Watching the "left" watching "liberals" and "conservatives" defend the rule of law against Musk/Trump. 

I think this is the last time I used the graphic.

record keeping

Statement of the #ICC Office of the Prosecutor pic.twitter.com/Cw331pMcDm

— Int'l Criminal Court (@IntlCrimCourt) May 3, 2024

The Office of the Prosecutor is aware that there is significant public interest in its investigations, and it welcomes comments, communication of concerns, and engagement In its activities from State and elected officials, non-governmental organisations, scholars,  and activists.  

The Office seeks to engage constructively with all stakeholders whenever such dialogue is consistent with its mandate under the Rome Statute to act independently and impartially. 

That independence and impartiality are undermined, however, when individuals threaten to retaliate against the Court or against Court personnel should the Office, in fulfillment of  its mandate, make decisions about investigations or cases falling within its jurisdiction.  Such threats, even when not acted upon, may also constitute an offence against the administration of justice under Art. 70 of the Rome Statute.  

That provision explicitly prohibits both "[r]etaliating against an official of the Court on account of duties performed by that or another official" and ”[i]mpeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the  official not to perform, or to perform improperly, his or her duties."  The Office insists that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence its officials  cease immediately.

Wooooow. H*m*s released the text for the ceasefire deal that they accepted. It includes the release of ALL Israel hostages & war prisoners and all bodies of deceased Israeli hostages & war prisoners. ALL OF THEM.
Israel said no. https://t.co/rm7GAIEtrg

— Taleed El-Sabawi, JD, PhD (@el_sabawi) May 7, 2024

May 5,  "Al Jazeera condemns Israeli government decision to shut down local offices" 

Israeli cabinet votes unanimously to close the network’s operations in Israel with immediate effect.

The statement comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted unanimously to close Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after Israel’s parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a threat to national security during the months-long war in Gaza.

Netanyahu announced the decision on X, formerly Twitter. “The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel,” he posted in Hebrew.

Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi wrote on X that he had signed the orders against Al Jazeera, which would be effective immediately.

Karhi said he ordered the seizure of Al Jazeera’s broadcasting equipment “used to deliver the channel’s content”, including editing and routing equipment, cameras, microphones, servers and laptops, as well as wireless transmission equipment and some mobile phones.

May 4th, Barrons, (AFP) 

A top Israeli official said Saturday that Hamas's continued demand for a lasting ceasefire in the war in Gaza was stymying prospects of reaching a truce. "So far, Hamas has not given up its demand to end the war, thus thwarting the possibility of reaching an agreement," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The official rejected reports that Israel had agreed to end the war as part of a deal to free the hostages held by Gaza militants.

The official said suggestions Israel was prepared to allow mediators to provide Hamas with guarantees of an end to the war were also "not accurate".

The official's comments came after Hamas negotiators returned to Egypt on Saturday to give their response to a proposed pause in the nearly seven-month war.

May 5th, Haaretz

Netanyahu Hoped Hamas Would Reject the Cease-fire Offer. When It Didn't, He Turned to Sabotage

General context for this: 

 
source 

repeats

"For those of you who have been with us so far, you'll know that we've been thinking and talking a lot about how the First Amendment should adjust to the new challenges of the platform era." 

Important article by Amos Goldberg. Please note that Professor Goldberg has not had a chance to look over the translation. But it is a reliable rendition of the Hebrew original and he has allowed me to post it.https://t.co/yEge11gXMS

— Omer Bartov عومر بَرتوف עמר ברטוב (@bartov_omer) April 28, 2024

Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain for the “most horrible of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, this is the way it will be viewed in history’s judgment for generations to come.

From a legal point of view, there is still no telling what the International Court of Justice in The Hague will decide, although in light of its temporary rulings so far and in light of increasing prevalence of reports by jurists, international organisations, and investigative journalists, the trajectory of the prospective judgement seems quite clear.

Watching Israel and Zionism fall apart. The last colonial state and the last modernist utopia but one.

The people who should look themselves in the mirror, won't. 

---

I'm watching Israel and Zionism fall apart in real time, and all I can think about is the liberal consensus that defended them. That's not a defense of radicalism—Israel and North Korea are the last utopian projects—but the role of adversarialism, pessimism, negativity, denial.

keeping this one as a record.

Billionaires at Davos predicting Trump is the best indicator that Biden wins in a landslide

— Scott Shapiro (@scottjshapiro) January 21, 2024

WaPo: Judge blocks California law meant to increase online safety for kids

U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a request Monday by the tech trade group NetChoice for a preliminary injunction against the measure, writing that the law probably violates the First Amendment and does “not pass constitutional muster.”

The initial ruling deals a massive blow to state lawmakers, who passed the law with broad bipartisan support last year, and to children’s safety advocates, who touted the measure as one of the strongest children’s online safety laws in the United States. Lawmakers in several other states have since pushed to replicate the standards, modeled after regulations in the United Kingdom.

NetChoice, which counts Amazon, Meta and Google as members, sued to block the law in December, arguing that tech companies have a right under the Constitution to make “editorial decisions” about what content they host or take down and that the law would turn platforms into “roving censors of speech on the Internet.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim Post chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.) 

“We look forward to seeing the law permanently struck down and online speech and privacy fully protected,” Chris Marchese, who leads NetChoice’s litigation efforts, said in a statement.

Monday’s ruling is the latest in a string of recent defeats for children’s safety advocates in the courts. Last month, two federal judges temporarily blocked laws in Arkansas and Texas that would require some online service providers to verify users’ ages and to get parent consent to access social media platforms or adult content.

1—arguing that tech companies have a right under the Constitution to make “editorial decisions” 

Publishers face liability

2—the law would turn platforms into “roving censors of speech on the Internet.” 

They already are 

"the First Amendment should adjust to the new challenges of the platform era."

 "tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world." 

old: What Exactly is Neoliberalism?

and new: It's all so obvious. Academia circling the wagons. I wonder what her girlfriend says.

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Wendy Brown gave at Yale in 2019. As she acknowledges, Weber is, on the face of it, a surprising choice of ally for a radical political thinker who has done so much to scrutinise and oppose political orthodoxies. Weber is typically dismissed on the left as a conservative defender of bourgeois liberalism and a critic of socialism. In recent years, Brown has been best known for her critical analysis of neoliberal rationality and the way it has weakened resources for political action; recent scholarship, meanwhile, has highlighted significant continuities between Weber’s thought and that of early neoliberals such as Ludwig von Mises. Brown isn’t a sociologist, but her work is unquestionably animated by what C. Wright Mills called the ‘sociological imagination’, which connects ‘private troubles’ to ‘public issues’. Although Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology, he has become unfashionable among sociologists because of his insistence on a rigid distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’, and his refusal to let politics or ethical reasoning intrude into scholarship.

So why Weber? The texts Brown focuses on are the two famous lectures given in Munich in 1917 and 1919, ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’, which Nihilistic Times reads in reverse order. Here Brown finds Weber responding to ‘crises of political and academic life bearing certain parallels to our own, including a crisis of liberalism’. In a time of war, demagoguery and bureaucratisation, and when the ‘death of God’ had become a given, Weber sought to reorient politics and scholarship through a dogged commitment to what distinguished each of them. As Brown admits, some of this made for dry and disappointing reading (‘Science as a Vocation’ is ‘one long depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions’). But what she finds most valuable in Weber’s ethos, not least in its implications both for the left and for the academy, is the willingness to face uncomfortable truths without lapsing into wishful thinking or despair.

Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’ through which individuals commit to their life course. The tragedy of modernity, as recognised most acutely by Nietzsche, is that modern knowledge can tell us a great deal about how the world works (facts), but nothing whatever about what we should do about it (values). This, Weber argued, is just the way it is, and to deny the split between facts and values (in the form of mysticism, say, or Marxism) only makes things worse. Modern society is therefore suffused by nihilism, in the sense that values no longer have any stable or consensual foundation, while scholars have nothing helpful to say about them, other than to study them sociologically.

In these circumstances, both science and politics carry a heavy burden. Once values come to be regarded as non-objective cultural artefacts, politics becomes a never-ending battle to assert one set of values over others. In spite of this, or because of it, values must be defended to keep nihilism at bay, and the responsibility for doing this falls especially to politicians, and political leaders in particular. Weber’s central injunction to scholars, meanwhile, is to stay in their lane and avoid the temptation to issue edicts on morality or politics. Both scientists and politicians must take ‘responsibility’ for their own sphere of activity, and ensure that there remains, as Brown puts it, a ‘moat between academic and political life’.

recently on Weber, and the political origins of value free science. 

Weber now has a tag.

Haaretz live commentary: "Israel's Supreme Court Hears Petitions Against First Netanyahu Law Attacking Judiciary"

The chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, Simcha Rothman slammed the Supreme Court saying that the very existence of the hearing is a failure of the court. "Why is a judicial process or ruling which will harm the core values of democracy needed? What is the justification for taking away from the State of Israel its basic characteristic as a democratic state?" Rothman asked.

Addressing what the judicial overhaul supporters consider a gradual encroachment on the Knesset's authority, Rothman said: "For many years, through a gradual process of legally sound arguments, the Israeli Supreme Court has taken upon itself powers unparalleled anywhere in the world." He further claimed that "the public's trust in the court has eroded due to the court's extensive involvement in social, economic and political matters." 

Rothman stated that the Knesset is authorized to legislate on any Basic Law, subject to the will of the people.

Justice Anat Baron responded, 'What if there were a law that denied Arabs the right to vote or postpones elections by ten years, then what?' Rothman replied, 'If the elected parliament fails in its role, a remedy won't be found in the hands of a group of individuals authorized to annul the elected representatives without being accountable to the public through elections.'

tagged: Judicial Review, for Americans who don't get the joke.

From 2004, an update

WSJ,"A 'Torture' Memo And Its Tortuous Critics"

Posner and Verlmeule's op-ed was pulled so quickly that Balkin had to link to a cache file that died within a year. Now the piece has been republished. There's no telling if it's been cut but I'm betting it hasn't. That's how far we've come.

I found out it'd been republished because I had to search for it again after ridiculing a member of the extended PRC apparat who was defending the honor of China against a Foggy Bottom intellectual. The link in his header and the pinned tweet is to an interview with Vermeule.

"A lesson of virtue" in The Beijing Review. Vermeule must follow him because he blocked me, again.

Whining about the Cold War is like asking McDonalds or KFC to stop competing with each other; the difference is the armies and the nukes. The only option is to reject US and Chinese foreign policy goals as such, and look to the small states forced to negotiate a path between them.

I think the reason all these academic intellectuals follow edgelords and fascists, is that their minds are too dead to think for themselves.

Kathleen Stock: "Why incels should read Michel Houellebecq"

Conservative men should read T.S. Eliot. His poems describe the true misery of the conservative male, and reading him will help them escape it.

This list has gone to three

"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"

"I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling."

Eliot may well have become more liberal when he was older but it wasn't because of the poetry; it was the sex.

Philip Roth. "Céline is my Proust!" 

Crash and burn

NYT: Biden Orders U.S. to Share Evidence of Russian War Crimes With Hague Court

President Biden has quietly ordered the U.S. government to begin sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, according to officials familiar with the matter, signaling a major shift in American policy.

The decision, made by Mr. Biden in recent days, overrides months of resistance by the Pentagon, which had argued that it could pave the way for the court to prosecute American troops, according to the officials.

It was unclear why Mr. Biden let the impasse linger or what finally led him to resolve it, but he has been under mounting bipartisan pressure to act. Last week, for example, a Senate committee approved a government funding bill that had a provision stating that the president “shall provide information” to the court to assist with its investigations into war crimes in Ukraine.

S. 2438. pp 203-4

(3) LIMITATIONS.—

(A)(i) None of the funds appropriated under the heading ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ in this Act may be made available for assistance for the Palestinian Authority, if after the date of enactment of this Act—

(I) the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof outside an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians; or

(II) the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.

It'll be sad when twitter dies.

Euractiv 

The European Commission’s appointment of an American economist to a top job in its competition department has prompted a backlash from French politicians, with the digital minister “inviting the Commission to re-examine the matter”.

The EU executive announced Fiona Scott Morton’s appointment as chief economist in DG COMP, the Commission authority responsible for ensuring fair competition within the single market, on Tuesday (11 July).

However, Scott Morton’s career as a consultant for a series of digital giants, including Apple and Microsoft, and her nationality has resulted in criticism in Paris. Of the 32,000 people working for the Commission, around 1,900 are third-country nationals and are mainly local agents established in foreign countries....

Centre-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, who headed the French Socialist list ahead of the 2019 elections, said that “appointing an American citizen who worked for Amazon and Meta as chief economist of DG Competition is unacceptable”.

“We have worked hard to regulate GAFAM [Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft], not to entrust the application of these rules to their lobbyist. No way,” he concluded on Twitter.

Manon Aubry MEP, co-chair of The Left group in the European Parliament, said the situation “raises an obvious question of conflict of interest”....

Louis Aliot, one of the leaders of Marine Le Pen’s party, the far-right Rassemblement National, condemned Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for “giving a key position to American interests against the interests of European companies and peoples”.

Contacted by EURACTIV France, a series of government advisers from the prime minister’s services, the Elysée, and three ministries first declined to respond.

Renew MEP and former Minister for EU Affairs, Nathalie Loiseau, questioned the appropriateness of Scott Morton’s appointment, calling it “disappointing”.

“So Commissioner Vestager hasn’t found any Europeans who are worthy of being chief economist?”, Loiseau tweeted.

According to a senior European official quoted by Le Monde, the American “was the best of the eleven candidates”.

Macron’s Renaissance MP Antoine Armand described the European executive’s choice as “absurd” and “inconceivable”, given that the conflicts of interest that seem to be emerging mean that the new chief economist of DG COMP “will have to withdraw from major dossiers”....

GAFAM: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. Remember Stanford, the first link below.

There's no freedom of speech in Europe, but America sees freedom of speech as paired with freedom of property. The US government and "liberal" technocratic managers, Scott Morton and her peers, are perfectly happy to have private monopolies, their past and future employers, control what people read and say. Algorithms can feed the lowest instincts their captive audience, free from liability. The government gets censorship without having to taking credit.

Taibbi is a grifter; the "Twitter files" were mostly nothing new, but as hype-man for billionaires, and making a good living at it, he's helped to obscure the bigger issue. 

repeat: Zuckerberg describes Facebook policy, "penalizing borderline content", shadowbanning, in 2018.

I don't read Stoller much. Out of curiosity I googled his name and Taibbi's

Twitter, prior to Musk’s takeover, had been caught multiple times playing fast and loose with user data. So it signed a consent decree with the FTC in 2010 committing the firm to lots of internal work regarding data privacy and security. It then violated that decree in the 2010s, and so had to pay $150 million fine in 2022, and redouble its commitment to data privacy. When Musk bought the firm, he fired most of the people in charge of FTC compliance, and probably unwittingly gave user data access to third parties. Which is likely both illegal and Twitter’s third violation of the law. That’s the kind of thing that can incur a huge fine, as well as penalties against individuals in charge of decision-making. And guess who makes the decisions at Twitter? Elon Musk.

During the subcommittee hearing, which revolved around Hunter Biden’s laptop-style scandals, participants occasionally veered into the FTC. (Jordan released a silly mostly ignored report pretending there’s some connection, my org put out a rebuttal.) And no one seemed to understand why the FTC would police Twitter’s violation of the law, instead chalking it up to some sort of conspiracy to censor conservatives. (Taibbi, after attacking the FTC, didn’t seem to realize there had been a consent decree.)

Not that there aren’t conspiracies, but the FTC policing Twitter over privacy violations isn’t one of them. Anyway, Senator Ted Cruz ad Jordan are investigating the FTC. That’s not going to go anywhere, because there’s no scandal. But Musk is going after the FTC via Jordan for a reason - he realizes Twitter has a legal problem and may be on the hook for some serious penalties. 

Stoller recommends Taibbi on Substack, for the same reason he defends Hawley: he can't see the grift. He's an honest nationalist who knows how to count: a Keynesian China hawk. 

repeat, on Bidenomics, from neoliberalism to mercantilism, which in the end neoliberalism always was.

Americans are conformist: opinions are like assholes; two things you don't talk about in a bar are politics and religion, three if you add money; the web is for talking to your friends. Individualism leads to its opposite. The second link is to Jed Purdy on Tocqueville; by accident or luck the first includes Stoller, and Taibbi—I'd forgotten—on Joe Rogan, and David Dayen, all on banning targeted advertising. 

I've alway referred to the flattening effect of individualism as resulting in an inability to judge A from B. If everyone is dancing to their own tune they're all equally inarticulate: the articulate being defined by the existence of a common form or language. But before that, public conformity begins in the need not to start a fight, and less in individuals than the coexistence of tribes. But then the tribes too begin to fade, and then recreated as artificial, overdetermined "intentional" communities, "social bonds are construed as a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation" as Streeck describes it, 250[?] years after the first utopian community, the first revolutionary cosplay.

Taibbi and Stoller are more examples of the nostalgia of contemporary American politics. 

Press briefing, Nov. 28, 2022, state pressure to censor is state censorship. The whole exchange is obscene. I wonder who the researcher at Stanford is.

Q    Just a question about Twitter. You know, there’s a researcher at Stanford who says that this is a critical moment, really, in terms of ensuring that Twitter does not become a vector for misinformation.  I mean, are you concerned about the — you know, Elon Musk says there’s more and more subscribers coming online.  Are you concerned about that?  And what tools do you have?  Who is it at the White House that is really keeping track of this?

Mark Graber 

Harvard tried to keep out Jews and other unsuitable children of immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe by using intelligence tests. The persons who devised those tests assured the American elite that standardized examinations distinguished the natural intelligence of sturdy Anglo-Saxons from Jews and others whose inflated grades reflected obsessive studying. Alas, Jews and other immigrants figured out how to game the test. An admissions system based entirely on text scores and school grades would increase further the percentage of Jews and immigrant children at Harvard.

Diversity was the better solution to Harvard’s Jewish problem. Maybe Jews and other immigrant children were smart (“cunning“ and "shrewd” were other words found apt by many), but all they did was work and grade-grub. Protestant men were well-rounded leaders. You could go hiking in the woods or party with Protestants on weekends. Universities that were finishing schools for the elite wanted students who could appreciate the full richness of American society. The Protestant elite was convinced that all Jews did was study. How some managed to have children was a mystery to them. Evaluating the full person guaranteed classes made up predominantly of Protestants who would be political, economic, and social leaders and minimized the number of Jews who would do little more than become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and teachers....

When the Supreme Court of the United States first ruled on the constitutionality of race-conscious university admissions policies, four justices took the historical disadvantage route rather than Harvard’s road to diversity. The issue in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) was whether the medical school at the University of California, Davis could set aside sixteen seats for students of color. Justices William Brennan, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun found this policy constitutionally unproblematic. Brennan’s opinion observed that “whites as a class” were “not saddled with such disabilities or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.” Relying on what in the United States is called “intermediate scrutiny,” a form of judicial review that resembles what the rest of the world describes as “proportionality,” Brennan asserted that the medical school “could conclude that the serious and persistent underrepresentation of minorities in medicine . . . is the result of handicaps under which minority applicants labor as a consequence of a background of deliberate, purposeful discrimination against minorities in education and in society generally, as well as in the medical profession.” White, Marshall, and Blackmun played variations on these themes in their opinions. None cared much for diversity.

Justice Lewis Powell, who provided the crucial fifth vote on a court of nine justices, proved a better Harvard man. His opinion rejected both of Brennan’s central arguments. Powell insisted that the Court apply the highest level of scrutiny, strict scrutiny, to all race classifications. In his view, because “the white majority is composed of various minority groups most of which can lay claim to a history of prior discrimination, . . . no principled basis” existed “for deciding which groups would merit heightened judicial scrutiny.” 

Diversity came to the rescue. Powell concluded that “a diverse student body” was a compelling interest given that “the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.”

Good one

Justice Clarence Thomas noted that the University of Michigan Law School would enroll more students of color by being less selective and that the institution’s interest in being ranked in the top ten could not possibly be a compelling interest.

Every administrator dreams of working at a top tier school, for the same reason professors lord it over secondary school teachers, and the highest ranking are happy when they don't have to teach at all.

Leiter's arguments against "diversity blather" are founded in vulgar positivism: there's no reason for women to have a role in writing abortion policy.

repeat: There's no epistemological need to have blacks, or women, or homosexuals, or Palestinians, tell their own stories, or judge others' stories.

as expected, the court has inverted the 14th. an amendment written explicitly to directly ameliorate the conditions of race hierarchy becomes in conservative hands an amendment that says it’s illegal to try to directly ameliorate the conditions of race hierarchy https://t.co/CeklyHtyBr

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) June 29, 2023

NYT: Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.

In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.

Again and again. 

[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts. 

The great critical race scholar Derrick Bell, for example, argued that African Americans can advance on issues of race only when whites also benefit. One way to secure this “interest convergence,” he observed, is to ally with lower-class whites "who, except for the disadvantages imposed on blacks because of color, are in the same economic and political boat."  

NYT today: 

College admissions experts anticipate there will be increased pressure on elite schools to end preferential treatment for children of alumni, who are more frequently white and affluent, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision.

And in his concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch criticized Harvard for resisting proposals to eliminate legacy admissions, saying the university’s “preferences for the children of donors alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trip to the alumni tent all their lives,” he wrote.

The Court on Tuesday in Moore v. Harper emphatically rejected the independent state legislature theory. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the Court in a 6-3 decision, and held that state courts have the power to enforce state law, including with regard to elections. He invoked Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 decision that famously recognized the power of courts to review the constitutionality of executive and legislative actions. The Court declared: “We are asked to decide whether the Elections Clause carves out an exception to this basic principle. We hold that it does not. The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”

Win for judicial review. I wonder if Ryan Cooper was forced to work on the piece. 

Stop what you're doing and read the extraordinary amici curiae brief Akhil Amar, Vik Amar and Steve Calabresi have just filed in Moore v. Harper. That's the case involving a claim by North Carolina legislators that under the Constitution only the legislature of a state has the power to regulate federal elections--without any interference from state courts or any constraints from state constitutions. The brief from Akhil, Vik and Steve is an intellectual battering ram that demolishes the independent state legislature theory. It is also the punchiest brief filed in a very long time. In its substance and by its candor, the brief sets a new standard for friend of the court. The brief is available at this link.

Sereny again

Into That Darkness 

Shortly before breaking off for lunch – when, I had been told, I would have to give him as much time as he wanted for his meal and rest – I told him that having listened to him for two and a half hours I thought I had better explain what I really wanted. He could then think about it and let me know after lunch whether he wanted to go on. I said that I knew inside out all the things he had said that morning; all of them had been said before by any number of people. And I didn’t wish to argue the right or wrong of any of this; I felt it was pointless. What I had come for was something quite different: I wanted him really to talk to me; to tell me about himself as a child, a boy, a youth, a man; to tell me about his father, his mother, his friends, his wife and his children; tell me not what he did or did not do but what he loved and what he hated and what he felt about the things in his life which had eventually brought him to where he was sitting now. If he didn’t want to do this, but preferred to go on in the vein of that morning’s recital, then I would listen to him, I said, to the end of that afternoon, go back to England, write a little something about the interview, and that would be the end of it. But if, after thinking about it, he decided to help me delve deeper into the past (his past, because things had happened to and inside him which had happened to hardly anyone else, ever) then perhaps we could find some truth together; some new truth which would contribute to the understanding of things that had never yet been understood. If this could be done I would be prepared to stay in Düsseldorf as long as he liked; days or even weeks. I told him, too, that he had to know from the start that I abhorred everything the Nazis had stood for and done, but that I would promise him to write down exactly what he said, whatever it would be, and that I would try – my own feelings notwithstanding – to understand without prejudice.

When I’d finished he didn’t say anything, only nodded. And when a moment later the guard came to take him back to his cell, he left the room with nothing but a small formal bow. I was not at all sure I’d see him again....

Stangl looked indefinably different when he was brought back to the little room on the second floor at 2 p.m. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, but he still looked spruce – that wasn’t it. He was as well shaved as he had been in the morning – had probably shaved again – yet he no longer looked quite clean-shaven, nor was his skin as taut and young-looking as before....

I’ve thought about what you said,” he told me at once, his voice slightly unsteady. “I hadn’t understood before – I hadn’t understood what you wanted. I think I understand now … I want to do it. I want to try to do it.…”

There were tears in his eyes before we even began to speak of his childhood. “I thought you just wanted – you know – an ‘interview’,” he said, emphasizing that loaded term. I had some English cigarettes and he took one – he was, I soon saw, a chain-smoker. “My childhood,” he began, shaking his head several times, “I’ll tell you.

"Did he perhaps think of you as his friend?" 

"No I don't think he would have dared to think of that. He was very respectful. He a provincial Austrian. I was a Hungarian aristocrat." 

This is just hilarious.

---

Sereny makes me laugh. She has a good hard understanding of the world. 

Q: This phrase the banality of evil, is that what you're talking about?

A: Ah.. I suppose so. I really dislike that um... sentence. You know, evil is a huge word. Actually there was nothing evil about Stangl.

Arendt's use of "banality" isn't the problem; it's the here use of the word "evil" Arendt could never stop being a philosopher. That was always her weakness. Sereny doesn't need to pretend. 

Earlier, laughing, putting her hand to her chest:"Remembering Stangl and to think of him as being fundamental is always funny." An empty suit, but the suit was a uniform. Deep down he's shallow. Her aristocratic contempt.

Watching Sereny I thought of Stengneth, and my own contempt grew even stronger. Sereny seconds Arendt in a way that Stangneth could never counter. Post-war German Zionism continues pre-war German anti-Semitism, a transition without a break.

Sereny was a journalist and Harris was a lawyer. Empiricism over rationalism

Sereny's description of Speer and Hitler would probably offend a lot of people if they paid attention. 

more

repeat: Judicial Review vs The Independent State Legislature Theory. 

Because I'm hearing this shit again.

The court is a political institution. The pretense that it isn't is why we're here now, and who should we blame for that?