1) Liberty Fund conferences attract idea geeks -- people who will stay up until 2;00 AM debating the merits and demerits of different ideas. That's kind of the point of these things.Idea geeks. Okay. Well, my experience in legal academia is that people who try to get into the idea geek zone need to get their pretensions punctured right away. The sharp lawprof types I admire always see a veneer on top of something more important, and our instinct is to peel it off. What is your love of this idea really about? That's our method.
2) I've never encountered any racist attitudes, ideas, or even the benign neglect of these attitudes at these conferences.
3) At these conferences I have, on occasion, encountered a personality type that I suspect gave Althouse the willies -- people so besotted with the positive appeal of an abstract idea that they will argue in its defense against any and all comers. Indeed, they consider this a pleasurable activity. The worst of these lot will pooh-pooh valid counterarguments or appeals to pragmatism as besides the Big Point they are trying to make. Let's call these people True Believers.
4) Give that these are Liberty Fund conferences, I would wager that libertarians comprise a high percentage of True Believers at these functions compared to other ideologies.
5) Despite point (4), True Believers make up a very small minority of overall Liberty Fund attendees. Indeed, with the acknowledgment that modern liberals are probably the least represented group at these functions, the intellectual and professional diversity of these conferences is pretty broad.
6) I'm enough of an idea geek that I'm usually glad that one or two True Believers are in attendance, because it forces me to keep my arguments sharp in a Millian sense of debate.
7) The overwhelmingly predominant personality type in attendance at these functions are Contrarians. Wich [sic], of course, makes consensus pretty much a logical impossibility.
We are here to harsh your geek zone mellow.
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But he's discussing intellectuals, not lawyers.
I have to say that Drezner is probably my favorite blogging head; I've loved his contributions, I like his blog, and he's fairly high on my list of "bloggers I'd like to meet."
With that having been said, I think that when you're talking about normative political theory, you have to consider the consequences. So to that extent, I agree with Ann here. But on the other hand, re peeling back veneers, I think that when you're talking about descriptive interpretation, you should be more concerned with getting the right answer, no matter what the consequences. If I were massively in favor of the death penalty, and I believed that it was the backbone of the American criminal justice system without which criminality would flourish, and yet I determined that the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment categorically forbade the death penalty, that's the end of the debate (none of the foregoing is true, of course, but it's the first hypothetical that jumped to mind). If I had been sitting on the Heart of Atlanta court, and after careful consideration, I had determined that the Constitution did not give Congress authority to pass the CRA, it makes no difference to the outcome of the case what he consequences of that determination would be, although I would certainly have filed an op/ed in the New York Times the next day urging that the Constitutiuon be amended to give Congress that authority (although to be clear, I am not suggesting that I think Heart of Atlanta was wrongly decided, and even if it was, I would not overrule it today).
Whether consequentialism has a place depends wholly on whether you're talking about normative or descriptive questions. If the former is at issue, I can't agree with Dan on this - failing to consider consequences is dereliction of intellectual duty.
So Althouse geeks have a new euphemism for "having a really bad time". We can say, "That's worse than having dinner with a bunch of Libertarian idea geeks." Or, "I'd rather hang out with Libertarian idea geeks than [insert unpleasant task here]."
"We are here to harsh your geek zone mellow."
Reads like:
"All your base are belong to us"
I like it.
Re: Drezner,s #2 2) I've never encountered any racist attitudes, ideas, or even the benign neglect of these attitudes at these conferences.
So I assume this wolf stays under the covers until Little Red Riding Hood shows up and says "But Grandma what big teeth you have."
For some reason I think the Transhumanist stuff broke out a little later, things got a little out of hand, and it all went down like this
Poor Ann.
My major thought about the conference so far has been, God, Professor Althouse would be the most miserable person in the world at a scientific conference. So I like Drezner's thoughts a lot; this seems like an adequate point for everyone to shrug and say, OK, people talking past people. Possibly some of the people in question being over-academicked types.
...harsh...mellow.
Marshmallow. Harsh hallow. Marsh hello.
Are we doing spoonerisms again?
Shiloh Pitt!
Well, my experience in legal academia is that people who try to get into the idea geek zone need to get their pretensions punctured right away. The sharp lawprof types I admire always see a veneer on top of something more important, and our instinct is to peel it off. What is your love of this idea really about? That's our method.
We are here to harsh your geek zone mellow.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
-Oscar Wilde
The opposite of creativity is cynicism
-Esa Saarinen
It's hard to argue against cynics - they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side
-Molly Ivins
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism
-George Meredith
A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye
-Carolyn Wells
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
-H. L. Mencken
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
-Sidney J. Harris
The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.
-Henry L. Stimson
It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.
-Fannie Hurst
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
-Henry Ward Beecher
Every person has the power to make others happy.
Some do it simply by entering a room --
others by leaving the room.
Some individuals leave trails of gloom;
others, trails of joy.
Some leave trails of hate and bitterness;
others, trails of love and harmony.
Some leave trails of cynicism and pessimism;
others trails of faith and optimism.
Some leave trails of criticism and resignation;
others trails of gratitude and hope.
What kind of trails do you leave?
-William Arthur Ward
Althouse said: "Well, my experience in legal academia is that people who try to get into the idea geek zone need to get their pretensions punctured right away. The sharp lawprof types I admire always see a veneer on top of something more important, and our instinct is to peel it off. What is your love of this idea really about? That's our method."
The above sentiment, as well as your end of the conversation at the Liberty Fund dinner that set off this spat with Ron Bailey, seems awful close to giving undue credence to ad hominem forms of argumentation and judgment. It's one thing to want to examine more closely how ideas too blindly adhered to might play out in real life, but another to focus on the suspected (but usually unknowable) motivations and bad faith of the person advancing an idea. This ad hominem focus and "method" seems all too common in legal academia and journalism, and the "instinct" to "peel . . . off" the "veneer on top" of an arguer's "love of this idea" seems closer to an example of this reliance on ad hominem argumentation than the more noble-sounding "puncturing of pretensions." A bad person with bad motivations (and we should always avoid judging a person thusly until the evidence really proves it) can make a good argument, and we should engage the ideas on their own terms.
I disagree with pragmatism as a personal philosophy. Dumping over-arching ideas for point-by-point concretes leaves one debating example after example. Idea people will always have an easier time dealing with difficult issues. Pragmatists will continuously be bombarded by the 'grayness' of everything. This also explains why Ann Althouse cannot be pigeonholed. Pragmatists believe the final result is what should be judged. I prefer to know what the principle is and recognize that there are many fewer occasions where the principle doesn't apply (also known as emergencies or exceptions) than where it does apply.
Obviously I wasn't at the conference but are you sure they weren't taking the mick, half the time? Libs enjoy oppositionalism don't they - have a lok at 5thnovember.blogspot.com for UK libs mocking politics.
The sharp lawprof types I admire always see a veneer on top of something more important, and our instinct is to peel it off. What is your love of this idea really about? That's our method.
Sounds like (yawn) deconstruction, which even English profs are getting bored with. If you're at a conference to discuss ideas, then it's the idea that matters, not why a particlar person loves it.
Maybe you should try attending a similar conference on the Left. Based on your positions on this blog, I bet you wouldn't get too far into the discussion before you were the one being deconstructed and called a racist. Might give you some perspective.
Well, my experience in legal academia is that people who try to get into the idea geek zone need to get their pretensions punctured right away. The sharp lawprof types I admire always see a veneer on top of something more important, and our instinct is to peel it off. What is your love of this idea really about? That's our method.
That sounds like a slippery method of side-stepping the debate.
""Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." - Sidney Hook
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