repeats of repeats of repeats, from March 14. Trudeau still makes me laugh. The only political figure I've ever met -including those wanted by the police at the time- that I've ever truly liked.

---

repeat from 2003. I'd forgotten the Posner quote.


From a related post from the same time.

What is 'The Law?' Is it the concept or only the concept in action? Is it a set of rules, or is it the process of arguing about those rules - in a room, in summer, without air conditioning, and with a bad hangover? 

Is it the relation between the two?

The above, in relation to Corey Robin, here, and to what he describes as "a sharp take on the left".
My comment was to repost relevant bits of this. It's not simply the number of people, academics, opposed to freedom of speech, but that they're opposed to it without understanding how their arguments originate in their idealist sense of their own authority. Trudeau by comparison was principled but pragmatic. And society survived.

Again. Shouting down Michael Oren is one thing; claiming that its justified as an example of free speech is another. Along with discussions of "triggers", the first is asking the state's permission to disrupt the state's activity, the second is asking the state or some authority to protect you from knowledge, even knowledge only of someone's beliefs. In both cases the relation of the individual to the state is of child to authority. And technocrats are always willing parents.

The ACLU defense of the Nazis in the Skokie case was not about the right to march but the right to march in a town full of Holocaust survivors.

repeats: the lousy politics of willed innocence

Trudeau was always hoping people would grow up.


the comedy continues here