Bloodless Coup

I love that the atheist symbol is a atom. Yay science.

What, no satanism?

binky -- volokh's one of your least favorite bloggers? i mean, there are a lot of appalling bloggers out there. i disagree with EV all the time, but he's a pretty temperate voice in a world of strident windbags.

{italics unintended, at least after "least"}

Uh, so are we now defining who we like by shrillness?

Sure Professor Volokh is always calm - but he says some stupid things from time to time. And speaking for myself, my favorite posters on that site were always Jacob Levy and Orin Kerr, and they don't post there regularly now.

Yeah, there was an earlier thread where we discussed how out of touch Volokh was... Armand, can you remember which it was? I can't say he's one of my least favorite bloggers in the sense of outright loathing, I just don't find his blog interesting or informed about a lot of things that interest me. He might be the bees knees for some legal aspects, but I read enough to suggest that culturally his blog is, well, a certain kind of elitist that I don't really fell like wasting my time reading.

ah, elitism i can understand, and certainly what i find most valuable about his work (and not necessarily that of his whole blog; like you, i always preferred kerr over volokh, although i'd throw bernstein in there as someone worth reading) inhere in the breadth of his interests just within the law (not to mention without it). volokh discusses, considers, blogs, and writes (as in, formal scholarship) about a much greater range of legal topics than the average law professor, and does so, at least in those areas that i'm qualified to comment, very intelligently. he's a big-picture scholar, in my view, and big picture scholars sometimes screw up on smaller points (and woe to them if the smaller points are especially important to some fraction of their audiences). but we can small-picture legal scholarship all day and all we get is a bunch of completely hypothetical and ultimately useless guff. if legal scholarship is to be relevant to the legal community -- and if not, i'd just as soon play hearts over a sixpack of dogfish head -- it needs never to lose sight of the big picture. volokh's way better at that than most, even if he often arrives at conclusions with which i differ.

as for this -- "Sure Professor Volokh is always calm - but he says some stupid things from time to time" --

amen, but if you can find me a blogger, present company not excluded, who can claim otherwise (with regard to his or her blogging in particular) let me know. we'll set up a foundation and offer an annual award.

calm expression invites calm debate, something the blogosphere has very little of, and the absence of which makes for an astonishing amount of static of no informative value whatsoever (and i'm excluding the livejournal wing of the blogosphere entirely, and describing how i view the supposedly informative, policy-debate oriented blogosphere), unless you seek to be informed regarding the state of the art in people shouting past each other.

volokh engages critics and those who differ with his ideas with an unusual candor and sobriety. that alone is worth the price of admission.

And again, I can't remember exactly when it came out that I disliked Volokh, but I do seem to recall that it involved stupidity re: teh gays.

i have a similar memory, too, but it's something he seldom writes on (hence both of our memories are hazy). the site in general seems to struggle with teh gays insofar as they are unabashedly libertarian, or claim to be, albeit of different stripes, yet when their libertarianism creates conflicts with respect to the gays (on the one hand, wanting to vindicate individual choice; on the other, not being big fans of legislating that sort of thing) they tend to err on the political libertarian side at the expense of the social libertarian side. if that makes any sense. volokh's not as bad as his co-conspirators on this front, though.

Well, what I meant was that in general, I just "don't care" about Volokh, but in that particular case I "disliked." If that makes sense.