I’ll bet your mother asked you, when you were about eight years old: “If all the other blogs posted their philosopher scores, would you?” (Warning: popups.)

• 1.00 Mill
• .82 Bentham (?!)
• .76 Epicureans
• .65 Kant
• .63 Sartre
• .55 Aquinas
• .51 Aristotle
• .44 Prescriptivism / Rand / Noddings
• .41 Spinoza
• .34 Hobbes
• .31 Augustine
• .30 Cynics
• .26 Ockham
• .25 Hume
• .22 Nietzsche / Stoics
• .16 Plato

Heh. [This blog was originally titled Sightseeing in Plato’s Cave.] Yes, I disagree with most of what I know of Plato, but I still like the metaphor of the Cave. (Beats calling my blog Fat Loser or something.)

Bill Quick comments:

I wonder if these people have heard of the 14th Amendment? It extended the provisions in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the people of the individual states. Of course, that only happened in 1868, so maybe word hasn’t filtered out to Chicago yet.

It doesn’t matter here what provision of the Bill of Rights he’s talking about, because I’m only using this item as a hook to gripe about the goofy doctrine of ‘incorporation’.

Apparently, each provision of the BoR applies to the several States only if the Supreme Court gets around to saying it does, i.e. ‘incorporating’ each clause under the Fourteenth. There is obviously no textual support for this in the Fourteenth itself.

One may respond that there is no explicit Constitutional ground for the judicial veto at all (and I won’t touch that one just now); but by 1866, when they wrote the Fourteenth, Congress was acquainted with the practice and might have provided for a special procedure if that was their intent. Congress did not.

To put it another way: with its Fourteenth Amendment practice the Court went beyond its earlier practice of judging the validity of legislation, to insert itself as an active participant in making legislation valid or invalid.

Can someone explain this to me?

Ask Dave about Tic-Tac-Toe and keep your game sharp and exciting! (by way of the muted horn)

Everybody’s mourning Spike Milligan today. Strangely, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard any of his work.

LotR: same old thing?

Go get ’em! The LP responds to the notorious infamous “if you buy dope you’re supporting terrorism” spot with this newspaper advertisement. (Thanks to Ananda, who credits Declan McCullagh.)

Pet peeve nº 17000: false precision. When you write “boosts . . . by 17,000 percent” do you really expect anyone to divide the original number (if it were available) by 100, multiply it by 17000 and add it back? Do you really expect me to believe that the increase is known to be neither more than 17005% nor less than 16995%? Would it be harder to write “171-fold”?

The funniest example I’ve seen of pseudo-precision was a package of sandwich-bags marked “25% free! 32 for the price of 25.”

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.