one thing that occurs watching the kagan hearings: i am very glad i have not lived her life. so when they ask her about memos she wrote in the clinton admin, strategizing on avoiding a ban on partial-birth abortion, she's all like 'i was working for a president who had very definite views. my job was to push forward his agenda.' when she was dean at harvard law school and sought to exclude military recruiters on the grounds of 'don't ask/don't tell,' she was only trying to enforce the 25-year-old non-discrimination policy, not embodying any particular position. as solicitor general she argued that prisoners of the u.s. in afghanistan and iraq do not have habeus corpus rights. we should make no assumptions about her own opinion on this matter: she was representing her client. as a supreme court justice all she will do is read and apply the constitution/laws as they stand, without regard to her own opinions.

it must be hard to live a life in which you are never permitted to think independently. one might be tempted to call it a slavish life, and to boot, an unintelligent or at least incurious life, though these would be odd things to say about so eminent and famously smart etc person. really i think that an institution that demands at least the simulation of automatism of this kind is profoundly dehumanizing; it ought to begin to make one sceptical of bureaucratic and in particular legal institutions; they rest on a lie, or a demand of total inauthenitcity. if i was sitting there with the purpose of completely disguising even the sheer fact that i have opinions, i would feel compromised, sullied.

Comments

[Joe]

Sounds kinda like what your typical office job requires. I personally couldn't give a shit if what I'm doing ever gets done, but somebody else does, and they're paying me.

[CB]

More of the reason not to support Ron Paul's notion of markets! The majority lives their entire life in bad-faith.

[adamcrazypants]

oh Utah

"That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 - he said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work." Hah! You don't have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, "I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
Fat chance!"

http://www.jeddy.org/moi/utah.txt

[Joe]

CB,

The Kagan thing is more of an example of bad faith, I think. I was talking more about internal versus external motivation, so it wasn't a perfect analogy. Still, I don't see how the situation I describe is peculiar to "Ron Paul's notion of markets." I mean, if I'm doing what I do in a workers coop, I may have more say in how the work gets done, and more of a financial (or whatever) stake in it--improvements no doubt--but I'm not going to have any more enthusiasm for the work itself than I do now.

[CB]

Joe that's debatable. if you're actually employed at something you love, you'll have far more enthusiasm.

[WorBlux]

It is a lie. The law if merely the words is apt to mean and many different things are there are meanings and combination of meanings of the words used withing the law. In order to make legal judgments there needs to be some idea of benchmark or what the law ought to be before it can be known what it is. In addition current law is full of contradictions is that any judge sufficiently familiar with the laws can choose the ones that best reflect their own personal views and ideas of justice.