-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of andie nachgeborenen
I am not talking about lawyers in general, and I wasn't saying all lawyers or mnost laewters or many lawyers are generally ethical people and a boon to society, though I am not saying the contrary either. I was saying, specifically, that the best _Ohio State law_ students are just as smart as anyone in the Ivies or Oxbridge (the point that Luke doubted), and that _Ohio State law_ students are nicer, more pleasant, morte amiable people than grad students in philosophy at Tigertown, Michigan, or Cambridge.
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And Veblen pointed out the utter folly of making such comparisons.
Moreover, I am tired of lawyer-bashing from you.
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Take a nap, then. A lot more bashing of the legal profession is in order.
You know better. You can't blame lawyers for all that crap. The drug war is due to the politicians.
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As elected officials they are law *makers*. Leaving aside the average number of lawyers in Congress, etc. since the founding of the Republic, don't attempt to use a simple redescriptive technique in order to distinguish law making from law following, enforcement, adjudication
The Enron, etc., is due to the businessmen, the MBAs. The transactional lawyers (crooked ones)_wrote_ the contracts, maybe some of them, directed to do so, invented the schemers at the MBAs requests. The 3d World debt is to to the bourgeoisie and the economists and loan officers at the IMF and the World Bank.
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The international neoliberal regime is a *legal* regime. Sheesh, lefties have been bashing neoliberal economics as a global phenomenon for decades, but when neoliberal legalism is brought up you get all testy.
We lawyers, especially we scumball corporate defense lawyers, have a lot to answer for, but not the particular litany of crimes toy attribute to us. For the litany that can be correctly attributedto us, see Ralph Nader's No Contest.
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Read it a while back. It's not a matter of personalities [hi Carrol]. You're happy to bash the Brad Delong's of the world, but...I repeat myself.....
Philosophers, meanwhile, do little evil only because they lack power, not because the lack malice. In the small areas where they have power (in philosophy depts), they do as much evil as they can. Asa group, they arte afr far worse than lawyers as a group, not just Ohio State law students. They are infinitely worse than OSU law students as a group -- the latter are very good people, and philosophers are collectively lowlifes. Trust me, I know this from personal experience.
jks
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Unlike you I've never met a philosopher with malice, but then if someone was regularly malicious, I wouldn't care how well they knew their Mill, Neitzsche or whoever, they wouldn't be a philosopher, imo. But that's beside the point as both our sample sizes are too small......
Chill out already,
Ian