Archive | June, 2004

From a story in the Arizona Republic, May 21, 2004: Offended citizens and school officials should work together to resolve a politically charged dispute brought on by a teacher who used a school computer system to send out offensive material, a government agency has said. . . . If the parties cannot work out a […]

A very interesting Slate piece; I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it sounds plausible. Key point: When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we cut it a lot of slack. It seems cute. We don’t care that it’s only 50 percent humanlike. But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike […]

The Justice Department announced a week ago that it had “entered into a consent decree with New York City and various school district officials, settling allegations of civil rights violations and deprivations of equal educational opportunities at Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School”: The government’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of […]

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution yet again endorsed (by a 5-4 vote) an anti-flagburning amendment. It’s apparently coming to the full Committee in a few days. So, everything old being new again, I thought I’d repost my L.A. Times op-ed criticizing this proposal: “What’s Wrong With the Flagburning Amendment” (published in […]

The State University of New York at Brockport has the following speech code (emphasis added): Also expressly prohibited by this policy is verbal or physical conduct that denigrates or shows hostility or aversion toward an individual because of his/her race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, marital status, national origin or any other characteristic […]

With thanks to reader Alex Corvino, here is a detailed update [UPDATE: and another here] to the story about the “smuggling” of Yemenite Jews from Monsey, NY, to Israel, that I blogged about last week. Basically, the Jewish Agency claims that the family in question was being held against its will, while the Satmar Hasidim […]

Like Maimon, I too want to thank Eugene and the rest of the Conspiracy for being excellent hosts. And my thanks as well to the many readers who e-mailed with comments. I hope that those of you who are so inclined will come visit us at The Right Coast.

Thanks to the Volokh Conspirators, one and all, for the hospitality this past week! All of us from TheRightCoast have really enjoyed guest-blogging here!

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the movie Troy. At the time, I noted some of the discrepancies between the movie and the Iliad, and urged people to use the movie as an opportunity to go back to the poem. For those who don’t have the time or the inclination, I can now […]

I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan’s, and I think it’s fitting to mark the occasion of his death — but it seems to me that spending about half a billion dollars of taxpayer money for a paid holiday for federal employees (see here and here) isn’t quite the right way to do it.

Now: “Reagan’s admirers contend that his costly re-armament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster.” In 1982: “I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street […]

My friend and colleague Steve Bainbridge has a TechCentralStation essay that praises government protection of “negative rights” (“the right to be let alone”) and generally condemns government protection of “positive rights” (“a right to an education, a job, etc.”). The piece doesn’t define the terms explicitly further, but as I understand it, the terms usually […]

Steve Kurtz points to Tom Franck’s indictment of the game: In even a casual introduction to the game of quidditch, its flaws are so obvious and so great that it strips JK Rowling naked and reveals just how divorced she is from our world of muggle sports. . . . The general idea of a […]

Some fascinating literary detective work about Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” in the (London) Times Literary Supplement (available on line only to TLS subscribers, unfortunately). It seems that in the 1920s, while Nabokov was living in Berlin, an aristocratic Berlin aesthete named Heinz von Lichberg published a short story about a nymphet and the middle-aged man who […]

Some bloggers, such as Brad Delong, have attacked the Reagan economic record. For a strong defense of that record, including answers to the charges that Reagan assumed that the tax cuts would pay for themselves, that the tax cuts were primarily responsible for the Reagan deficits, that the Reagan boom was a Keynesian recovery, and […]