Eugene Volokh has an interesting observation:

…The goal of many emerging parliamentary democracies, I think, is for citizens to be able to say “The government has collapsed. Now, which movie do you want to go see tomorrow?,”…

I am not a fan of our constitution. I think the framers did an awfully lazy job of it. But I think that the silliest thing they did was to adopt the Parliamentary system instead of the Presidential system. What do you people think?

If the harbingers of hope(tm) brought out an exercise video, would it be called stretch marx?

As I have been outed as a supporter of Marxism (I am! I always got good Marx in school ) I hereby give notice to all present that I hereby change my standard naming convention for them from “retards” to “harbingers of hope”

Incidentally, I also support congress – in the Kamasutra sense.

The cost of searching and the stress of choosing predominates, according to this interesting post.

Madman adds to my point about India having too many laws. He says that many of the laws are very old – many more than a hundred years old.

I agree with Amardeep Singh’s comment there. The age of a law by itself should not be a problem. In an ideal (and libertarian) world, the only reason to add new laws would be technological change. In fact, I’d say that if it turns out that a law needs frequent changes to keep up with changing realities, it probably means that the law is unnecessarily complex.
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Attention Cartelians, our secret is out. There is someone called Nerd who claims that we think that the Marxists are harbingers of hope.

I agree with ABC. Many times I have read blogs of “libertarians” like Gaurav Sabnis and others who claim that Congress and Marxists are the harbingers of hope and BJP and its allies are a blot on democracy. And most of the time, the judgement is passed even without due knowledge of what happened or even before the judiciary passes its judgement on the case. Take for example, the case of Babri Masjid demolition – everyone had put blame on Advani among others as conspirators but later a former IB person revealed that Congress has suppressed the tape that proved that Advani was not involved. Also, there have been many confessions from caught Naxalities that they are being funded by Marxists and CPI-Ms of West Bengal but I never find a single post on your blogs implicating them. For secularists, these parties are the ones who defend democracy.

I must say that we are doing a pretty good job of getting our secret message across to the gullible masses. Long live Marxism!

Suppose that an extremely filthy man points out that there is a spot of dirt on your clothes. What will you feel?

Will you say that the filthy man, being so filthy, has no locus standii to point out the fact that your clothes are dirty? Will you feel insulted?

I don’t know about you, but I’d feel shame, not insult. The fact that the other guy was filthy would make it worse, not better. I would feel humiliated that I had to hear those words from such a man.

The fact that the filthy guy is not evenhanded in pointing out stains in others’ clothing would make no difference to me, because shame is between me and my conscience. Shame is what you feel when you have violated a principle that you hold dear. If you don’t feel shame, then it is easy to make it a point of honour and cry that you were insulted.

Modi has compared his being denied a US visa to Gandhiji being chucked out of the South African train.

That reminds me of a shameful period in our history.

I am referring to the blatant and absolutely uncalled for interference by Gandhiji into South Africa’s internal affairs. By what right did he, a foreigner, ask South Africa, a sovereign and independent nation, to change its internal policies towards Indians and blacks?

Besides, he was also guilty of hypocrisy. How could Indians possibly ask to be provided equal treatment with whites when they were openly discriminating against untouchables in their own country?

(Paraphrased from memory)

“Never get angry at a man for speaking the truth”

“That particular truth was none of his business”

“His evaluation of it is neither your business nor mine”

I think the libertarians among you will know where I have taken this from.

I am talking of Narendra Modi, of course. I don’t understand the argument that the Americans are “interfering” in our Internal Affairs. Yes, the fact that he is still the chief minister even after he explicitly gave instructions to his policemen not to protect the muslims who were being killed and raped by his partymen is our “internal affair”, to our eternal shame. But if the Americans won’t let such a man into their country, it is their internal affair too. Yes, he is the democratically elected chief minister of an Indian state, but that is not the Americans’ fault, it is ours.
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If you can read this, it means that the problems have passed. The hosting company (Textdrive) Madman was moving us all to went back on its assurance that we could have separate FTP accesses, and after a bit of a fight, they ejected us out of their servers. So Madman, responsive as usual, moved us all to the new site. As far as I can see, there has been no major data loss except some few comments that were posted after Madman backed the site up.

The legal notice that the Times of India has sent to Pradyuman does not actually mention any law. That’s because everyone knows that the point is not to prove anything. The point is to sue. In any civilised country, such a suit would be laughed out of court and the court would impose damages on the Times for filing frivolous cases.
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