[goldstategop]

Post-modernism is about the absence of principles. They don’t exist because reality is unknowable. It changes from observer to observer. There are no universals and no sense that was what relevant in the past is applicable today. Everything is in change and life itself is the ultimate change. Anything that can be justified to produce good change is in itself good. This is the philosophical and intellectual world in which Cass Sunstein resides.

[Nachum]

The list, ping

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[Bhoy]

thanks for post.

[Baynative]

bttt

[neverdem]

Feds Seek to Implement Unconstitutional Power Grab Cass Sunstein will be overseeing ATF's end run of the 1986 FOPA.

Roll Back the Hippie Damage

CARB's Carbon Capers

E.P.A. Limit on Gases to Pose Risk to Obama and Congress

10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology Apolitical New Year's bonus!

Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list. Happy New Year!

[lentulusgracchus]

Sunstein .... rejects originalism and pre-New Deal philosophies of government because they produce, in his view, bad outcomes.

In other words, Sunstein is a convicted New Dealer.

He diddles the Progressives by turning their lack of principle back on them and refusing to be pinned down or made to cleave to a consistent POV: so he's an unprincipled New Dealer. But I repeat myself.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Art., quoting Sunstein] . "[W]here the Constitution is ambiguous," he writes, "courts do best to attend to long-standing practices, on the ground that those practices reflect the judgments of many people extending over time."

Oh. Like segregation and Jim Crow. I see. </s>

[nathanbedford]

There have been several irresistibly influential polemics written in American history and they all have one thing in common: they appeal to the common sense of the common man.

One thinks of the book of that name, Common Sense, which provided the philosophical underpinning for the American Revolution in a short publication which became universally read in the colonies. It is straightforward, it is readable, it is lucid, it is compelling, and it is directed to you and me.

One thinks of Uncle Tom's Cabin which some argue precipitated the Civil War and which used fictional imagery to animate the antislavery movement to the point that slavery became morally repugnant and ultimately intolerable.

Cass Sunstein's works are not of that order. Most importantly, they are not directed to the common man and they do not seek to arouse the common sense of the common man rather they seek to supply intellectual cover to elitists and their ambitions. The author of this article in criticizing Cass Sunstein's inconsistencies and revealing them to be only so much intellectual jujitsu exposes his elitism. His job is to provide the talking points for activists and politicians to justify their predilections, read: their ambitions.

Nor is it an accident that the most prominent politician of our time, Barack Obama, has swallowed whole the Sunstein syllabus. Many conservatives miss the mark when they accuse Barack Obama of lack of intelligence. That is about as far off the mark as accusing him of being incapable of persuasive intercourse when he is unsupported by Teleprompter. He is quite effective without a Teleprompter and will be be very difficult to defeat in debate in the next election cycle, just as he was in the last. Nor is he unintelligent, but his intelligence is ungrounded and therefore more akin to cleverness and certainly not a generator of originality. All his life, Barack Obama has traded equally on his ability to talk the talk and on the color of his skin.

Was it PJ O'Rourke who said that a gaffe by a politician occurs when he is caught out telling the truth? Certainly, Joe Biden's assessment of Sen. Barack Obama as a clean-cut African-American who is articulate went to the heart of the matter and, since it was honest and accurate, it was regarded to be a gaffe. Biden's gaffe simply encapsulated the essence of Barack Obama. All his life he has advanced well beyond his level of experience and competence because he has been able to master the vocabulary and present it with the cadence and tonality exceptional in an African-American. So he advanced through academia right through Harvard Law school and then to the teaching position at the University of Chicago. During his academic career he learned quickly the liberal line, that is, after all, what he had been spoonfed all his life, and he perfected the technique of spitting it back.

He is a chameleon who shapes his argot with perfect pitch to his audience. He is as good, perhaps better, at this art even than Bill Clinton. So Obama can talk trash with the black political power structure of Chicago or with black liberationists like Rev. Wright; he can wax ardent with the elitist white revolutionaries like Bill Ayres; he can sound euridite with fellow senators in the Illinois legislature and with Senators in the United States Congress, or with progressive academics (to indulge in redundancy).

Nor is it an accident that Obama is an elitist. It is the nature of progressives to despise the common sense of the common man for the very reason that an elitist is a progressive, that is, because he wants to impose his ambitions on the common man and the common man's common sense is a stubborn obstacle to those ambitions. More fundamentally, an elitist is an elitist because he wants to play God, no, because he is compelled to play God.

It is this compulsion which is the driving force of leftism (it is instructive here to equate leftism or progressivism to fascism) and it explains why there is no fixed star, no true North which are the fixed and immutable truths which animate these people. The whole idea to play out one's ambitions in the lives of others so there can be no fixed truth apart from one's own conceptions.

So it is that Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama enjoy a synergistic, if not a "sodomnistic" relationship. Neither one has the elegance born of true insight, which generates straight talk such as our colonial ancestors discovered in Common Sense.

[Jacquerie]

Sunstein is probably the second most dangerous man in America, only behind Obamamao Himself.

[raybbr]

Not sure why the author left out this one? I guess dissent is no longer necessary...

From Amazon..

University of Chicago law professor Sunstein draws on an impressive knowledge of economics, law and psychology, as well as a great deal of common sense, to make an elegant and compelling case that dissent is critical to a successful society. So convincing and lucid is his argument that this work is likely to influence the current debate on the role of dissenting from official or conventional thinking when society faces external threats. Sunstein does not elevate dissent based on abstract ideology, but rather on the most pragmatic of grounds-good choices are unlikely to be made by a society that stifles dissent. In an engaging analysis, Sunstein examines studies of three related phenomena-the human desire to conform to group norms, group decision-making processes and the tendency for groups to polarize-that lead to the suppression of dissent. This suppression in turn results in the loss of accurate information and competing arguments, which are the basis for rational and effective decision making. Making his arguments all the more powerful, and more acceptable across the political spectrum, is Sunstein's choice to avoid taking political or moral positions on the many charged social issues-such as affirmative action and conformism among judges and in other branches of government-he employs as examples of how decision making is aided when dissent is encouraged. Sunstein also offers wise suggestions on how to create systems that not only tolerate but encourage dissent. This is a noteworthy achievement and an invaluable contribution to the literature on the enduring question of dissent's role in a democratic society.

[PubliusMM]

Ping for later...

[Don Corleone]

Truly the most dangerous man in America!

[rockinqsranch]

Last on the list of books by Sunstein above was:

“Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America”

Was that Extreme Right-Wing Court Judge Roy Bean? I can’t remember. /S