David Hajdu and Jadakiss dis 50 Cent.

On a first gloss this pissed me off but in retrospect I have to shrug. Hadju's glibness is annoying but his condescension is muted. It could be a lot worse.
Rap both is and is not, pop music. Street cred is important, but so is the mainstream, and cynical gunplay is still gunplay. The tension between the need for honesty and the need for bullshit, both of which are market derived, is what gives hardcore rap it's resilience as art and product. And interestingly obviously or both, this ties in with the critique of positivism. Without the tensions of a dual allegiance rap would not be nearly as interesting as it is, and I mean by that: objectively interesting. I have no interest in taste one way or the other.

An argument for judicial discretion, in its strong form -with a capital 'D'?- is no more than an argument for closing the door on any attempt at understanding how change occurs or/and is made. Would H.L.A. Hart be able to understand or to describe the duality of those italicized words, or what it means to define the present by describing it? The whole point of Brian Leiter's philosophy in its disdain for art and literature—and indeed for language—is that description is at all times logically and morally ancillary to the attempt at definition.
Good judges in their opinions attempt to describe the present. And in doing so sometimes they change it.

More later, I'm off the the Armory Show I have a VIP pass for the weekend. And openings tonight etc.