From the monthly archives:

July 2003

The Truth is Out There!

July 30, 2003

– And it’s out at the Drug Enforcement Agency website and museum, in Crystal City, just down the road!
Did you know that the drug trade has a “symbiotic” relationship with terrorism? Well, you will when you see the shocking exhibit Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists, and You. You can see the work of drug traffickers [...]

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Loving to Hate

July 29, 2003

– I can only heartily second Anne Applebaum’s sentiment in her biting review of Coulter’s Treason.
Even the company of Maoist insurgents would be more intellectually invigorating than that of Ann Coulter. More to the point, whatever side this woman is on, I don’t want to be on it.

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Are You Open to the Whole or Aren’t You?

July 26, 2003

– Robert Light posts a long passage from Strauss in the comments to the below post on natural law. I believe Light takes Strauss to be saying something especially relevant, important, or true here. But I find the passage characteristic Strauss. There is very little argumentation. It is more a kind of poetico-philosophical rhapsodizing. Key [...]

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Mutual Advantage vs. the Draft

July 26, 2003

– In his reply [scroll down] to Judge Posner’s defense of an all voluntary military, Bill Galston writes:
Let’s begin with a conception of society as a system of cooperation for mutual advantage. A society is legitimate when the criterion of mutual advantage is broadly satisfied (versus, say, a situation in which the government or some [...]

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First thing we do, let’s kill all the [natural] lawyers

July 23, 2003

– Post Lawrence, the advocates of natural law have been emerging from their ghetto to speak of the “unnaturalness” of gaydom. [See E. Volokh's sound analysis.] In this vein, Robert Light has passed along to me a short dissertation on Scholastic metaphysics by his acquaintance Marc Balestrieri, who writes:
Everything of material creation in the world [...]

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Ahab, Amputee

July 11, 2003

– At the bottom of this disturbing Slate article on amputation as pathological lifestyle choice, we are given an advertisement for Moby Dick from Buy.com.
Cute.
And the sick little Slate illustration really fucks with me.

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Hawkish

July 11, 2003

– On my drive to work today, I saw what I swear was a hawk perched on a lightpost aside the highway overlooking the Pentagon. What could that mean?

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Dialogue on Rationality

July 9, 2003

– At the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students, a conference I ran a couple weeks ago, John Tomasi and I did a little workshop session called “Ideal Justice, Real Institutions” about the constraints social scientific evidence about the possibilities for social organization place on theorizing about justice. It was a good time. John and [...]

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The Paradox of Blogging

July 3, 2003

– It turns out that the more your life is worth blogging about, the less time you have to blog.
Things have been pretty interesting while I’ve been MIA. Just for instance, on Saturday I spent a couple hours in a car driving Douglass North to D.C., talking about the problems with the prevailing wisdom [...]

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