ON MY HEGEL CLASS: Though not by me; truer words were never spoken:

"that deds basghtto take the course"

WELL: In a sure sign I have waaaay too much free time on my hands, I found myself wondering after my Ethics and Public Policy class (in which there was widespread agreement with the notion that human life has no intrinsic value, only what it gets from the utility it can provide) whether one can marry that sentiment (that sometimes, it produces a better net utility to die rather than keep on living miserably) with what I understand to be the key insight of the Coase Theorem (that, absent transaction costs, the efficient outcome will occur regardless of who has property rights) to argue that it really doesn't matter who actually ends up doing the killing in such cases, because, obviously, I think that particular utilitarian intuition is extremely wrong, and just a hop, skip and a jump from a perfect justification for eugenics and genocide, which leaves me to wonder if I'm perverse enough to see if I can make that argument actually work (to demonstrate how completely insane it is, of course).

EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH HOLLYWOOD: From E:

"Fey is also working on the script for Paramount's Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill, a based-on-a-true-story comedy about a young Hasidic Jew and an aging rock 'n' roller who meet and form a band."

AND JUST WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN LATELY? Busy, sick, yada yada yada.

I've moved at least some of my blogging energies to World Magazine's Cinema Veritas blog, run by the inimitable Bill Wallo, and, should I prove to have the energy for it, I'll post a short little review of the movie I saw this weekend (Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, which was at least more comprehensible thanThe Hour of the Wolf), and perhaps a more general rumination on whether pretentious foreign films are generally worth it or not.

Some energy has gone into finishing the solidarity paper, and more will go into the companion piece I'll be writing this term, which might be on the limits we're willing to place on what one person can reasonably make another person do (or something related, depending on how my Hans Morgenthau interpretation goes); also focusing on the fascinating world of International Political Economy--let's just say my appreciation for Dan Drezner has gone up about a millionfold; reading Hegel, who has just done (in the Phenomenology) some positing that the weakness of our mental powers to grasp the world around us leads to doubt, which leads to despair--if this sounds familiar to you, well, it's probably a good sign you've read some Kierkegaard (or even Canto I of Dante's Inferno), and I think there's a religion-and-philosophy paper waiting to be written about how Christian faith can exempt you from existential crisis, but I have to do some re-reading before I get to that point.

In my spare time, my (1800 page) edition of Grotius' De jure belli ac pacis just arrived, so that will occupy me for awhile, as (potentially) will some reading of Kant and re-reading of Kierkegaard to try and get at Hegel some more, whatever Netflix serves up to me (Disc 3 of Shoah is still on tap, but I haven't been able to work up the fortitude to work my way through it).

In someone's cruel idea of a joke, I was invited to a conference on Alexis de Tocqueville.

Best line of the year so far, from American Political Thought:

Tom: "As Amy Gutmann said, 'communitarians want Salem without the witches.'"
Amber: "The people in Salem didn't want the witches, either."