Iintelligent people whom I usually agree with like Misha and Arthur Silber have argued that Wellstone ought not to be eulogized. I was going to reply but there’s no point in writing about anything Lileks has written about first.
Oct 282002
Oct 272002
From The Sum of Life
Nothing to do but work,
Nothing to eat but food,
Nothing to wear but clothes,
To keep one from going nude.
Nothing to breathe but air,
Quick as a flash ’tis gone;
Nowhere to fall but off,
Nowhere to stand but on.
Nothing to sing but songs;
Ah well, alas, alack!
Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back.
Nothing to strike but a gait;
Everything moves that goes.
Nothing at all but common sense
Can ever withstand these woes.
–Benjamin Franklin King Jr.
Oct 262002
Title: Those Evil Warbloggers
Stardate: 20021026.1025
Word Count: 2,247
Impetus: Some Brit blogger who’s upset that actual conservatives use the Internet too. And that whole Little Green Footballs vs. Anil Dash MSNBC hate speech thing.
Thesis: If speech is unrestricted, truth will out.
Historical Reference: Justice Holmes’ 1919 dissent, in Abrams v. U.S.: “The best test of truth is the power to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
Evaluation: I doubt it. And “the marketplace of ideas” is a lousy reason to defend free speech anyway. If said marketplace failed to disseminate truth effectively — and there can be no denying that certain false ideas, like astrology, have made considerable market headway — would that be a good reason to restrict speech? Holmes’ jurisprudence indicates that he would have answered that question yes. What would Den Beste answer?
Oct 252002
Senator Paul Wellstone, who was killed in a plane crash this afternoon, was a professor of political science at Carleton College in the early 1980s, when I went there. Even then he was a charismatic figure, with a cadre of student followers, the “Wellstoners,” who tried to stir up the usual lefty trouble, organizing the local farmers into coops or persuading the cafeteria ladies to strike.
Wellstone’s introductory poli sci course was the most popular on campus. Its core text was Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, and it was agitprop. This bothered me more then than it does now. Wellstone did openly what other professors did snarkily and on the sly. With him you knew where you stood.
In the Senate he was much the same way. Anti-corporation, sure; but he also refused corporate campaign contributions. Never saw a tax cut he liked. Advocated a seven-year freeze on defense spending. Voted the true-blue AFL-CIO line. Opposed war with Iraq. Always wrong, in short; but forthright too, and incorruptible. Few on the left or right were like him, and I’m sorry he’s dead.
Oct 252002
Now that “meta” and “fisk” have been removed, one hopes, from discourse by Stephen Green and Colby Cosh, respectively, can we lose “meme” too? “Meme,” like “meta,” is a useful technical term. It was coined by Richard Dawkins and it means “cultural information transmitted by imitation,” like bird songs or dolphin whistles. It does not mean “cool shit on the web that you can link to.”
This has been a public service announcement.
Oct 252002
Classic works on constitutional government, from the Code of Hammurabi on down, are here. (Link from Radley Balko.)
Oct 242002
A bestiary. The writing is brilliant and the drawing is better. Which one am I? Which one are you? Collect ’em all! (Link from Brian Tiemann.)
Oct 242002
Mark Riebling has an excellent article in NRO on the connection between al Qaeda and the Moscow theater hostage-taking. (How the hell do you manage 600 hostages anyway?) But Instapundit already said that.
Oct 232002
Colby Cosh is irked, faintly, quaintly, that the Booker Prize was awarded this year to some nonentity, instead of Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis, or Peter Ackroyd. Since some people apparently still take this stuff seriously, let’s go straight to the top. The following authors never won the Nobel Prize for Literature:
Leo Tolstoy
Henry James
Yevgeny Zamyatin
James Joyce
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mikhail Bulgakov
Vladimir Nabokov
That’s just American, British and Russian novelists. (Don’t even get me started on poetry.) But you can only give out so many Nobels, after all, and you have to make room for Rudolf Eucken and Rabindranath Tagore and Pearl Buck and Odysseus Elytis and Dario Fo and Günter Grass and…so many mediocrities, so little time.
Colby commends the Booker committee for putting William Trevor on its short list, remarking that a “stopped clock is right twice a day.” It was another stopped clock, the poet-traitor Ezra Pound, who wrote, “Prizes are always a snare.”
Oct 232002
Again my comparative sloth is exposed…
Stardate: 20021022.1604
Word Count: 2,138
Title: Lord Robertson, the Hapless
Impetus: NATO. And of course, France.
Thesis: The follies of multilateralism, as exemplified by poor Lord Robertson, the Secretary General of NATO, who is intelligent enough to realize he is arguing a hopeless case. Our European allies, with the exception of Britain, are useless, militarily at least.
Military History Lesson: Schwarzkopf relied only on British and American troops in the Gulf War; everyone else was for show. Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan each demonstated, in its own way, why international coalitions to fight wars do more harm than good.
Best Quote: “[The U.S. would] be glad to sell [fancy military] communications equipment to Europe if they want to buy it. But that’s not what they want. What they want is for us to give them the technology to make it possible for them to create such things themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, what they want to do is to use this as an excuse for wholesale industrial espionage.”