Grauniad

But while her preference for supporting equal rights in this case was never in doubt, what was striking on Tuesday was how her willingness to place it along the civil rights continuum allowed her to cut through the argument in a way even the court’s conservative firebrands struggled to do.

“Marriage today is not what it was under the common law tradition, under the civil law tradition,” said Ginsburg when Justices Roberts and Kennedy began to fret about whether the court had a right to challenge centuries of tradition.

“Marriage was a relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female,” she explained. “That ended as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisiana’s Head and Master Rule was struck down … Would that be a choice that state should [still] be allowed to have? To cling to marriage the way it once was?”

“No,” replied John Bursch, the somewhat chastised lawyer for the states who are seeking to preserve their ban on gay marriage.

Bursch was similarly eviscerated by Ginsburg when he tried to argue that the sole purpose of marriage was to ensure a stable relationship for procreation.

“Suppose a couple, 70-year-old couple, comes in and they want to get married?” remarked the 82-year-old Ginsburg, to laughter, after a protracted debate over whether it was fair to ask couples if they wanted children before allowing them to wed.

“You don’t have to ask them any questions. You know they are not going to have any children.”

Repeat

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s presence on the Supreme Court represents not just the result of intelligence hard work and luck, but the common recognition that there's a need on the court for minds affected, colored [shaped? built?] by the experience of womanhood. Ginsberg's experience is bounded by a thousand other things, but Henry Farrell is not a woman. Perspectives matter. And this is a discussion of experience not biology. If he is admitting something similar now -for the first time?- not in the context of a discussion of representative democracy and the Supreme Court but Twitter, what does this say about the underlying logic of his interests? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't argue that female judges are only a political necessity. I assume he's just too self-absorbed to see the crossover, but who knows.

And another, since someone found it today.

What Exactly is Neoliberalism?

The most common criticisms of neoliberalism, regarded solely as economic policy rather than as the broader phenomenon of a governing rationality, are that it generates and legitimates extreme inequalities of wealth and life conditions; that it leads to increasingly precarious and disposable populations; that it produces an unprecedented intimacy between capital (especially finance capital) and states, and thus permits domination of political life by capital; that it generates crass and even unethical commercialization of things rightly protected from markets, for example, babies, human organs, or endangered species or wilderness; that it privatizes public goods and thus eliminates shared and egalitarian access to them; and that it subjects states, societies, and individuals to the volatility and havoc of unregulated financial markets.

Each of these is an important and objectionable effect of neoliberal economic policy. But neoliberalism also does profound damage to democratic practices, cultures, institutions, and imaginaries. Here’s where thinking about neoliberalism as a governing rationality is important: this rationality switches the meaning of democratic values from a political to an economic register. Liberty is disconnected from either political participation or existential freedom, and is reduced to market freedom unimpeded by regulation or any other form of government restriction. Equality as a matter of legal standing and of participation in shared rule is replaced with the idea of an equal right to compete in a world where there are always winners and losers.

The promise of democracy depends upon concrete institutions and practices, but also on an understanding of democracy as the specifically political reach by the people to hold and direct powers that otherwise dominate us. Once the economization of democracy’s terms and elements is enacted in law, culture, and society, popular sovereignty becomes flatly incoherent. In markets, the good is generated by individual activity, not by shared political deliberation and rule. And, where there are only individual capitals and marketplaces, the demos, the people, do not exist.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, Zone Books

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

Zone is known as a boutique publisher of academic high theory, and following the logic of boutique publishers of art and design, they put their designers' names up front.

It's standard issue elite vanguardism, and a model of the neoliberal imagination. The aestheticization of everything, including politics.

World-leading visionary, innovator, designer and author, Bruce Mau is committed to creative, healthy, ecological and economic abundance. His 25-year record of success through design thinking includes collaborations with such groups as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, MTV, MOMA, Herman Miller, Shaw Industries, The New Meadowlands Stadium, American Airlines Arena, Arizona State University, and countries such as Guatemala, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia.

Mau is the author and designer for several award-winning books, including Life Style; S, M, L, XL (in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas) and the iconic and celebrated ZONE BOOKS series. Translated into 17 languages, Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth has been an inspiration with his aphoristic articulation of his personal philosophy and design strategies.

Political theory is political design. Political participation requires a political art, a subjective self-aware engagement in real time. Design can be no more than as aestheticized functionalism, the definition of culture under the technocratic logic of which neoliberalism is the capitalist apotheosis. As in the prescriptions of and the performativity of theory, the practice is bounded by strict necessity.

So, too, our Collegiate Gothic, which may be seen in its most resolutely picturesque (and expensive) phase at Yale, is more relentlessly Gothic than Chartres, whose builders didn't even know they were Gothic and missed so many chances for quaint effect.

Theory, design, illustration, as opposed to art (and architecture): democracy requires more than the first order curiosity of functionalism. Virtue ethics can exist only as practice and require curiosity in layers, a second-order curiosity that feeds on and demands both experience and art: hypotheticals that bleed, that draw us in and surprise us or terrify us. Democracies like aristocracies are maintained by people with a flexible, permeable, consciousness and self-definition of which academics more and more are incapable, even as their arguments more and more point in the right direction.

Brown describes the practice of democracy and the idea of participation, while placing herself above as an observer of the participation, or lack thereof, of others. She's incapable within the logic of her own self-definition of practicing what she preaches, even as what she preaches is on point.
---

I'm seeing a lot more history titles, including some that sound lovely.  They publish one book by an author I quote too often, and I have no problem with well made books; I'm bourgeois and good design is good design. But history is an art, and the hierarchy is clear to historians if not -I repeat again and again and again- to philosophers. Foster is still an editor at October and I'm not going to go read him again, but maybe things are moving faster. It's a corollary to the fading of theory even as described by theorists, as both are corollaries of the return of respectable intellectualism outside the groves and shadows of academe. And maybe at some level they've realized to their chagrin that much of the academy has taken Bruce Mau as an ideal, and that Caroline Bynum is a better one.
---

I've used the Macdonald quote enough, but it belongs with posts on Clement Greenberg and Eliot
And Broch

And the ethical demand made of the artist is, as always, to produce “good” works, and only the dilettante and the producer of kitsch (whom we meet here for the first time) focus their work on beauty. 

I just realized after all this time, that I've never made a tag for Kitsch. Now I have.

updated, appropriately enough, in October. Hal Foster, the title essay from Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes), from 2002

Some of these speculations can be tested against Life Style by Bruce Mau, a compendium of projects by the Canadian designer who came to prominence with Zone Magazine and Books in the late 1980s. With a distinguished series of publications in classical and vanguard philosophy and history, this imprint is also known for "Bruce Mau Design," whose luscious covers with sumptuous images in saturated colors and layered pages with inventive fonts in cinematic sequencing have greatly influenced North American publish- ing. Sometimes Mau seems to design the publications to be scanned, and despite his frequent denials in Life Style he tends to treat the book as a design contract more than an intellectual medium.

...Yet for all the Situationist lingo of contemporary designers like Mau, they don't "detourn" much; more than critics of spectacle, they are its surfers (which is indeed a favorite figure in their discourse), with "the status of the artist [and] the pay- check of the businessman." "So where does my work fit in?" Mau asks. "What is my relationship to this happy, smiling monster? Where is the freedom in this regime? Do I follow Timothy Leary and 'tune in, turn on, drop out?' What actions can I commit that not be absorbed? Can I outperform the system? Can I win?" Is he kidding?

The last 5 pages of the 13 page essay are about Bruce Mau. The poverty and perversity of theory. Jumping forward, and back: "architectural favela porn"

A repeat from 2010.

Read it out loud, to yourself if no one else is around, or if they are.

Huizinga, The Waning Of the Middle Ages

Chapter One: The Violent Tenor Of Life

To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulae.

Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace. Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of winter were more real evils. Honours and riches were relished with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery. We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed.

Then, again, all things in life were of a proud or cruel publicity. Lepers sounded their rattles and went about in processions, beggars exhibited their deformity and their misery in churches. Every order and estate, every rank and procession, was distinguished by its costume. The great lords never moved about without a glorious display of arms and liveries, exciting fear and envy. Executions and other public acts of justice, hawking, marriages and funerals, were all announced by cries and processions, songs and music. The lover wore the colours of his lady ; companions the emblem of their confraternity ; parties and servants the badges or blazon of their lords. Between town and country, too, the contrast was very marked. A medieval town did not lose itself in extensive suburbs of factories and villas ; girded by its walls, it stood forth as a compact whole, bristling with innumerable turrets. However tall and threatening the houses of noblemen or merchants might be, in the aspect of the town the lofty mass of the churches always remained dominant

The contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light, like that between summer and winter, was more strongly marked than it is in our lives. The modern town hardly knows silence or darkness in their purity, nor the effect of a solitary light or a single distant cry.

All things presenting themselves to the mind in violent contrasts and impressive forms, lent a tone of excitement and of passion to everyday life and tended to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness, which characterize life in the Middle Ages.

One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises of busy life and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity: the sound of bells. The bells were in daily life like good spirits, which by their familiar voices, now called upon the citizens to mourn and now to rejoice, now warned them of danger, now exhorted them to piety. They were known by their names: big Jacqueline, or the bell Roland. Every one knew the difference in meaning of the various ways of ringing. However continuous the ringing of the bells, people would seem not to have become blunted to the effect of their sound.

Throughout the famous judicial duel between two citizens of Valenciennes, in 1465, the big bell, "which is hideous to hear," says Chastellain, never stopped ringing. What intoxication the pealing of the bells of all the churches, and of all the monasteries of Paris, must have produced, sounding from morning till evening, and even during the night, when a peace was concluded or a pope elected.

The frequent processions, too, were a continual source of pious agitation. When the times were evil, as they often were, processions were seen winding along, day after day, for weeks on end. In 1412 daily processions were ordered in Paris, to implore victory for the king, who had taken up the oriflamme against the Armagnacs. They lasted from May to July, and were formed by ever-varying orders and corporations, going always by new roads, and always carrying different relics. The Burgher of Paris calls them " the most touching processions in the memory of men." People looked on or followed, " weeping piteously, with many tears, in great devotion." All went barefootted and fasting, councillors of the Parlement as well as the poorer citizens. Those who could afford it, carried a torch or a taper. A great many small children were always among them. Poor country-people of the environs of Paris came barefooted from afar to join the procession. And nearly every day the rain came down in torrents.

Then there were the entries of princes, arranged with all the resources of art and luxury belonging to the age. And, lastly, most frequent of all, one might almost say, uninterrupted, the executions. The cruel excitement and coarse compassion raised by an execution formed an important item in the spiritual food of the common people. They were spectacular plays with a moral. For horrible crimes the law invented atrocious punishments. At Brussels a young incendiary and murderer is placed in the centre of a circle of burning fagots and straw, and made fast to a stake by means of a chain running round an iron ring. He addresses touching words to the spectators, "and he so softened their hearts that every one burst into tears and his death was commended as the finest that was ever seen." During the Burgundian terror in Paris in 1411, one of the victims, Messire Mansart du Bois, being requested by the hangman, according to custom, to forgive him, is not only ready to do so with all his heart, but begs the executioner to embrace him." There was a great multitude of people, who nearly all wept hot tears."

When the criminals were great lords, the common people had the satisfaction of seeing rigid justice done, and at the same time finding the inconstancy of fortune exemplified more strikingly than in any sermon or picture. ...

addendum to the post below on arguments over the politics of "religious liberty". 

I'd forgotten about Kelo

Perry Link

In teaching Chinese-language courses to American students, which I have done about thirty times, perhaps the most anguishing question I get is “Professor Link, what is the Chinese word for ______?” I am always tempted to say the question makes no sense. Anyone who knows two languages moderately well knows that it is rare for words to match up perfectly, and for languages as far apart as Chinese and English, in which even grammatical categories are conceived differently, strict equivalence is not possible. Book is not shu, because shu, like all Chinese nouns, is conceived as an abstraction, more like “bookness,” and to say “a book” you have to say, “one volume of bookness.” Moreover shu, but not book, can mean “writing,” “letter,” or “calligraphy.” On the other hand you can “book a room” in English; you can’t shu one in Chinese. 

I tell my students that there are only two kinds of words they can safely regard as equivalents: words for numbers (excepting integers under five, the words for which have too many other uses) and words that are invented expressly for the purpose of serving as equivalents, like xindiantu (heart-electric-chart) for “electrocardiogram.” I tell them their goal in Chinese class should be to set aside English and get started with thinking in Chinese.

You cannot "translate" Mallarmé or Pushkin.
You cannot "translate" Mallarmé or Pushkin.
You cannot "translate" Mallarmé or Pushkin.
You cannot "translate" Mallarmé or Pushkin.

YOU CANNOT "TRANSLATE" MALLARMÉ OR PUSHKIN.

How many times do you repeat the obvious?
Claire Messud

One of the most widely read French novels of the twentieth century, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, carries, for American readers, enormous significance in our cultural understanding of midcentury French identity. It is considered—to what would have been Camus’s irritation—the exemplary existentialist novel.

Yet most readers on this continent (and indeed, most of Camus’s readers worldwide) approach him not directly, but in translation. For many years, Stuart Gilbert’s 1946 version was the standard English text. In the 1980s, it was supplanted by two new translations—by Joseph Laredo in the UK and Commonwealth, and by Matthew Ward in the US. Ward’s highly respected version rendered the idiom of the novel more contemporary and more American, and an examination of his choices reveals considerable thoughtfulness and intuition.

Each translation is, perforce, a reenvisioning of the novel: a translator will determine which Meursault we encounter, and in what light we understand him. Sandra Smith—an American scholar and translator at Cambridge University, whose previous work includes the acclaimed translation of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française—published in the UK in 2012 an excellent and, in important ways, new version of L’Étranger.

The Onion. Americas Finest News Network

WASHINGTON—After several seconds spent sitting motionless and glaring directly into the camera, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly began Sunday’s video announcing her 2016 presidential bid by warning the nation not to fuck this up for her. “Listen up, assholes, ’cause I’m only saying this once: I’ve worked way too goddamn hard to let you morons blow this thing for me,” said Clinton, repeatedly jabbing her index finger toward the viewers at home while adding that if they thought she was going to simply sit back and watch them dick her over like they did in 2008, they were out of their fucking minds. “Seriously, don’t you dare even think about it. If you shitheads can just get in line, we can breeze through this whole campaign in 19 months and be done with it. Or, if you really want, we can do this the hard way. Because make no mistake, I’m not fucking around. Got it?” Clinton then ended her announcement by vowing to fight for a better future for all working-class families like the one she grew up in.

Duncan Black, 2013: "I like Hillary Clinton. I worried a bit about some of the idiots she has surrounded herself with. But happy for her to run."

Duncan Black, April 2015: It's "Not Too Late" for someone else.

repeat from 2008, not for the first time [some of the links might be dead]

I finally watched this yesterday

"It's not easy, and I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know... I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don't want to see us fall backwards. You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political it's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game, they think it's like who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids' futures, and it's really about all of us together. You know, some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds, and we do it, each one of us because we care about our country but some of us are right and some of us are wrong, some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven't thought that through enough.

Dowd: Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?

Atrios responding to Dowd: "Because only boys are allowed to cry. Or something. These people are all broken. Complete monsters."

Gitlin: Hillary Teared--and Edwards Blinked

Pollitt: Hillary Shows Feeling, is Slammed

Listen to Clinton's words, and ask yourself what exactly she's crying over. The response has been based on the assumption that Clinton was describing and reacting to the pressure of campaigning itself, but that's not it.

"You know... I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don't want to see us fall backwards."

She's crying because she's scared of what will happen to the country if she doesn't win. Dowd hints at this and no one else even comes close, but it's front and center: "It's not easy" trying to save us from ourselves. The performance and response have been equally embarrassing to watch. Does Clinton even know what she's doing? Does Katha Pollitt?

Leiter

Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but "fake" is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.

Interesting that Leiter of all people should be so observant. He has an instinctive understanding of psychology, reading performance for subtext, but he's unwilling to read that back into his larger intellectual interests, or his understanding of his own behavior.

Belle Waring undermines every argument by every "philosopher" and social "scientist" at Crooked Timber, but no one notices, least of all her.

My mom worked at MCI negotiating real estate rights so that they could put up cell towers and ensure coverage. Sometimes property holders had them over a barrel because there was nowhere else for miles around; at other times they had their choice of spots. She had a great team who was intensely loyal to her. Did her manager understand what the fuck her job even was about? Sort of. But did his manager understand even vaguely how to do her job, or what doing it successfully would mean? NO. Not even a little. They would issue conflicting diktats within weeks. They demanded she cut overall money paid out in her unit 10% by giving the appropriate number of workers unwarranted bad performance reviews. She took most of the pay cut herself and divided the remainder evenly among her team; the business, not understanding the source of her underlings loyalty and effectiveness, would shift them out to failing teams and then not understand why they didn’t do great there. My mom was not a math person or a law person or anything; she had been a serious, I’m living in a commune run by Dennis Hopper hippie who had to learn on the series of jobs she hustled, from paralegal up through to this serious managerial position. It’s wrong to conceptualizer this in terms of noble engineers and quants who can do math vs evil Liberal Arts-trained bosses who can’t. It’s just the normal office workers of the world vs Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss. And if anything your infuriating manager is an MBA, not an English Lit. major.

repeat here and elsewhere: the only ethic of service commonly recognized in the US is the military. "I served" or "Did you serve" refer to military service.

I've said before the Waring is the smartest one of the bunch. If she focused she might be a good writer, but she's lazy and also in a lot of pain, physically and psychologically. I don't blame her for copping out, but it leaves her open to a kind of criticism that others can avoid.

As long as I'm playing art critic to the authors at CT. Quiggin is a good photographer.

repeat, from 2013


"Yes but the point is, surely… This is the point of blank verse, "The lady shall speak her mind freely, or the blank verse will halt for it."  Hamlet says this. You don't have to think; you think after the line, not before it, or not during. The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."

Delacroix, (1850)

14 February
I am beginning to feel a violent dislike for people like Schubert, the dreamers like Chateaubriand (this began a long while ago), Lamartine, etc. Why will nothing of theirs endure? Because it is utterly untrue. Does a lover gaze at the moon when he is holding his mistress in his arms? It may be an excellent plan when one begins to grow tired of her! Lovers do not weep together, they make no hymns to infinity, and very few descriptions.  The hours of true enchantment pass so swiftly, and they are not spent like that. The sentiments in the Méditations are false, as they are also in Raphael, by the same author. These vague yearnings, this chronic melancholy, describe no real human being; it is the school of sickly sentiment and a very poor advertisement for it. Yet women pretend to be infatuated with all this nonsense. It must surely be out of modesty, for they know perfectly well what to believe about the real issue in love. They praise the writers of odes and invocations, but attract and deliberately seek out healthy men who are responsive to their charms.

Mme P[otocka] called today, with her sister Princess de B[eaveau]. She at once noticed the nudes, the Femme impertinente and the Femme qui se peigne. 'What is it that you artists, all you men, find so attractive in this?' she said. 'What makes it more interesting to you than any other object in its nude or crude state; an apple, for instance?' 

update to a recent post: "The humanists who followed the scholastics did not need the pronunciato, and no one has needed it since."

The romance of orthodoxy is mannerism

Arguments over "religious liberty" are a waste of time. Liberals are as confused as conservatives.

Holbo quotes Dreher

On the conservative side, said Kingsfield [Dreher’s pseudonymous law prof. correspondent], Republican politicians are abysmal at making a public case for why religious liberty is fundamental to American life.
“The fact that Mike Pence can’t articulate it, and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t care and can’t articulate it, is shocking,” Kingsfield said. “Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they’re marginal figures. Why can’t Republicans articulate this? We don’t have anybody who gets it and who can unite us. Barring that, the craven business community will drag the Republican Party along wherever the culture is leading, and lawyers, academics, and media will cheer because they can’t imagine that they might be wrong about any of it.”

Kingsfield said that the core of the controversy, both legally and culturally, is the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), specifically the (in)famous line, authored by Justice Kennedy, that at the core of liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As many have pointed out — and as Macintyre well understood — this “sweet mystery of life” principle (as Justice Scalia scornfully characterized it) kicks the supporting struts out from under the rule of law, and makes it impossible to resolve rival moral visions except by imposition of power.

“Autonomous self-definition is at the root of all this,” Prof. Kingsfield said. We are now at the point, he said, at which it is legitimate to ask if sexual autonomy is more important than the First Amendment.

For liberals like myself, this is a topsy-turvy view. I think of religious liberty as an aspect of individual liberty. I’m not sure I endorse Kennedy’s exact phraseology, but it’s close enough for government work. Dreher and Kingsfield take almost the opposite view. For them religious liberty functions as a check or curb on individual liberty. Their concern is to maintain a safe space for orthodoxy. This is quite explicit later in the post.

The professor brought up the book The Nurture Assumption, a book that explains how culture is transmitted to kids. 

“Basically, it says that culture comes through your peer group,” he said. “The most important thing is to make sure your kids are part of a peer group where their peers believe the same things. Forming a peer group is hard when it’s difficult to network and find other parents who believe what you do.”

Individual liberty and the state: Wickard v. Filburn is foundational to modern liberalism.
repeats of repeats. The same points in different contexts.

—And again, as to the New Deal, both modern liberals and conservatives ignore that the biggest result was the economic unification of the country. Most modern conservatives are in favor of US economic dominance, and without Wickard v. Filburn and other decisions the US would not have become what it is. Similarly the civil rights cases had as much to do with economic efficiency, and liberal self-love, as concern. Read Derrick Bell’s dissent in What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. Capitalism requires the collapse of public and private; private life has shrunk and continues to.

— As to liberal pretensions: Wickard v. Filburn helped secure US domination of the post-war world. Democracy might have been stronger if the decision had gone the other way. And then there's Derrick Bell on Brown. [not the same link as above]

The market trumps community and individualism, collective and individual conscience, always.

The romance of orthodoxy is mannerism. Rawlsian scholasticism is mannerism, not modernism.

"Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks."

etc. etc.  And I'm still getting hits from the LRB blog, a fair number from the Oxford Union. I'll be in London in a month. You should invite me.
----

see also the ACLU's contradictions.

When Christian educator Bill Jack ordered a cake last year from Azucar, a Denver bakery, he had a special decoration request for owner Marjorie Silva. He wanted the cake to say "God Hates Gays" with a drawing to match. Silva refused, and now she's facing a half-baked complaint from Jack alleging he was the victim of religious discrimination.

Jack and others are touting this as equivalent to what happened at Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2012, and they are pointing to both cases as reasons to support laws allowing businesses to discriminate against gay couples. As you have likely heard by now, Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips turned away gay couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins from shopping for wedding cakes, citing his faith as the reason. The couple filed a discrimination complaint and the ACLU stepped in to represent them. An administrative judge and then the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that yes, they had suffered illegal discrimination. Masterpiece and Phillips are now appealing that decision.

Also Volokh

But while Jack has succeeded in getting publicity for his cause, he doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. Colorado law bans discrimination by a wide range of businesses, but only when the discrimination is based on “disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.” This means that a store may not specifically refuse to sell cakes to gays, or sell them to (say) Baptists. It may well mean that it may not specifically refuse to sell cakes for use in same-sex marriages, or in Baptist events. It may even mean that it may not specifically refuse to inscribe messages that identify buyers as gay (e.g., “John and Bill’s marriage”), or as Baptist (e.g., “Baptist Church Picnic”).

But nothing in the law bans discrimination based on ideology more broadly. A store can refuse to sell to someone because he’s a Nazi, or a Communist, or pro-life, or pro-choice, or pro-gay-rights, or anti-gay-rights. A store can likewise refuse to inscribe cakes with Nazi, Communist, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gay-rights, or anti-gay-rights messages, if it’s discriminating based on the ideology of the message, rather than the religiosity of the buyer.

Here, there’s no reason to think that Azucar Bakery discriminated against Jack because of his religion, or even because of the religiosity of his message (though I don’t think discrimination based on religiosity of message is barred by the law in any event). I suspect that if the message had read “Gay is unnatural” or “Gay is disgusting” — with no reference to religion — Azucar would have refused to write that message, too. To win on a religious discrimination claim, Jack would have to prove that he would have been served based on his religion, and he can’t do that if the Azucar people credibly testify that they would have rejected such an anti-gay message regardless of whether or not it was religious. (Nor can Jack argue that this was “creed” discrimination; in such statutes, “creed” simply means “religion.”)

I do think there are serious Free Speech Clause problems with some application of public accommodation discrimination laws, such as to wedding photographers; but that is a separate matter. Here, the law simply doesn’t even purport to prohibit refusals to write messages on cakes based on the messages’ ideology.

Volokh links to Volokh

I’m pleased to report that I filed a friend-of-the-court brief, on behalf of the Cato Institute, Dale Carpenter, and myself, arguing that wedding photographers (and other speakers) have a First Amendment right to choose what expression they create, including by choosing not to photograph same-sex commitment ceremonies.

According to the logics above, religion is distinct from ideology and people are separable from their beliefs. The latter is easier in some cases than others: are the Jews a people?"

"Affirmative action" was and is problematic. The simplest way to apply it would be to base it on economic status, but that would never pass. Think of what would have happened if Reconstruction meant 40 acres and a mule for freedmen and for poor white trash.

In the US, you can be fired for membership in a political party.

Pedantry is lousy model for politics and an even worse model for politics in a democracy.
more above.
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And I'd forgotten about Kelo

"They're letting a Jew in the building"

Corey Robin: Do the Jews Really Not Belong in the United States?

Last September, Joe Biden spoke to a group of invited guests, including leading American Jews, about Israel as a haven for American Jews:

Folks, there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.

I found that a rather stunning comment from a sitting vice president. So I wrote about it for my column at Salon.

Yet no one has remarked upon the fact of a sitting vice president telling a portion of the American citizenry that they cannot count on the United States government as the ultimate guarantor of their freedom and safety. The Constitution, which the vice president is sworn to uphold, guarantees to American citizens the “Blessings of Liberty” and equal protection of the law. Despite that, despite “how deeply involved” Jews “are in the United States,” the occupant of the second-highest office in the land believes that American Jews should look to a foreign government as the foundation of their rights and security.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Some thoughts on being Jewish in contemporary polite society

There is much talk going around now about so-called Jewish privilege: That we can blend in, that we’ve “made it” here in America. But privilege only exists when you’re comparing one people to another people, and I’m not sure why we do that. Does anyone benefit from this kind of one-upsmanship? I would not trade my problems—which, to be clear, are that the country that I can flee to for asylum is under threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran and random, unprovoked attack by its neighbors—with anyone else’s. It sucks all around.

Privilege has two meanings: One is that those who are privileged are elevated somehow. The other is that they are different. I renounce the notion that Jews—Jews, being told to stay home from their synagogues for their safety, Jews being kept out of schools and ridiculed in the street, all this, right now in Europe—have the first kind of privilege. But the second, we have it in droves:

It is my Jewish privilege to have very few blood relatives because the rest of them were murdered in the Holocaust. It’s my privilege to have to keep my mouth shut at casually racist remarks, because “you know what I mean, like a JAP, everyone says it.” It is my privilege to have thought twice about accompanying a celebrity to Paris as I profiled him, then let the clock run down on the offer so that I could only interview in Los Angeles. It is my Jewish privilege that the word lampshade makes me cringe, that the word camp—camp!—makes me cringe. It is my privilege to always wonder what I should have been doing differently, how I am a disgrace to the martyrs of the Holocaust because my outrage and sadness is confined to my Direct Messages.

Various repeats

"...as a German Jew living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium, I really do not need your lectures on these matters." 

"...my own expected happy homecoming into German society wasn't necessarily working out as planned. One of the teachers at the Gymnasium told me that Heinrich Heine wasn't really a German' poet, but rather was a 'European' poet. My absurdly well-meaning and wonderful hostfather regularly repeated that 'Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland' " 

“Jews still don’t believe that the world won’t turn on them. It’s hardwired into their systems. They can’t accept that the Holocaust is a distant memory for most of the world’s population and they get upset when they are not perceived as perennial victims, even though they hardly look like victims anymore. But historical memory today is almost an oxymoron. People hardly remember the Vietnam War, and even 9/11 is a starting to be a fading memory for younger Americans.”  

"We are living in a time of exploding nationalisms. The blacks in America are the first to abjure the idea of assimilation, to realize the inherent lie in the concept of melting pot. Through black nationalism has developed a new black pride and hence the ticket to liberation

Today’s young American Jew is a good bit slower. He desperately wants assimilation: Jewishness embarrasses him. He finds the idea of Jewish nationalism, Israel not­ withstanding, laughable. The leftist Jewish student is today’s Uncle Tom. He scrapes along, demons­trating for a John Hatchett, asham­ed of his identity, and obsessed with it. He cannot accept the fact that he is seen as a Jew, that his destiny is that of the Jews, and that his only effectiveness is as a Jew. But he wants to be an 'American,' a left­ist American, talking liberation and aspiring WASP. He is a ludicrous figure." 

"There are a lot of Jews on the upper east side. But while I was walking down 84th street in the early 90’s (on lunch from a job site) I passed two well dressed old women leaving a building. One commented to the other: 'They’re letting a Jew in the building' 

It’s still an issue."

I knew I'd told the story somewhere. The post itself is as bad as anything else at CT that relates to class, but a few of the comments are great.

WaPo: Millennials are just about as racist as their parents

When it comes to explicit prejudice against blacks, non-Hispanic white millennials are not much different than whites belonging to Generation X (born 1965-1980) or Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964). White millennials (using a definition of being born after 1980) express the least prejudice on 4 out of 5 measures in the survey, but only by a matter of 1 to 3 percentage points, not a meaningful difference. On work ethic, 31 percent of millennials rate blacks as lazier than whites, compared to 32 percent of Generation X whites and 35 percent of Baby Boomers. (Question wording and methodology at the end).

No fucking shit.