The Dead Thread 2024

The beauty of the early punk movement. That a band such as this could not only be welcome, but celebrated as one of its forebears

Television is certainly considered a punk / DIY forerunner. On Rushmore with Lou Reed, Richard Hell, and New York Dolls for the bands that precede the Ramones and the mainstreaming of NYC punk.

One of many masterpieces.

A true great regret: my older brother was going to see these guys 30 miles from my house when I was 12 and 13. As you know, I am relentless. I could have worn him and the doorman down had I been me, then.

Probably would have lost my cherry 4 years earlier, too.


fig 1. What's your major?

Stacy Keach, 85.

Another Shakespearean down.

Apparently comedian Anthony Clark died. Haven’t seen anything concrete except for a tribute post from fellow comedian Mike O’Malley. Couldn’t find anything about a cause of death.

He was so funny. Loved this set, his bit about Oklahoma still cracks me up.

Oklahoma, Oklahoma. There. I said it twice.

Dan Hicks….
too bad

NBC sports broadcaster Dan Hicks, 64, who called Michael Phelps’ legendary run of Olympic swims

Scarlet said:

Apparently comedian Anthony Clark died. Haven’t seen anything concrete except for a tribute post from fellow comedian Mike O’Malley. Couldn’t find anything about a cause of death.

He was so funny. Loved this set, his bit about Oklahoma still cracks me up.

Oklahoma, Oklahoma. There. I said it twice.

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Everyone's mentioning "Yes Dear" and no one's mentioning "Boston Common". Mostly because it sucked, but stil.

Richard Posner. Would have made a better SCOTUS justice than any in the last 50 years.

Judicial opinions, he once wrote, should be "characterized by brevity and candor and a quest for a sensible result."

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So, the Anti-Scalia.

FadeToBlack&Gold said:

So, the Anti-Scalia.

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Not really. And he gave us the initial circuit decision allowing restrictive voter ID laws. Though he did admit he got that one completely wrong years later.

Posner was the anti-Scalia in the sense that Scalia at least believed he was rulling based on principles while Posner deeply distrusted principles in general. He reminded me of Isaiah Berlin, a personal hero who said among many other wise things:

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made.

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Or, longer:

There are, in my view, two factors that, above all others, have shaped human
history in this century. One is the development of the natural sciences and
technology, certainly the greatest success story of our time – to this, great and mounting
attention has been paid from all quarters. The other, without doubt, consists in the great
ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian
Revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and the
expansion of nationalism, racism and, in some places, of religious bigotry, which
increasingly enough, not one among the most perceptive thinkers of the nineteenth
century had ever predicted.

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When our descendants, in two or three centuries’ time come to look at our age, it is
these two phenomena that will, I think, be held to be the outstanding characteristics of
our century, the most demanding of explanation, and analysis. But, it is as well to
remember that these great movements began with ideas in people’s heads: ideas about
what relations between men have been, are, might be, and should be; and how to realize
how they came to be transformed in the name of a vision of some supreme goal in the
minds of leaders, above all of the prophets with armies at their backs. Such ideas are the
substance of ethics. Ethical thought consists of the systematic examination of the
relations of human beings to each other, the conceptions, interests, and ideals from
which ways of treating one another spring, and the systems of value on which such ends
of life are based. These beliefs about how life should be lived, what men and women
should be and do, are objects of moral inquiry; and when applied to groups and nations,
and, indeed, mankind as a whole, are called political philosophy, which is but ethics
applied to society.

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If we are to hope to understand the violent world in which we live (and unless we
try to understand it, we cannot expect to be able to act rationally in it and on it), we
cannot confine our attention to the great impersonal forces, natural and man-made,
which act upon us. The goals and motives that guide human action must be looked at in
the light of all that we know and understand; their roots and growth, their essence, and
above all their validity, must critically be examined with every intellectual resource we
have. The urgent need, apart from the intrinsic value of the discovery of truth about
human relationships, makes ethics a field of primary importance. Only barbarians are
not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where
they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why
not. The study of the variety of ideas about the views of life that embody such values and
such ends is something I have spent forty years of my long life in trying to make clear to
myself.

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Posner would have written something similar. He aimed to be pragmatic and that rubs hard against certain moral absolutes. He famously believed that when tortious actions resulted in harms the burden of paying for damages ought to fall on the guy with the deepest pockets, not necessarily the miscreant who caused the harm. Why? Because then through risk management and fees and insurance the market would work to prevent a repetition of the harm -- the main desired outcome.

God knows what he'd have done about slavery or native genocide. Probably fines or something. Moralists aren't going to care for that and in a lot of ways I don't either.

But he was trying to have law conform to the good of people, not strict adherence to some ethical code, because codes can change. Once it was right to own people or burn witches or stone gays and it might be again someday, so divorce law and punishment from what the majority views as morally supportable and try to ground it in something like pragmatism. Who knows what you'll get? You might radically attack inequality because it breeds crime and disease and volatile politics which harm everyone. Scalia would have just sniffed in his Sumneresque way that we owe a duty to the protection of property and called it a day.