Michael Savage Banned From The UK

Via Brian, Michael Savage is banned from entering the UK because of his role in spreading ethnic hatred. Apparently he wants to sue the UK or something in response. Media Matters has a nice rundown on many of the people he's wanted to kick out of America, including American-born children of immigrants and ACLU members. He also has suggested a ban on Muslim immigration.

I appreciate how the UK is treating members of all races who spread hatred the same way. Other banned people include a Hamas MP, Neo-Nazis, a Russian skinhead, a violent Jewish extremist, a Hezbollah guy, and Fred Phelps.

This is only tangentially related, but Savage has claimed "that any heterosexual woman today over the age of 25 who grew up in America is basically a dominatrix." I don't entirely understand what the point of that comment was. I hope it isn't true. It would mean that several of the women I've been involved with were reluctant to tell me what they really wanted and I might have left them unsatisfied.

People Mention Peter Railton And I Get Excited

Via Ezra, here's something from Robin Kar, who clerked for Sonia Sotomayor and did a PhD at Michigan:

Judge Sotomayor stands out from among these people as one of the very brightest; indeed, she is in that rarified class of people for whom it makes sense to say that there is no one genuinely smarter. (Others who have stood out in this way in my experience would include Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, and Peter Railton, a moral philosopher at the University of Michigan.)

I don't know Sotomayor or Koh personally, but I know Peter Railton. He was the dissertation advisor of one of my dissertation co-chairs, Brian Leiter. Spending time with him was one of the big reasons I left Texas for a year to be a visiting graduate student at Michigan. And, yeah. "It makes sense to say that there is no one genuinely smarter" is right. I didn't think that judges ever got the chance to demonstrate that they were in that league. Kar did his PhD at Michigan where Railton is, so he knows the man well. (Kar and I have overlapping scholarly interests, got Newcombe fellowships, and graduated magna from Harvard, so it's conceivable that our mutual Railton-admiration arises from an extremely surprising a posteriori identity between us.)

On the other hand, Jeffrey Rosen thinks Sotomayor isn't that bright. And I haven't read enough of his piece to get a confident sense of it, nor have I talked to enough of its detractors and supporters to get a fully balanced view of its strengths. But sources who will remain anonymous tell me that Rosen wrote it just because he wants sexists and racists to like him. And if that's good enough for an article in The New Republic, why isn't it good enough for a blog post?

Supreme Head Fakes

Ezra points out that we're basically seeing an oppo dump against Sonia Sotomayor, poured through the keyboards of Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Cohen. Maybe I've been watching too many NFL draft tactical gimmicks, but it seems to me that a nifty White House strategy would be leave minor hints that Sotomayor is under serious consideration for the next several months. Let the far right demonize her more and more, and then, boom! It's Elana Kagan. Or somebody else who ruins a big Republican investment in demonizing the wrong judge. Which is not very nice to Sotomayor, I'll grant, but assuming that we get a really good judge out of it I hope she'd be happy.

Mark Halperin, Call (Out) Your Editor

As we have been told, authors of articles often don't write their headlines. This makes it possible for an author to write a relatively mundane article and unwittingly receive a racially inflammatory headline. In such a situation, the author's responsibility is to muse about how the editors who title their articles about Obama's Supreme Court options "White men need not apply" ought to be swiftly affected by economic trends prevalent in the news business.

The Panic Of 1825

Astute commenters and emailers responded to a previous post by pointing out that financial panics where individual actions generate systemic risk have been with us for a long time. People in particular mentioned the panic of 1825, so I went and looked it up. The wikipedia entry begins, "The Panic of 1825 was a stock market crash that started in the Bank of England arising in part out of speculative investments in Latin America, including in the fabled imaginary country of Poyais."

Wait, so the Bank of England nearly collapsed because of people investing in an imaginary country? Well, yeah, it looks like that's basically what happened.