It amuses me to have a go at translating this Livejournal entry by François-René Rideau (“Faré”):

. . . in taking positions based on static emotions disconnected from causal mechanisms, [the socialists] come to advocate absurdities. The more Swiss cheese, the more holes; the more holes, the less cheese; therefore, the more cheese, the less cheese. Correlations with moving referent, variation of the constant, semantic slippage — an anti-conceptual mentality, impaired from proper reasoning, exposes itself to such sophisms.
. . .
Enemy of the people and of the other enemies of the people, alone in the world where man is man’s wolf, where each is the enemy of all — behold at once the spectre that socialism demonizes and the prophecy that socialism realizes.

To which I suppose a socialist would say, I know you are but what am I?

Some of Faré’s entries are in (excellent) English, by the way.

The Manchester Guardian (Oct.27):

Torture is simple – amazing results can be achieved with the everyday household objects that any Blue Peter presenter might recommend. And it’s really sexy – think of all that painstaking attention to genital areas. Better yet, it’s about power – having the power to make somebody into something. The kind of exhilarating stuff you’re not supposed to try at home. Never mind that even Malleus Maleficarum (the original torture manual for the Spanish Inquisition) cautioned that its victims might say anything to make it stop – torture is definitely about truth and about justice springing in a really surprising and frankly rather ill-defined way from unjust and criminal acts, and don’t forget, if we don’t do it to them, they’ll do it to us.

Cited by the Future of Freedom Foundation. There’s a daily mailing of links, but I don’t see offhand how to subscribe.

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.

carob nanotubes

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.