Instead, permanently irasced. Fortunately for those of my three regular readers who have sensitive dispositions, Life has gotten in the way of blawgging of late. There are only so many times one can point out that all officers of the United States (including both the military and everyone else) take an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Not to support and defend one's personal interests, or tribal allegiances, or self-righteous moral doctrines — the Constitution. A document that had embedded in it both a self-awareness of possible error and an inherent, limited, and direct mechanism for change (which is one of its two fundamental innovations — most others, however radical in substance, are mere more-extreme examples from late-eighteen-century systems).1 A document that proclaims itself as less than perfection, a mere guide toward creating a "more perfect"2 union.
OK, then. On to the rather unappetizing platter of sausages — a platter that epitomizes "you really, really wouldn't want to have seen these sausages being made."
- The Grauniad yet again wonders about the Problem of the Dishonest Memoir, which sounds like — but isn't — Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Maybe the problem isn't with the books, but with the selection process for them (and the marketing process thereafter). As a thought experiment, it would be worth comparing the reality games played in Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 with those in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, and pondering that one author successfully used the form of the memoir to comment on reality and evolution of a single soul, while one… did not. Then reverse the marketing categories plastered onto the books…
- That may be too much heavy thinking for a July heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere. How about the much simpler "eat the rich"? It's not like there are no examples, all in very poor taste, ranging from housing bubbles to succession crises IRL and even "meritocracy" as the emperor's new clothes. Or maybe we could just consider "entitlement as practiced by the fictional rich," either in the present tense or a century in the past (as carefully elided by Disney in a "classic period" animation involving lots and lots of puppies).
- That last aside leads into this month's episode #2716 of musicians are getting ripped off by the distribution system at least as much as audience-victims of TicketBastard while questioning whether there has ever been a middle class of musicians earning their living from music — or whether that would be a good thing in the first place. The irony that both of those links go through "begging walls" may be a bit much for a hot Monday afternoon, though.
- What this says about the intellectual dishonesty of slavish adherence to a vision of "original public meaning" is for another time. At that time, we'll consider things like "who is the public," "what nature of evidence is there of the 'public meaning,'" "must, or even should, clearly technical contexts always use 'public meaning' as their touchstone, as in the word 'judg[]ment,'" and perhaps most egregiously "does the 'public' of 'who is the public' form a union-set with the sources of evidence of 'public meaning.'" But what would I know about that, after struggling with the disjunctures within Beilstein as both German and the underlying knowledge of chemistry evolved over a century, or after dealing directly with [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] with their overt temporal shifts in meaning in my first profession?
- Perhaps examining the use of the word "perfect" in mathematics, and particularly the mathematics of the late eighteenth century as well known to (among others) Franklin, Jefferson, and Samuel Adams, might be
valuablevirtually impossible given the utter lack of basic mathematical and scientific literacy (past the "rocks for jocks" general education courses) endemic in the legal and political communities. Except, that is, among some economists and MBAs who have fun manipulating the numbers to support their preconceived notions, supremely confident that no one who they might otherwise respect will challenge either the numbers… or the data-gathering methods. It would also require thinking about "boundary conditions" — something that advocates of "original public meaning" try desperately to evade.