A man of prodigious fortune, coming to add his opinion to some light discussion that was going on casually at his table, began precisely thus: "It can only be a liar or an ignoramus who will say otherwise than," and so on. Pursue that philosophical point, dagger in hand.

--Michel de Montaigne, Of the art of discussion.



Stab back: cmnewman99-at-yahoo.com


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I'm outta here...
My family's going on vacation again, and this time I even get to go with them. It's up to northern Cal for granny's 80th. The extended family is converging for some RVing through Yosemite, Gold Country, etc., culminating in the Big Bash in Ferndale. You won't be hearing from me till September.
posted by CMN at 1:36 AM
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Den Beste is gloating over France's tourism losses. Fun though this is to do, I feel compelled to report that Paola and Lucas stopped in Paris briefly on their way to Italy and say they experienced extremely helpful and generous treatment by the locals. Better than they did in Italy. It's obviously very silly to extrapolate individual experiences like this into global judgments, but we're human and that's what we do on a gut level, strictly rational or not. So France has now climbed several rungs higher in my estimation than it had been of late. I wonder how many of the relatively few Americans who are taking advantage of the downturn to go there are having similar experiences, and whether their word of mouth will repair the damage. They'll definitely win us back much faster that way than by having Woody advertise his desire to French kiss his wife.
posted by CMN at 11:17 AM
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I hate to be fickle, but...
Pejman's got some serious competition now. I think he should try to join forces and get her to be his running mate. I'm sure the skills he's honed while hitting on every female blogger in sight will work on fellow gubernatorial candidates as well.

UPDATE: It figures that this would be my highest traffic-generating post in recent memory. By the way, has anyone ever listened to Ambush at Fort Bragg? It's an audio rendition of a novella by Tom Wolfe, performed by Ed Norton. Fantastic. It's like the flip side of A Few Good Men, the same issue seen through a wildly different lens, with that level of social perspicacity and devastating characterization that Wolfe seems to have all to himself. And Norton's reading is phenomenal. The reason I thought of it now is that the conniving female journalist character is named, well, Mary Carey. I can't hear that name now without hearing Norton's portrayal of the good ol' boy Marine clueing in the condescending liberal yankee as to what it means to be under fire in Mogadishu. Definitely worth a listen if you're into theater of the mind.
posted by CMN at 10:31 AM
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The more the merrier.
Pejman really doesn't want to run for governor. I think we should throw him in the briar patch.
posted by CMN at 10:29 AM
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Volokh has an interesting rumination on the Supreme Court's citing of foreign legal authority in Lawrence.

I think there's another point worth making, though. In my view, a careful reading of Justice Kennedy's opinion shows that he was not citing the European authorities as persuasive precedent the way state courts sometimes cite decisions from other states. He was citing that authority for one purpose only--to rebut the asserted factual premise of the holding in Bowers that criminalization of homosexual practices is a deeply rooted feature of western civilization. I don't think there's any valid objection to this particular use of foreign precedent, even if we are--as I think we should be--rightly wary of looking to the moral views of other countries as a way to interpret our own constitution.
posted by CMN at 2:38 PM
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Sounds like he oughta be named Flaming if you ask me...

Diane must be trying to get a rise out of me. On second thought, no--that would be flattering myself. In any case, she's getting one. A moderate, brief one. But a rise nonetheless. Here it is:

No thoughtful libertarian--and that includes the dogmatic Ms. Rand herself--claims that there is no such thing as "common good," that all community is evil, or that cooperation is not necessary to human fulfillment. Come on. Let's think half a sec here. What on earth is "the market"--the closest thing libertarians have to a deity--if not the personfication of the fact that humans are social animals and cannot flourish as disconnected individuals? Market society is all about interdependence.

No, libertarians don't deny that there is any such thing as "common good." They merely ask you to show a bit of caution when you use that term. Seems fair enough given the bloodstains on it. They ask you to remember that there are lots of goods, some of which are arguably common to everyone, many of which are not, and none of which command universal recognition. They ask you, when you toss around this word as a justification for coercion, to keep the following caveats in mind:

1) When a good really is commonly regarded as such, people usually find ways to obtain it through voluntary cooperation.

2) When a common good is allegedly impossible to obtain solely through voluntary cooperation, it's usually because not enough people regard it as a good.

3) Even if we admit the existence of some real, objectively identifiable "common goods" that can be achieved only through coercion, one has to weigh those goods against the damage that coercion--even coercion in the service of real goods--inevitably does to people's ability to voluntarily achieve all the other goods on which their lives and happiness depend.

4) We must also include in the scales the fact that the institutions whose use of coercion we legitimize will never, EVER be limited to achieving the specific "common goods" that we might think would justify such power. Such is not human nature. Such is not power.

The above verbosity can be summed up as follows: There are such things as common goods. And people need communities to achieve them. But communities are conducive to the common good only to the extent that they respect the rights of the individuals to whom the "good" is supposed to be "common."

Alright, back to my cave and porn videos. (No coke, I'm afraid. I tried snorting it once, but the bubbles tickled my nose.)
posted by CMN at 4:04 PM
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