Tom the Dancing Bug: Why Johnny Joins the Taliban. Link relayed by an Awaiter who commented, “it’s pathetic that anyone even has to point this out.” Funny, tho.

Many years later: Newer link.

Which side of the road do they drive on? With lots of history, theory and anecdotes.

William Sulik seems to say that we ought to act not on our own mores but on those of our more enlightened descendants. Neat trick if you can manage it: like predicting an innovation.

What made 1861 such a hot topic in the blogs of late? Douglas Turnbull wrote:

So yes, there may be a Constitutional case for a state’s right to secede from the Union, but the Southern states did not secede just to show they could, to demonstrate the proof of the abstract principle of states rights. They seceded because they felt their pecific right to slavery was in danger from Lincoln and the North, and then used the argument of states rights as a justification. I really don’t see how anyone can plausibly deny the primary role that slavery played in the decision of the Southern states to secede.

An argument has been made that the issue of slavery was a proxy for Southern sectional interest, rather than the reverse.

Northern population was growing more rapidly than Southern. (Lincoln was the first president elected without a single Southern vote.) Southerners called for the extension of slavery into the new Western states in the hope that Western senators would tend to align with the South. When the crunch came, “a threat to the sanctity of our distinctive domestic institution” made a better sound-bite than “the increasing irrelevance of our votes.”

This view is bolstered by the facts that Congress proposed an Amendment protecting slavery – and that this gesture did the Union cause little if any good: none of the seven(?) preceding secessions was reversed, and four more followed.

Office lottery in ancient Athens.

In short, the lottery – and the great Iron Age pachinko machine that was its finest expression and most powerful tool – made the first democracy what it was. Together, the system and its technology enabled Athenians not just to recognize but to live what Aristotle, in his Politics, considered one of democracy’s defining principles: “ruling and being ruled in turn.”

Amendment XVII to the U.S.Constitution removed a bit of diversity – and thus a layer of sanity-checking – from the Federal legislature, by making both houses elected in the same way. If indirect election had to be replaced, better to replace it with something else entirely; lottery is the obvious choice.

Several blogs today have mentioned a certain former president of Megaserbia Jugoslavija; and that reminded me of Private Eye’s log of the twenty-two last chances in 1991-99.

Victor Davis Hanson, in an otherwise splendid defense of Americanism and the melting pot, says:

Mr. Karzai needs something like the U.S. Constitution and an Abraham Lincoln a lot more than he needs $15 billion.

Would this be the same Lincoln who said violent secession was legitimate but peaceful secession was not, whose lifelong dream was to complete American unity by deporting the Negros, who turned what might be friendship (as between us and Britain) into generations-long resentment? Or some other Abraham Lincoln?