Oh, great, just what we needed: conservatives learn how to play the victimization game (Jesse Walker, Reason, May 8).
Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
Overlawyered
Point of Law- Hoping to boost book sales, perhaps?Naomi Klein, eh? Just happened to see her name the other day. She's one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU's suit challenging the just-signed FISA Amendments Act (Public Law No: 110-261). From the lawsuit, page 29: "Nation contributor Naomi Klein...Carter Wood
- More on the Michigan schemeHaving spent a lot of time around state legislators over the years, just can't get enough of the news out of Michigan today. (See James Copland's post here.) Reform Michigan Government Now's proposed constitutional amendment is revealed to be a...Carter Wood
- Worst book of the yearClearly Naomi Klein's godawful The Shock Doctrine, with its conspiracy theories blaming free-market economists for every bad thing to happen in the world, is headed for that honor. Earlier here and here....Walter Olson
- A depressing book on antidepressants?In yesterday's WSJ, Mark Herrmann of Drug & Device Law Blog fame reviews what he depicts as a lamentably one-sided treatment of the controversy over alleged side effects of Prozac and other antidepressants: "Side Effects" [by Alison Bass] belongs to...Walter Olson
- Some interstitial thoughts on judicial selection and electionsJim and Walter have done an excellent job of covering the waterfront (Jim even quoted my criticism of the "Missouri Plan"!), so let me restrict myself to some additional thoughts they haven't addressed:...Ted Frank
- Hoping to boost book sales, perhaps?
- Volokh
- Josh Chafetz Guest-Blogging:I'm delighted to report that Josh Chafetz will be guest-blogging here next week. Josh is a law professor at Cornell, a scholar of British and American legal history, the author of...Eugene Volokh
- Third Circuit Rejects Proposed New "Depiction of Animal Cruelty" First Amendment Exception,by a 10-3 en banc vote (U.S. v. Stevens). Here's my summary of the issue from when I blogged about another such case last year, though I've revised it...Eugene Volokh
- Barack Obama on Iraq.--The McCain campaign has a long, nearly 8-minute ad up on its website, which is mostly just video clips of Barack Obama's statements on Iraq, interspersed with derogatory slides expressing...Jim Lindgren
- Three Difficulties With Using State Constitutional Rights to Infer Federal Constitutional Rights:I really appreciate Eugene's thoughtful response to my earlier questions about the relevance of state constitutional rights to whether courts should infer or an analogous federal constitutional right. At...Orin Kerr
- The Meaning of "the"--Dave Kopel argues that the use of the word "the" in "THE right to keep and bear arms" indicates that the right was pre-existing....Jim Lindgren
- Josh Chafetz Guest-Blogging:
Victimhood claims are the nuclear warfare of today’s politics. The only possible response to launch your own missiles. The columnist seems to seek a world in which declaring your strength and virtue are winning positions. I sympathize, but this doesn’t generally work. Nobody in our newly globalized democracy draws laurels by proclaiming greatness. That may in part be because such proclamations don’t spur action - people are motivated by claimed needs to reform or to avenge more than claimed needs to protect and preserve.
The best combination is to claim extreme victimhood while exhibiting strength and ferocity in the pursuit of political goals. The truth is that all politics are “identity politics.”
“Victimhood claims are the nuclear warfare of today’s politics. The only possible response to launch your own missiles.”
Exactly. As soon as the rules of political correctness and victimhood have to apply equally, they will be scrapped (which is GOOD).
If you’ve got another way to get rid of them, let’s hear it.
Sometimes the only way to fight the other guy’s transvaluation, is with a transvaluation of your own.
Group competition is almost necessarily phrased in good guys vs bad guys terminology. There have been few times in history when it was otherwise.