Patterico's Pontifications

9/13/2005

This Just In

Filed under: General — Angry Clam @ 10:32 am



[Posted by the Angry Clam.]

Today two packages arrived for me.

One was from Amazon, and contains a copy of Justice Breyer’s new book Active Liberty.

As some have speculated, it does appear to be an update (or rehash, depending on how things turn out) of John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust. Reading this book will be interesting, since Justice Breyer has set himself up as the intellectual and jurisprudential counterweight to Justice Scalia, facing him in various debates about constitutional interpretation, the use of international law, and the like. Indeed, this book could very well be in emulation of Justice Scalia’s A Matter of Interpretation, although I would point out that Justice Breyer does not allow criticism of his views to share space in his slim volume, as Justice Scalia did.

In any event, I’ll be reading that this week, and will provide a fuller report in the coming days.

The second package, however, is getting much more use already: my ipod nano arrived directly from the factory in China via FedEx today. I don’t have a review for you, really- it’s an ipod, but way smaller. I’m mostly just bragging about this.

4 Responses to “This Just In”

  1. “my ipod nano arrived directly from the factory slave labor camp in China via FedEx today”

    clark smith (08f959)

  2. … he said, typing on a computer assembled from parts made in Chinese factories slave labor camps.

    Xrlq (816c74)

  3. What the heck is wrong with Chinese slave-labor camps? They’re far superior to the slave-labor camps in many nearby Southeast Asian countries.

    I suspect they’re probably not up the high standards of the slave-labor camps of the old Soviet Union; but it’s hard to beat Stalin at the game he invented. You people are talking through your hats… I have grave doubts that you have sufficiently sampled the slave-labor output from very many camps, at least not in recent years. There has been a huge improvement in slave sophistication in China, for example: rarely nowadays do the slaves write tech docs that include instructions such as “upon boild,, stir three time with chopstick and eat BUT NOT UPON BEFORE A COOLING!!!”

    I’m sure the slave-labor camps in, say, Sudan, Somalia, and Massachusetts are not even in the running anymore. But the all-time champs were the Roman slave-labor battalions. They were not, of course, organized into camps; but they frequently comprised Greek philosophers and Egyptian surgeons.

    Dafydd

    Dafydd (f8a7be)

  4. I am dreadfully sorry, but I must make a correction. In my commment above, I got carried away and inadvertently wrote the the Roman slave battalions “frequently comprised Greek philosophers and Egyptian surgeons.”

    This is absurd, of course; and I’m very sorry I said it. I sincerely apologize.

    I meant to say they frequently included Greek philosophers and Egyptian surgeons, of course.

    Dafydd

    Dafydd (f8a7be)


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