReally? Conservatives "know a little something about being cast as the other in the psychodramas of more than a few?" Why don't you self deport to Iowa or Ohio or Idaho and find out what its like to be cast in a real psychodrama by Americas premiere conservative psychotics? What's that? YOu can't stand them either?
ReplyDeleteI'd have to go back and read it again to figure out where I was coming from, but I call having to look back at it for work in early 2013 and just being shocked at how far from the mark some of their predictions about the power of the anti-marriage equality folks ended up being in the last election cycle.
ReplyDeleteBut you're absolutely correct that it did paint her personally as a very sad, angry person.
I never knew President Obama was a QED as well as a JD. Do you happen to know where he took his degree?
ReplyDeleteAre you aware that you're supposed to place some vague attempt at a logical argument before the letters 'QED'? Just FYI.
ReplyDeleteAnd there goes the tendentia-meter. TTYL.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it makes sense to pass over Jim Lingren's effusions in silence, since he's dead and no longer making an ass of himself. But it's pretty hard to take seriously any site that gives posting privileges to a Lingren.
ReplyDeleteI don't like it = unconstitutional
ReplyDeleteBovine University.
ReplyDeleteThat was his C.U.D.
ReplyDeleteAh-ha! The reason he hasn't published his college records is revealed! His degree in queer economics comes from Plekhanov. He roomed with Vladimir Bogdanov and went by the name of Barry Sotlinsky.
ReplyDeleteI read that as 'erotic manga' at first and was only slightly shocked that VC had taken a turn for the even more bizarre
ReplyDeleteWell, Fred Hiatt is the hack. Volokh and company are a weird mixture of super angry and super pretentious, but I think they're most sincere in their pretension.
ReplyDeleteHmmm...it turns out Lingren isn't dead. So he's fair game.
ReplyDeleteIts QED if U DIY.
ReplyDeleteThat is one way of interpreting this. Another way would be that the left is lickspittle subservient to Obama, and the WaPo is lickspittle to the left.
ReplyDeleteAll joking aside there was an enormous online kerfuffle a few years ago over whether you could, or could not, attribute actual emotional motivations like pleasure to specific right wing people's decisions to condemn others to death by starvation, torture, war, or ending the ACA. I can't remember who said what to whom but it was considered a shocking breach of etiquette to observe that a person who champions policies which will result in death and suffering for a large and defined group of people does it because he either doesn't care or actively seeks the death and suffering of those people. I.e. "he likes it" since people generally do what they like to do and advocate for outcomes of which they approve. So, yes, if someone tells you that he enjoys seeing and even just thinking about the torture of other people--believe him. He enjoys it.
ReplyDeleteYou are kind of funny. I have to say. I happen to like Vermont. I can get along with the natives just fine. I take sort of an anthropological approach.
ReplyDeleteRight back at'cha.
ReplyDeleteStart with, say, the House Un-American Activities Committee (and young Richard Milhous Nixon) about 1950 and go from there.
ReplyDeleteOh, I get it, apparently not calling for the twice elected President's lynching everyday is being "lickspittle to Obama."
ReplyDeleteI am having fun, but at the bottom, we just don't disagree that much. It really comes down to whose ox is getting gored. This time, it's the liberal ox.
ReplyDelete--if the WaPo is an influence peddling scandal sheet meant to push right wing propaganda into every home in Washington, DC
ReplyDeleteYou misspelled Washington Times, there.
"lynching"? Really? Now all his opponents are '20s era southern racists? And you say I am not careful with language.
ReplyDeleteI know, I know, you were using hyperbole for effect. An indulgence to don't allow the other side.
The implication that Bezos knows anything about making money is preety funny, since Amazon has never turned a profit. He is --apparently -- an expert at getting rich people to give him money, though
ReplyDeleteNo one's ox is getting gored. The Washington Post is not now, and has not been for many years, either left or liberal. Now its been bought by a canny businessman whose corporate practices w/r/t labor and taxes are vile, and who has (of course) massive business interests to be defended within Washington which he can do more cheaply by buying the WaPo than merely with registered lobbyists.
ReplyDeleteBTW claiming to be a libertarian when you are really a conservative and then telling people you are "just having fun" when you shit all over people with real political concerns besides getting laid, smoking dope, and refusing to pay taxes is just one of the most tediously overused dodges in the libertarian handbook. Which is kind of where we all came in, actually. Libertarians are cheap skate upper class anarchists who resent the moral strictures of the far right, lick the boots of the wealthy oligarchs, and wonder where they can get sex and drugs without any societal or legal risk.
What happened to the WT after Moon's death?
ReplyDeleteOK, I will change my handle. I just added it because lefties on the Telegraph Blogs in the UK seemed to think that libertarians goose step around in their many meetings.
ReplyDeleteOh, you know, its just because a Republican just called for Obama's lynching in Florida. And republicans have been hanging Obama in effigy since the get go.
ReplyDeleteAs for an "indulgence I don't allow the other side" who says? I don't object to Republicans and neo conservatives and neo nazis letting everyone know where they stand on lynching, which is a time honored tradition down south. I only object to their threatening to lynch our first black president and then pretending that it doesn't mean what it obviously means--a popular form of extrajudicial killing applied primarily to AA men and women post reconstruction in areas in which white political majorities and the KKK used terrorism as a normal means of doing business.
Its a word that stands for a thing. If you mean the thing: say it.
No one cares about your handle. Really. It wasn't interesting in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe Volka Conspiracy just got a good blogging gig and you didnt? You mad bro?
ReplyDeleteOK. Well you sure wrote a lot about it. Plus, the more I comment, the more the handle looks false to me.
ReplyDeleteOK, went to google, that was a black man running for state rep. There are over 300 million Americans. Not every one of them is going to be sane. I am sure it wouldn't take long for me to find a movie or something advocating, for example, the assassination of George W Bush if I were to look.
ReplyDeleteThat'll probably in the top five of the 100 Best Conservative Put Downs listicle that the interns at the National Review are working on right now.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever thought about giving Greg Gutfeld and Dennis Miller a little competition?
ReplyDeleteWhen ironic conversation gets this deep, I admit I can't keep up. But that Gutfeld insult is a little bit cutting, I admit.
ReplyDeleteLater.
He was a Republican candidate for office and the Republican party had to ask him to stand down.
ReplyDeleteAccording to you you are neither a conservative Republican nor a Libertarian, so what do you have at stake in fighting their battles or trying to excuse the obvious racist excesses of named Republican candidates and self described Republican voters? Not only do we still have an active neo-confederate party in this country we still have an active KKK, Militia, Christian Identity, and White Supremacist movement and when they vote they vote Republican or the rightward fringe of the Republican party led by Dominionists or the "Constitutional" party. This is not really a very well kept secret. Haley Barbour, the head of the Republican Party for many years, was also an out and proud member of the CCC which was a direct heir of the KKK. Again--this is not a secret.
If you don't like racist language, disgustingly racialized attacks on President Obama and his family, frequent references to lynching (including Tom Delay keeping a noose in his office, IIRC), public references to extra-judicial killing as a remedy for right wing failures at the ballot box then stop hanging out with conservatives and defending them. Because that's their language, not mine.
When my straw men boogie they tend to fall apart.
ReplyDeleteIsn't HTML the artist formerly known as Retardo Montalban? Somehow I got that impression.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the difference between a troll and an ex-libertarian?
ReplyDelete13. Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?
ReplyDelete15. During the last five years, have you or your spouse ever gone fishing?
To paraphrase Sean Young in Blade Runner, is this testing whether I'm a "Mainstream American" or a lesbian?
Most people's nyms are not a reflection of who they are--I, for example, am not a fictional character from the beloved Finnish children's series The Adventures of Moomintroll. I simply responded to your posts, not your nym.
ReplyDeletethe "top legal minds in the country."
ReplyDeleteAll of 'em? Surely there must be a bottom or two in the mix...
I'll bite! So, what is the difference between a troll and an ex-libertarian?
ReplyDeleteYeah, please share.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, I read just as many lefty blogs, but don't finish the articles. I'm reading less "lefty" blogs.
ReplyDeleteAs long as you practice safe sax, it doesn't matter.
ReplyDeleteThen you'd be reading "less lefty blog", along the lines of "less science fiction", or "less wingnut blather".
ReplyDeleteGosh, I wonder what would happen, I really do, if we labelled people's politics by their actions, not their self-professions. I admit, it's more fun the other way round, but I do wonder what would happen, especially to "libertarians"
ReplyDeleteThey're trying to make Jennifer Rubin look good. They'd better get Ace of Spades and the Confederate Yankee on deck.
ReplyDeleteI know, I thought of that interpretation after I'd hit publish. I'm definitely reading both fewer and less. And at the rate my braincells are exploding I'm understanding less of the few.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately the list doesn't include burning a cross, perhaps because Murray would throw off his own bell curve.
ReplyDeleteApparently, nothing ;-)
ReplyDelete"Putt" Hogan?
ReplyDeleteWedgies, towel snaps... What sort of cruelty is next? Pantsing?
ReplyDeleteIt dumped a lot of staff and became more of an online venture to cut costs in 2010, though it still prints the broadsheet. Its columnists include former editor and Civil War reimaginer Wesley Pruden and the still crazy after all these fears Frank Gaffney.
ReplyDeleteWhy, yes, yes he is! Notsadly yes!
ReplyDeleteAmazon has never turned a profit
ReplyDeleteNot sure that's accurate.
Anyway, who's to know whether Bezos has had any direct influence at all on editorial policy? Fred Hiatt is still there and seems like the obvious instigator.
I'd been waiting for one of these! And I take it as a good sign that it took so long. Maybe we're evolving as a species.
ReplyDeleteOMG! Politicians lied about a bill! What next? Minimum wage increase?
ReplyDeleteOr Fox News.
ReplyDeleteI would love to take this comment to a one-man show of Gilbert Gottfried reading the greatest hits of National Review Online, followed by a screening of the Three Stooges performing Atlas Shrugged.
ReplyDeleteProgress!
ReplyDeleteSure, pb, the hacks are those who get lucky with a part of a SCOTUS opinion that says a particular analysis of the ACA ("the merits is was sold") is unconstitutional, but these same writers reflexibly claim almost everything Obama does is unconstitutional. Blind pig, acorns.
ReplyDeleteduh, living is not a right. QED
ReplyDeleteUnless you're a fetus.
A Polka Conspiracy would have hipster-type background music, but it's blog wouldn't be nearly as interesting as the current proprietor's.
ReplyDeleteI sympathize. That error is far too common these days -- or maybe it always was, and I just started noticing it.
ReplyDeleteAww, did that evil Obummer squash all o' yer freedumbs?
ReplyDeleteIf the blogs as less lefty, then I'd recommend hyphenation: "less-lefty." But I just love hyphens.
ReplyDelete