I realize that most of my handful of readership that were not already put off by the dreary, insipid subjects of most of my posts have abandoned me utterly during the last two months without posts. Unlike Peculiar, I have no particular excuse for my silence, except that my time is now occupied with actual (as opposed to speculative) involvement with the judiciary process. Nevertheless, I intend, once I can do the reading necessary to support my treatment with concrete points, to post another dressing-down of NPR for its fatuous decision that the summary rehearing order the Supreme Court handed down on the Texas redistricting case was somehow newsworthy. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if they have a legal analyst look at any of their Supreme Court stories before they shoot their magnetomotive mouth off.
A propos of foolish liberals, and a recent post by Odious, I must confess I have become rather cynical about the comparative inherent worth of various sources of law--whether power derives from a mandate from the masses or some farcical aquatic ceremony. I may myself value individual liberty over distributive justice, but it gives me no pleasure to discuss my reasons, since I am now convinced there is no conclusive argument that can be brought to bear on the subject. It is, I grant, possible to argue by setting up hypothetical parameters, just as it is theoretically possible to compare apples and oranges by assumed common criteria: but such is the work of philosophers, who have experience discussing matters that, in order to be discussed at all, must be hypothesized into irrelevance. What I cannot stand about politics, and particularly liberal politics, is the lack of any attempt to establish an analytical framework, so that all arguments reduce to the bald assertion that the one doing the asserting is right, along with all his cohorts, and everyone else is wrong. Even liberals in law school learn to define their terms and state their postulates--otherwise, there is no argument to be had. All that one can do in response to an unformulated statement is concede and throw back some vituperation. Therefore, when someone asks how the Unites States can say Saddam Hussein is a bad man, because we haven't spent nearly the amount of money the World Health Organization thinks we should to sponsor AIDS treatment in the third world, I will only shrug and answer: "Yes, I am a Republican, and therefore bent on humanity's destruction; but I think for now I could could content myself with yours."