Thanks for the link to the Volokh Conspiracy topic on Clinton-Obama.

Volokh is dead wrong about the Vice-Presidency continuing to be so weak.

That might have been correct in the past …. but this is a new Century.

Hillary Clinton is dynamic and intelligent enough to radically change that office from a mere sinecure into the second most powerful office in the United States …. and if the United States survives all the aftershocks of the disasterous Bush abberation, the changes she would bring to the office of Vice-President would influence the course of American history long after she was dead-and-buried.

And fat.

Who said 59cm is similar to 88cm?

Many, many husbands.

agree that the parodist has CLs sneering exactly right, but surely equating Pinker to Mengele is over the top, even for CL?

Moderator, doesn’t this trigger the Godwin rule?

Own up, whoever it is.

Parody? Seems like business as usual.

Interesting piece of writing gets the sneering dismissal treatment.

Pinker is saying nothing of the kind as I’m sure you know if you bothered to read past the introduction to his article. Instead he’s saying that freedom, autonomy and even dignity are more complex, nuanced and (dare I say it, relative) than the prescriptive rules imposed by a Pope or holy roller American fundie preacher can encompass:

There is a second reason to give dignity a measure of cautious respect. Reductions in dignity may harden the perceiver’s heart and loosen his inhibitions against mistreating the person. When people are degraded and humiliated, such as Jews in Nazi Germany being forced to wear yellow armbands or dissidents in the Cultural Revolution being forced to wear grotesque haircuts and costumes, onlookers find it easier to despise them. Similarly, when refugees, prisoners, and other pariahs are forced to live in squalor, it can set off a spiral of dehumanization and mistreatment. This was demonstrated in the famous Stanford prison experiment, in which volunteers assigned to be “prisoners” had to wear smocks and leg irons and were referred to by serial numbers instead of names. The volunteers assigned to be “guards” spontaneously began to brutalize them. Note, though, that all these cases involve coercion, so once again they are ruled out by autonomy and respect for persons. So, even when breaches of dignity lead to an identifiable harm, it’s ultimately autonomy and respect for persons that gives us the grounds for condemning it.

Could there be cases in which a voluntary relinquishing of dignity leads to callousness in onlookers and harm to third parties–what economists call negative externalities? In theory, yes. Perhaps if people allowed their corpses to be publicly desecrated, it would encourage violence against the bodies of the living. Perhaps the sport of dwarf-tossing encourages people to mistreat all dwarves. Perhaps violent pornography encourages violence against women. But, for such hypotheses to justify restrictive laws, they need empirical support. In one’s imagination, anything can lead to anything else: Allowing people to skip church can lead to indolence; letting women drive can lead to sexual licentiousness. In a free society, one cannot empower the government to outlaw any behavior that offends someone just because the offendee can pull a hypothetical future injury out of the air. No doubt Mao, Savonarola, and Cotton Mather could provide plenty of reasons why letting people do what they wanted would lead to the breakdown of society.

I wonder whether you dislike Pinker because you see aspects of yourself in this description:

For two decades, a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society. This impoverished vision has only led to anomie, hedonism, and rampant immoral behavior such as illegitimacy, pornography, and abortion. Society should aim higher than this bare-bones individualism and promote conformity to more rigorous moral standards, ones that could be applied to our behavior by an authority larger than ourselves.

Own up, whoever it is.

Indistingishable from Joseph Mengele.

But who uses 800 x 600 resoltuion these days?

Somewhere between 8 and 14%, Ken. 800*600 is a dead issue now a days. The res to worry about now is 320*480.

Angry Of Mayfair, as you and other persons of taste will know, is a small homage to the late great Kenny Everett who along with The Goodies was responsible for keeping my kids quiet, entertained, educated and happy for many years just after school each day.

Yours etc

Angry Of Mayfair

Unlike the previous government, this one actually does have a macro-economic policy.

I never realized he had such a sense of humor.