TypePad Says…

by

“MAINTENANCE UPDATE: Some published weblogs may currently be experiencing issues with layout and design. We know about the problem and are working hard to resolve it. Over the weekend we will be automatically republishing weblogs on TypePad in order to address this problem.”

Right. (IE is the only browser I have — and I have a bunch — that makes the right sidebars appear at the bottom of the left side of the page, so if you normally use it and want to see ‘recent comments’, etc., try Safari or Netscape or something. The horrible huge type in the sidebars, and the fact that some pages are entirely blue, seem to be true on all browsers. — Why would you be using IE in any case?)

Consider this an open thread.

21 thoughts on “TypePad Says…”

  3. “Why would you be using IE in any case?)”
    Because apparently in my peer group, bloggers and commenters, using IE is a form of rebellion.

  5. The only thing that looks really ugly in Firefox is that the search box extends past the margin of the right column. The bullet points are weird but not horribly so.

  7. The only thing that looks really ugly in Firefox is that the search box extends past the margin of the right column.
    It does that in Safari too.

  8. “huge” may have been a slight overstatement. Some of it is bigger than it was, quite a bit, and that combined with the fact that the bullet points seem to have moved towards the center of the column means that a lot of things that used to take one line now go tripping merrily down the page.

  11. How am I spending Saturday night?
    Watching the HBO debut of Troy which is good enough. And using the movie as an excuse to visit Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, via a post of John Emerson. I like Troy because the political theorey seems to have been gotten right.
    Schmitt & Strauss
    Don’t read Emerson too casually, he is a radical who thinks our current political system utterly broken.
    And the links at the end of his post are useful. I’ll repeat one.
    Xenos on Strauss

  13. Noble Lies …from Emerson’s links
    “It is easy to see how this sort of thinking can get out of hand, and why hard-headed realists tend to find it naïve if not dangerous.
    But Strauss’s worries about America’s global aspirations are entirely different. Like Heidegger, Schmitt, and Kojève, Strauss would be more concerned that America would succeed in this enterprise than that it would fail. In that case, the “last man” would extinguish all hope for humanity (Nietzsche); the “night of the world” would be at hand (Heidegger); the animalisation of man would be complete (Kojève); and the trivialisation of life would be accomplished (Schmitt). That is what the success of America’s global aspirations meant to them.
    Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a popularisation of this viewpoint. It sees the coming catastrophe of American global power as inevitable, and seeks to make the best of a bad situation. It is far from a celebration of American dominance.
    On this perverse view of the world, if America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.
    To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognises that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully.”
    In case you were wondering why there aren’t enough troops in Iraq. But we have been thru this Strauss/Schmitt stuff last year, Republicans denied it, and that was that. I think Emerson is looking for a new left path that is not Democratic, Green, or Marxist. But “forceful” and effective.
    Somebody did say “open thread” And I am too old for Satnight drunks and hookups. So I listen to ghazali and read political philosophy.

  14. Use & Abuse of Carl Schmitt
    “Forgotten here is the historical fact that it was precisely Protestant fundamentalists committed to defending their traditions and customs that laid the foundations for the new social arrangements they institutionalized in the US. Objectified into concrete political forms, such as the US Constitution, this worldview hypostatized tolerance and the various liberties guaranteed by the “Bill of Rights” as the new country’s most coveted principles, precisely in order to protect those who, unwilling to conform to the predominant “socioeconomic landscape” of the societies they had left behind, sought legal protections for their traditional lifestyles.
    Universalized out of their cultural and historical context, these traditional liberal values are no longer seen as the particular achievement of a particular people. Rather, they are viewed as absolute norms and inviolable principles derived from the kind of rationality accessible only by New Class intellectuals, experts and professionals, whose objectification in “the role of law” can override any allegedly “fascist” choice, no matter how much democratic legitimacy they may have. As in the theological critique of idolatry, the idol displaces the spirit, and precipitates the kind of reification identified so forcefully by Western Marxists and other critics as the fundamental problem of modern society. Along with any fundamentalism that refuses to regard itself as binding only for those willingly adhering to its norms, a “role of law” deduced from allegedly apodictic rational principles chokes democratic prerogatives and, because of its inescapable in determinacy, paves the way for arbitrary interpretations, instrumentalizations, and the worst possible excesses.
    Schmitt was aware of this problem, especially after the Weimar Republic’s disintegration into the Third Reich. This is why, unlike Kelsen and Heller, he always saw “the legal order” in concrete terms, grounded in the traditions and customs of the society that enacted it, rather than in terms of liberal legality predicated on ever growing legislative mandates (what Schmitt called “motorized legislation”). After he became acquainted with Maurice Hauriou’s work, (53) in the late 1920s, Schmitt began to emphasize the pre-legal institutional framework that he characterized as “concrete order.” Soon after the Nazis came to power, Schmitt, in an ultimately failed attempt to contain them, elaborated on this broader understanding of juridical thinking, by emphasizing the primacy of the state–and the traditional values it embodied–over the Nazi Party. (54) Among other things, this is one of the main reasons why he was eventually thrown out of the Nazi Party in 1936.
    According to Scheuermann: “The concrete-order theory … represents the perfect theoretical expression of Schmitt’s hostility to liberal conceptions of a system of codified, general law. Its underlying insight is that society needs to be conceived as a series of variegated communities or `orders’ having highly specific needs resistant to codification by general legal norms or concepts.”
    Something for Paul Cella, wherever he might be. An Arrow aimed at the next post up. Zap ====>

  15. Formatting is a bit weird in Safari. Line breaks between paragraphs are almost indistinguishable from regular carriage returns, reducing readability a bit.
    But, on the plus side, I notice every comment now has a permalink available on the date. That will come in handy.

  16. Forgotten Thinker
    “German historians in the early twentieth century had typically drawn comparisons between, on the one side, Germany and Sparta and, on the other, England (and later the U.S.) and Athens – between what they saw as disciplined land powers and mercantile, expansive naval ones. The Anglo-American powers, which relied on naval might, had less of a sense of territorial limits than landed states. Sea-based powers had evolved into empires, from the Athenians onward.
    But while Schmitt falls back, at least indirectly, on this already belabored comparison, he also brings up the more telling point: Americans aspire to a world state because they make universal claims for their way of life. They view “liberal democracy” as something they are morally bound to export. They are pushed by ideology, as well as by the nature of their power, toward a universal friend/enemy distinction.
    Although in the forties and fifties Schmitt hoped that the devastated nation-state system would be replaced by a new “political pluralism,” the creation of spheres of control by regional powers, he also doubted this would work. The post-World War II period brought with it polarization between the Communist bloc and the anti-Communists, led by the U.S. Schmitt clearly feared and detested the Communists. But he also distrusted the American side for personal and analytic reasons. From September 1945 until May 1947, Schmitt had been a prisoner of the American occupational forces in Germany. Though released on the grounds that he played no significant role as a Nazi ideologue, he was traumatized by the experience. Throughout the internment he had been asked to give evidence of his belief in liberal democracy. Unlike the Soviets, in whose zone of occupation he had resided for a while, the Americans seemed to be ideologically driven and not merely vengeful conquerors.”

  17. The Sovereignty of the Political
    “Hence, the thundering opening of his treatise: ‘The sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’ It is a disturbingly ‘realistic’ view of politics, which, in the manner of Hobbes, subordinates de jure authority to de facto power: autoritas, non veritas facit legem. (The law is made by the one who has authority (i.e. power) and not the one who possesses the truth (the legitimate sovereign).)
    The problem of the exception, for the constitutional jurist Schmitt, can only be resolved within the framework of a decision (an actual historical event) and not within that of a norm (an ahistoric and transcendent idea). Moreover, the legal act which decides what constitutes an exception is ‘a decision in the true sense of the word’, because a general norm, an ordinary legal prescription, ‘can never encompass a total exception’. If so, then, ‘the decision that a real exception exists cannot be derived entirely from this norm.’ The problem of the exception, in other words, demarcates the limit of the rule of law and opens up that trans-legal space, that no-man’s land of existential exigency, which is bereft of legal authority and where the decision of the sovereign abrogates the anomaly of the legal void. However, it is against the background of the liberal theory of the state, which equates ‘sovereignty’ with a simple ‘rule of law’, that Schmitt’s highlighting of the problem of the exception becomes significant and meaningful. For, against the legal positivism of his times, Schmitt seems to be arguing that not law but the sovereign, not the legal text but the political will, is the supreme authority in a state. States are not legal entities but historical polities; they are engaged in a constant battle for survival where any moment of their existence may constitute an exception, it may engender a political crisis that cannot be remedied by the application of the rule of law. From the existential priority of the sovereign over the legitimacy of the norm, it would also follow that according to Schmitt, law is subservient to politics and not autonomous of it.”
    Hmm, where are those Gonzalez and Yoo memos?

  18. By the way: everyone should check out this thread on Making Light, which I was going to post on when Typepad went down.
    Basically, there’s some company that runs fake poetry contests where they announce that you have won, due to your great merit, and for a fee they want to publish your next work. And some site has been running a contest to see whether anyone can come up with a poem they will not accept. Theresa Nielsen-Hayden won, by recasting one of the Miriam Abacha spam messages as poetry, and blogged about it.
    And now, in her comments section, people have been writing Miriam Abacha spam recast in the styles of zillions of different poets. Dante, in Italian. Gilbert and Sullivan. Alan Ginsburg, WC Williams, the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ version, you name it. And they are all wonderful.
    Check it out.

  21. Hobbes vs Schmitt
    PDF…and does not lend itself to cut and paste. This lady says that terrorism is the Schmittian exception to test the limits of liberalism.
    Enough. I have tested limits myself, I guess.

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