If posts are catch-as-catch-can for the next day or two, I apologize. But any of y'all in D.C. are welcome to come to the Hayek Auditorium at the Cato Institute tomorrow morning at 9:30 to listen to me and some fellow K. fellows explain why heroin should be a schedule II drug. Supposedly the audience's job is to ask tough questions and try to catch us up.

While suggesting that Amitai Etzioni is wrong to be criticizing the Matrix, Kieran Healy writes:

The more teenagers who are routed towards papers by Colin McGinn or Dave Chalmers or Julia Driver and away from The Fountainhead or Ender’s Game the better, if you ask me.

H: She's a historian.
Q: Explain this.
H: She searches through the books to find out the stories of humans, and then writes stories about what she finds and gives them to all the other humans.
Q: If the stories are already written down, why does she write them again?
H: Because they aren't well understood. She helps people understand them.
Q: If the people closer to that time didn't understand them, how can she, coming later, understand them better?
H: I asked this myself, and Valentine said that she doesn't always understand them better. But the old writers understood what the stories meant to the people of their time, and she understands what the stories mean to the people of her time.
Q: So the story changes.
H: Yes.
Q: And yet each time they still think of the story as a true memory?
H: Valentine explained something about some stories being true and others being truthful. I didn't understand any of it.
Q: Why don't they just remember their stories acccurately in the first place? Then they wouldn't have to keep lying to each other.

"When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced-- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. . . though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand. However that's how it's done."

"Speakers for the dead apparently have an almost pathological reliance on the idea that people behave better when they know more. I've been a politician too long to share his confidence-- but he's older than I am, he claims, and I deferred to his wisdom."

"Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at. Even the convicts in a penitentiary and the freaks in a side show. Everybody but me. . . So I must have a substitute-- even if it's only a locked room and a few objects not to be pawed."

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do if we're honest about it."

"Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that."

"You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain."

Loss of Consortium on our parodist:

'm sorry... i laughed my, um... butt off at this one. they said "ass prat." like ass-paragus. and tex-ASS. it appears to be a parody of another blawg, which, were it to take the form of a sphincter, would probably turn arnold schwarzenegger's fist into a broken mess of bones if ahhnold's fist ever tried to knock on its door. and we don't mean the state of california.

Those of you who have been following the blog for the past few days will notice that I've been spending far more time than is healthy reading Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing. Previous observations are here, here, and here. Well I've now finished, at least with the last hearing, and I must say the whole thing is rather breathtaking-- not at all what I expected.

I suppose it should be no surprise, but the Senators (who almost all have law degrees, of course) had some truly amazing and quite sophisticated questions, but most of them also seemed like pretty silly questions to ask of a Judge who has already made clear that he doesn't want to comment on specific types of cases. The hearing was also intriguing because of how Libertophobic it was. The remarks of Thomas's that seemed to get him in the most trouble were speeches at Cato, interviews with Reason, and all the rest. Senators voiced a serious concern that Thomas would be the vanguard of a libertarian revolution by the disciples of Epstein, trying to give (horror of horrors!) economic rights as much protection as civil rights. They were also worried about abortion, and really really worried about natural law.

Now perhaps this was surprising to me only because I wasn't really paying attention back in those days, but while these issues are associated with Clarence Thomas these days, they're hardly the issues that most people think are his worst flaws. I was also intrigued by the Senate's insistence that one's personal policy preferences simply had to have an effect on one's Justiceing, even if they didn't necessarily have an effect on one's Judging. Now, one might think that about Thomas, but he would certainly disagree.

But the other interesting thing was how much Justice Thomas's jurisprudence has evolved beyond the views he stated in the nomination hearing. And I do think it should be clear to anybody who reads the transcript that it's far more likely to be evolution than dishonesty that's going on here. You have Guido Calabresi, then-dean of the Yale Law School, now archliberal appellate judge, testifying that they should accept Thomas to the court because he is open-minded, fair, unideological, and because his views will probably involve to a more coherent picture of justice as he sits on the court. Several of Thomas's views have changed since then, not just the question of the right to privacy (on which Yglesias so unfairly charged him with lying) but also the role of stare decisis, the standards of racial discrimination at different levels of government, and so on. From the way these then-views formed a coherent jurisprudence and picture of the law I think there's little grounds for the charge that Thomas was putting on a big front to get through confirmation. It seems far more likely that he is what he claimed to be-- a fair- and open- minded Justice intent on trying to read his own personal preferences out of the law, in ascertaining by any means possible the intent and meaning of the phrases in the constitution, and damn smart.

Now, if anybody can find me the 52-48 roll call vote that confirmed Justice Thomas, there will be a gold star in the works.

And what would a long reflective post be without a closing quote (mock away, Pretentia)?

[On federal judges' confirmation hearings:] Well, what the hell are you supposed to ask? Who do you like to sleep with? Girls? Boys? Will you sleep with me? Of course you'll ask them how they'd rule!

Judge Alex Kozinski