This public sculpture is the thing that scares a group of people who would never read this blawg, because they can't control it: Theocrats (and their ilk). Trick or subpoena treat!
Yes, I already voted. Over half the races on my ballot included an individual unfit for (any) public office, which says something rather distressing about the contemporary political process in the US.
- I don't often link to TNR; its proclamation that it has "independent reporting" is… puffery at best, and closer to deceptive branding/advertising. Despite that skepticism, sometimes it prints outside (that is, not written by staff) book reviews worth pondering, even when they fall short. The difficulty with Professor Lanham's approach is that it doesn't even mention the two barriers — familiar to anyone who understands either the scientific method or the more obstinately-classical Aristotelian logic — that make all varieties of "originalism" untenable as an unsupplemented deterministic method.
Originalism necessarily assumes that texts have single, identifiable authors — even if that single, identifiable author is "a momentary agreement among individuals," such as "the US Constitutional Convention of 1787." As to the US Constitution itself, the very existence of both The Federalist Papers and The Antifederalist Papers — with their strident, contemporaneous, and often utterly incompatible interpretations, not to mention that there were members of the Constitutional Convention on both "sides." Contract disputes present a more-familiar problem; remember that by definition, a contract is supposedly formed only by a "meeting of minds." Then, too, there's the assumption that that author was a competent writer in the first place, who actually meant exactly what was written (and teh converse). So that's a theory-based problem.
There's a much more disturbing dataset problem, especially as one gets farther in place or in time from the document(s) at issue. It's epitomized by this newpaper headline from last century:
Dewey Defeats Truman!
Recall that the Trib reached that result through a telephone poll of those it considered likely voters — which, if the data set had reached Mississippi, wouldn't have included very many descendants of slaves; which, closer to home, wouldn't have included those who didn't have telephones at home, or who didn't answer during their dinner hour, or who worked odd shifts or were otherwise away from home; it definitely wouldn't have included anyone in the military. In short the "public" from which the Trib drew its "facts" was nonrepresentative. It's even worse stretching to two and a half centuries ago; one might well wonder what Crispus Attucks would have thought "free persons" meant, but that would require that his writings had (a) considered the matter, (b) survived to the present, and (c) existed in the first place. Much the same for marginally-literate farmers. Or teh wimmin, who didn't have the right to vote, who didn't have the right to independently make and enforce contracts, who may have been residents but were certainly not thought of by the Founders as "citizens" (when thought of at all).
- This year's set of Nobel economics laureates (admittedly, the prize in economics is not technically a Nobel) is a collection of advocates for democracy (and implicitly for equality of rights). It's worth pondering how this fits in with upper-class politicians, especially those beholden to business interests.
And, of course, congratulations to them and their fellow laureates in other fields.
- Languages evolve, sometimes (with official sanction) toward idiocy. But then, if mugging other languages in dark alleys (or even broad daylight) and going through their pockets for loose grammar and vocabulary were a crime, English would have been locked up centuries ago as a habitual and repeat offender (and at any trial, would have proclaimed not innocence but justification).
Any relationship of this sausage to the others on this platter is entirely intentional — and purposely ambiguous.