maybe it shoulda been called the Kallikak monkey trial
Inherit the Wind somehow never mentioned that the evilutionist textbook used by John Scopes was racist and eugenist. Jim Lindgren, Volokh Conspirator, has the story.
About a decade ago, someone or other wrote in The Nation advocating that the Left reclaim the word populist. I was tempted to send a letter asking whether, in that case, we individualists could have liberal back.
The Economist, in its current issue, makes a similar plea for liberal, remarking:
“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well – even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government – in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms.
H L Mencken, quoted by David Friedman in the December issue of Liberty
In nothing did the founders of this country so demonstrate their essential naïveté than in attempting to constrain government from all of its favorite abuses, and entrusting the enforcement of these protections to judges; that is to say, men who had been lawyers; that is to say, men professionally trained in finding plausible excuses for dishonest and dishonorable acts.
Mark A R Kleiman says a number of sane things, but also this:
Requiring everyone who wants to have a gun to apply for a discretionary permit . . . serves no good purpose that I can see. The same is true of making a national registry of firearms and their owners. . . .
If and when it becomes technically feasible, we also need a database of ballistic signatures so that a bullet or shell casing found at a crime scene can be linked to the gun that fired it, and that gun in turn to its last lawful purchaser.
I deleted three paragraphs between, during which perhaps he changed his mind.
Kleiman also mentions Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer together, vaguely enough that I can’t tell whether or not he means to repeat the slander refuted by Roderick Long.
Joe Sobran’s view of Lincoln is more charitable than that of (say) Neil Smith or Thomas DiLorenzo, not that that’s saying much, but he still calls the war a tragic blunder.
Given the timing of that column (October 7), I wonder whether Sobran had the same thought as I, that the recent polarization of our politics should make talk of secession more palatable to the mainstream.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, quoted in The Economist Oct.30 p.48
If men are to wait for liberty till they become good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.