George Mason renaming its law school The Antonin Scalia School of Law. The late Justice, a genuinely beloved teacher, must be on cloud nine!— Nina Totenberg (@NinaTotenberg) March 31, 2016
Then I saw:
Come on, people...
March 31, 2016
Is April Fool's Day getting an early start this year?
I saw:
Then I saw:
Come on, people...
Then I saw:
Come on, people...
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72 comments:
These days it's hard to differentiate........
a little context:
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1103.pdf
Six months until Dump Obama day. It will be interesting to see how much damage he can do in six months. Obama can take many vacations and world surrender tours, but the end is near.
Isn't using nukes in Europe ( or at least holding out the possibility of doing so ) the whole reason we have nukes in the first place? Yeah, sure, China too.
I'm not suggesting that we nuke Brussels ( at least not at first ), but significant portions of Russia are in Europe. If you contemplate engaging in nuclear war ( or use the threat of it to deter an invasion by conventional forces ) then where else do you suggest the nukes to go?
Trumps talks about attacking the USA; The Obama-Hillary pair has actually done so.
A pretty commonly held opinion not too long ago.
Back during the cold war, it was assumed that we would use nukes in Europe to counter a Soviet invasion. We didn't have enough forces in Europe to stop them, otherwise. That was what the neutron bomb was about.
My God, journalists are stupid. You know that drunk guy at the bar who won't shut up about the tri-lateral commission? That's what most political journalists are like. It is not hard to get a journalism degree.
We should use nuclear weapons in Europe. We shouldn't use nuclear weapons on Europe.
Either these educated elites aren't very smart, or, they are lying to us.
It's sad that our "news" is either lying to us, or too stupid to know what the hell is being discussed.
Leftist reporter, formerly married to a Democratic Senator, comments about a non-leftist law school being named after famous conservative Justice. Yawn.
eric said...
We should use nuclear weapons in Europe. We shouldn't use nuclear weapons on Europe.
If I remember correctly from the owner's manual, we're actually supposed to use them slightly above Europe.
For maximum effect.
Nice to see Scalia getting some due--but it won't be square until he has a major airport named after him like Thurgood Marshall did.
Why is using nukes in Europe so "off the table"? It's obviously not our policy to use nukes willy nilly, anywhere--but the whole point of the nuclear deterrent is that defensive use of nukes is on the table anywhere. That includes in the U.S. as well.
Or do some people think ruling out their use won't make it ridiculous to even have them in the first place?
Trump did say that Brussels is a hell hole. Maybe he'll nuke it first to protect Belgians from terrorists.
I'm wondering why the Professor felt the Scalia thing had to be a joke, since it appears to be entirely accurate:
http://www.law.gmu.edu/news/2016/scalia_school_of_law_announcement
I suspect an honest answer would be quite illuminating.
Reagan got National Airport named after him, as a giant F. U. to the air traffic controllers.
What could we name after Scalia that would really tweak the haters?
"What could we name after Scalia that would really tweak the haters?"
My vote would be re-naming JFK Airport. Two birds with one stone.
Agreed. Why would GMU Law naming itself after Scalia be a joke?
Renaming the Brennan Center for Justice the Vladimar Lenin Center for Justice would convince me that the country had turned a corner. The so-called conservatives in congress couldn't even defund NPR when its managers were caught, on tape, offering to take money to slant their product a certain way.
In ten years or so Europe will be mostly Muslim. Best to wait until then.
Chicago? Chicago is nuking itself.
I'm pleased to George Mason U. honoring Scalia. It's very appropriate.
The vacancy on the Supreme Court should from here on be known as "the Scalia chair" or "the Scalia seat."
All the Russias are in Europe. Siberia and the -stans are in Asia.
When out on maneuver, we would occasionally see an atomic cannon stuck in a roadside ditch where it had not made it around a curve. Tactical nuclear weapons in Europe is not a new thing.
Great PR move for GMU--any that follow won't have the same impact.
Tactical nukes have been in Europe for decades for use if Russia invades Nothing new in that they could be used in Europe
If the president is not willing to use nukes - in Europe or anywhere else - to defend our nation or allies from the ultimate aggression, then we made a horrible electoral mistake. Nukes exist. We have them. They're an option on the table, whether we acknowledge it or not. Why is this challenging for you to grasp, Althouse?
Thread winner (IMHO) - Ignorance is Bliss at 3:11PM
If memory serves, about 2-6 thousand feet, depending on yield, for maximum Mach stem and shockwave propagation.
First we'll deploy the nuclear weapons. Then we'll backup over the survivors. Finally we'll abort any bitter clingers.
Oh, and there will be planning for the profitable parts. #CecileTheCannibal
Well, the only reason I had a Secret clearance is so that I could learn how to emplace Nuclear Demolition Charges in Europe. So personally, I spent some significant time contemplating how to use nukes in Europe. Not very pleasant day dreams really, but by the time I took the course the Soviet Union was already collapsing so it didn't seem likely.
"I'm not suggesting that we nuke Brussels ( at least not at first )"
How very Christian of you. The nice, new kind I mean. Not the Crusader kind. They'd definitely nuke Molenbeek.
Kyzernick and Ignorance is Bliss:
Not all of them, some of them are (were?) for use at or below ground level.
It's the only way to be sure.
Amazon: On Thermonuclear War
Some people thought deeply about war, nuclear weapons, and how to protect our nation and way of life. Those serious people were laughed at and mocked by the Left and popular culture, and now it is considered backwards and rude to even discuss nuclear weapons at all--the smart people pretend like they don't exist.
Ours is an unserious culture. I have read enough history to know that when an unserious culture clashes with a serious one the result is often not pretty.
We have NEVER pledged not to use nukes first. EVER. The WHOLE POINT, (as some here have already pointed out) was originally to use them as a deterrent and against being overrun by a numerical superior Soviet Union. As some one who used to sit nuclear alert in my F-4 ("Victor Alert") on top of a nuke at my twin base complex in the UK and also down in Incirlik, Turkey, 69-71 I can attest to the fact that our warplans were ALL based on "first use." (Use 'em or lose 'em)
HoodlumDoodlum, that book is one of the few dozen that I own that will never make it's way into the "garage sale" bin - ever. It was a chilling read to be sure, but more informative than I'd bargained on.
Holdfast, you're correct. ADMs (the so-called suitcase nukes, though they were quite a bit bigger than that), were designed for sabotaging enemy advances and strategic junctions, and certain nuclear bombs could be fitted with parachutes and hardened casings that were designed for something called a "laydown" delivery. The bomb, once dropped, would actually fall to the ground and detonate a few seconds after impact. These were for hardened targets like submarine pens and equipment storage depots.
@holdfast. Yes one was designed for a "laydown" delivery as an airfield killer in which it would float down by parachute (giving the ac time to get away) and stick in a runway with a giant spike in the nose. The chute was designed so it would slowly drape over the bomb which degraded the ability of base security services to target it and destroy it conventionally before it exploded. Another was designed to burrow underneath runways upon slant-range impact.
LOL, I see Kyzernick, above, beat me to it.
FWIW ADMs were to be dispensed by giant "ditch digger' like machines for NATO to rapidly deploy them before impending hostilities, NATO worried about the security of pre-hostility ADMS. Only the Turks were pugnacious enough (and realistic enough, one might say) to actually bury theirs along the Russian/Turkish border. There is some evidence that they have been left there to his very day.
George Mason was a real person, worthy of respect. To just oust him...
Scalia is a very particular Justice, representing one side of many ongoing legal controversies. To identify the school so conspicuously with one side strikes me as suggesting that the full range of thought on the subjects is not going to be presented. It's too contemporary, too much in dispute, too offputting to many students. I would be wary of it even if I felt strongly aligned with Scalia decisions.
When I went to law school, I felt that we were being instructed that Justice Brennan was the Justice who was getting it right. If they renamed the school the William Brennan School of Law that would have made me feel more deprived of an in-depth education than I already felt.
Yeah, you wouldn't want George Mason U to get a reputation for not being open minded enough. Not like all those other schools of higher education where all viewpoints are welcome, nor sir.
Hey what would you say are the rough ideological breakdowns of !most law schools? I mean, if there are 206 law schools in the US how many would you say are Right-leaning in a general sense? 10%? 20%? How many are Left-leaning?
George Mason is not being ousted: "The new full name of the Arlington, Va., school will be the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, school officials said," according to the Wall Street Journal.
If, as seems more likely than not, Merrick Garland is confirmed by December and Hillary Clinton is sworn in in January, Scalia's death will be the grave marker for the Burger-Rehnquist-Roberts conservative era of the Court. So perhaps the tribute of having a law school named after him is fitting, as much for what he represents in death as what he did in life.
"Scalia is a very particular Justice, representing one side of many ongoing legal controversies."
Would any of the liberal justices ever be described in such a way? Or does the fact that the liberal justices vote in lockstep whenever it matters insulate them from being considered "very particular" about anything?
Also...
"George Mason was a real person, worthy of respect. To just oust him..."
George Mason advocated for strong local government and weak central government. Who better in a modern context to represent that viewpoint than Scalia?
GMU is pretty right wing. I have Ed Meese's signature on my diploma.
I went to the Totenberg tweet and read the thread. One guy said that Scalia failed every one of his black students on purpose while at U of Chicago, citing a Gawker link. Another said he would never attend a law school named for Scalia, and further, he had $300,000 in student debt (JD and MFA) but that Obama was going to forgive all student debt under $500,000, and thank you taxpayer-suckers, more like this.
April Fools indeed. Them and us both. Is everyone nuts?
I vote for the Hamilton Burger School of Law. Poor doofus never won a case, but spent his entire career prosecuting innocent people. Wonder how he slept at night. Probably went to work at the IRS and mentored Lois Lerner.
Trump is not stupid, unlike Obungle. He said over and over that you don't take anything "off the table." Why should he tell people now what he might or might not do. It was like Pres. Idiot telling everyone the exact date we were leaving Iraq. Stupid, counterproductive, treasonous for a POTUS.
Nina Totenbag.
During pledge week, you get a free totenbag for your orgasmic vegetative state of mind
Ok, my comment here is way down the list so might not be read. I note that all the above comments on use of Nukes was about Europe and not one comment on a Nuke in/on/over Chicago. I guess that would be OK with everyone, except of course The Mayor.
Ann is micro-offended by the naming of the school after the greatest Supreme in a long time. Not to mention they raised $30M. I'm sure there is a safe spot at her school where she can pet puppies. Or she is trolling and I took the bait.
Hey Donald, drop that Chicago bomb at the corner of Meade Avenue & Lawrence Avenue!!!!!!
At some point in time I was going to get a photo of this corner and send them to Ann. I figured that they would get a kick out of it. I just looked on a map and while there are in fact two streets named Meade and Lawrence (I think Meade's first name is spelled differently)they actually do not cross. For some reason Meade Avenue dead ends at Gunnison St., which is about a half block north of Lawrence Avenue!!! Oh well, so much for good intentions.
"To identify the school so conspicuously with one side strikes me as suggesting that the full range of thought on the subjects is not going to be presented. It's too contemporary, too much in dispute, too offputting to many students" As opposed to all the other schools inconspicuously identified with one side, where" the full range of thought on the subjects" is always presented, and which are not at all "off-putting to to many students." Because they are so, what's the word, help me out here.
"the full range of thought on the subjects is not going to be presented."
And the "full range of thought" is presented where ?
"I vote for the Hamilton Burger School of Law."
I have met a few graduates.
Fun bedside reading:
- On Thermonuclear War (Kahn)
- Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (Kissinger)
- Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Glasstone)
I read the first two while avoiding solving elliptical integrals at UCB back in '78.
There's another one I can't find a ref to online now for some reason: "The Prompt and Delayed Effects of Nuclear Weapons", which I found while wasting time in the stacks of the UCB undergrad library.
The first two are really essential reading for understanding that part of the Cold War.
streiff, who dials up erickson to eleventy, exaggerated that last part, my recollection was strangelove and his counterpart in failsafe, was a mishmash of kissinger and kahn,
Nick and Laslo never post at the same time.
I'm quite glad we don't worry any more about the Warsaw Pact sending tens of thousands of tanks through the Fulda Gap. After all villages in West Germany are only about two kilotons apart.
"Scalia is a very particular Justice, representing one side of many ongoing legal controversies."
Surely there is 'right' and 'wrong' involved? Representing the right side of a controversy is not a bad thing. Eugenics comes to mind.
For the Fulda Gap - the Davy Crockett was designed in the 1950s. The rocket projectile was fired by a an armor or mechanized infantry team - it had a 1.5 or 2.5 mile range. The nuclear device had a lethal range of 0.25 miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Scalia is a very particular Justice, representing one side of many ongoing legal controversies. To identify the school so conspicuously with one side strikes me as suggesting that the full range of thought on the subjects is not going to be presented. It's too contemporary, too much in dispute, too offputting to many students. I would be wary of it even if I felt strongly aligned with Scalia decisions.
George Mason has been a right-wing law school for a long time. They hire pro-life law professors, libertarian law professors, law-and-economics law professors. Anybody Republican who has been blacklisted at other law schools may find a home at George Mason. They have consciously and appropriately defined themselves in opposition to all the liberal law schools that teach identity politics, critical race theory, and gender studies.
Scalia tried to hire Ann Althouse, so clearly they know what they are doing!
"Yeah, you wouldn't want George Mason U to get a reputation for not being open minded enough. Not like all those other schools of higher education where all viewpoints are welcome, nor sir. Hey what would you say are the rough ideological breakdowns of !most law schools? I mean, if there are 206 law schools in the US how many would you say are Right-leaning in a general sense? 10%? 20%? How many are Left-leaning?"
What you're missing is that George Mason already had the reputation as the right-leaning law school. That's something that should be done with elegance and loftiness and the name George Mason worked very well to that end. It's something that already worked.
"George Mason is not being ousted: "The new full name of the Arlington, Va., school will be the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, school officials said," according to the Wall Street Journal."
Thanks for the link to the article. It says article says "Change comes after school received two donations totaling $30 million." So the question whether it was a good idea in the abstract was strongly skewed by money.
Anyway, in answer to your point is that the law school has changed its name and the university has not.
If you contribute enough money, you can get a law school to change its name. You can also get a name on the building or a room. We have several rooms with names attached to them. No name on the whole building. To get the whole school named though, that is a huge deal. That means all the grads will be saying "I went to the Scalia School of Law." What kind of reaction is that going to get?! It's too specific, too fraught with meaning.
Why would I ever trust a journalist who made up half a headline link as clickbait?
He just destroyed whatever credibility he thought he had before I even read the article.
"It's too specific, too fraught with meaning."
I went to the Tepper School of Business. He was just some rich, dead guy to me at the time.
Ahhh, the Fulda Gap . . . man, Althouse should post about nukes more often. Great discussion here.
And I'd heard that "2 kilotons apart" joke somewhere, but I can't remember where, and I'd also definitely forgotten it. Too bad I'll probably never get to tell it to anyone personally - most of my friends aren't much older than me, and they sometimes remark how odd it is that someone who was only 4 when the Cold War ended bothered to learn so much about it in the first place. They don't know the Fulda Gap from the Letterman Gap, or a kiloton from a kilowatt.
I imagine Scalia Law would be a place of great liberty, where freedom of expression and diversity of thought are prized. After all, Scalia joined the flag-burning opinion!
Also, how do we know this renaming is political and not jurisprudential? After all, Scalia is a well-known textualist. And many great liberals have that jurisprudence, from Hugo Black to Akhil Amar to James Boyd White. Here is Amar talking about what a great seminar in the law he had under Robert Bork.
When liberals demonized and "bork" Scalia, it is right to honor the man!
(Besides, we all know that in 10 or 20 or 30 years, when right-wingers start insisting that a baby is a person with a right to life, liberals will yell, "Why can't you be like that great Justice Scalia?!")
Ann Althouse said...What you're missing is that George Mason already had the reputation as the right-leaning law school.
No ma'am, I'm not missing that at all, I was being sarcastic. I'm familiar with George Mason (I frequently post links here to Econtalk, a podcast by Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason--I understand the links between GMU, Cato, the Mercatus Center, etc). My point was that your asserted fears about GMU being stereotyped are misplaced as they're already one of a few schools that are right-leaning--I don't understand why you think that their reputation will suffer (more) because Justice Scalia's name is on the door.
Why is is that only right-leaning people get counted as "divisive" or controversial? We are just now, in 2016, getting around to questioning putting Woodrow fucking Wilson's name on stuff--is the Woodrow Wilson School of Law not a problem for you?
George Mason's decision is motivated in part by money and involves a right-leaning Justice you find divisive, so it's not an elegant move. Fair enough. Elegance means never honoring anyone the Left finds distasteful, and if you think that's unfair to great people on the Right, too bad--them's the breaks.
@Chris McKenney/
The Davy Crockett was taken out of service not long after it was deployed because the "big kids" didn't like the idea of some itchy trigger-fingered corporal starting a World War III all on his lonesome. Launch code security and transmittal was almost impossible on a battlefield where a simple coffee-grinder hand jammer could prevent transmission to launch. It was replaced by the larger and longer range LaCross system shortly thereafter which had a 1.5-10kt warhead--a variant of the kind of "dial-a-yield" tactical nukes we used in the F-100, F-4, F-101, F-105, and F-111 (and later even F-16s) which sat alert in Europe during the Cold War across USAFE bases to inclu those in Turkey.
Wiki: List of Places Named After Robert Byrd
That's one-time Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd for those of you keeping score. Oh, but he was a Dem & a Lefty, right.
@Virgil
Yep, it was only in service for about 10 years but was symptomatic of our tactical intent and necessity at the height of the cold war to seriously consider the use of nuclear weapons within the European theater, which was my non spoken point. Here is a weapon that could barely fly further than its detonation radius.
And you are also correct that due to its size and simplicity, the level of fail-safes - much like the GENIE air-to-air nuclear missile also designed in the 1950s for mass bomber attacks (again a stop-gap device) made its replacement quick (plus probably fact that it was in the Army command and not US Airforce didn't help...turf battles being what they are).
The right answer would be that if we ever get to the point that nukes are considered a viable option, campaign promises will mean little, niceties of the lace doily set will mean less.
Wrong order; would use them on Chicago and might in Europe.
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