Late Friday afternoon, fresh from a nap after a delightful lunch at a lakeside restaurant. I can muster only a few quick comments.
Dale Carpenter, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, asks "Why So Few Gay Marriages?" He fails to suggest the main reason: "Gayness" is mostly about sex, not about lifetime bonding centered mainly around children.
Publius (with a little "p"), of legal fiction, chastises Americans for their obliviousness to history. His aim -- which he disavows, of course -- is to suggest that Americans are somehow responsible for Islamic terrorism because of their ignorance of the "villainy" of (some of) their European ancestors during the Crusades. According to publius, Americans' obliviousness to history also blinds them to the fact that America's efforts to "export democracy" have been failures, though he somehow fails to mention Germany and Japan. Nor does he acknowledge that our real aim in the Middle East isn't so much to export democracy as it is to establish friendly regimes that are (at least) not oppressive.
Publius goes on to say that "Americans just haven’t had to internalize defeat, loss, and humiliation in the same way that other people have." But in the next paragraph he contradicts himself by acknowledging "two [sizeable] groups of people in America that do have a collective consciousness of resentment . . . white Southerners and blacks. Say what you will about both groups, they don’t forget." I'm not sure whether little "p" objects to the defeat of the Confederacy or to the failure of the effort to remove all freed slaves to Liberia.
