--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen :
>
> Dead wrong, unless you want to stop thinking.
>
> ^^^^^^^
>
> CB: If you keep thinking , you will realize I am
> correct.
>
> ^^^^^^^
I doubt if I will be persuaded that we would all benefit from everyone being in the "amen" corner. Give me reasons I'm wrong -- tahtw opuld be useful. And our learning from thsi disdagreement wouyld show that I'm correct on this.
>
> Good writing form does not save bad
> > content of ideas. Evil
> > literary geniuses get no vote.
>
> Marx disagreed. He was a \great fan of the Royalist
> Balzac, intended to write a book of literary
> criticism
> on Balzac
>
> ^^^^
>
> CB: But it was not the Royalism of Balzac's ideas
> that Marx praised rather
> the exposure of the bourgeoisie. It was the
> unintended left in Balzac's
> thinking, the rational kernel.
Point is, the political orientation of the author doesn't by itself tell you much about the worth of his or her ideas. There are lost of Marxists whose work is catatonically boring or implacably stupid or both -- the Soviet Union turned out these hacks in droves, but there are lots like them in Western left groups of all stripes too. There are lots of dumb rightwingers -- Mill (wasn't it he?) called the Tories the "stupid party," but there are lots of smart ones who have things to say with which we must at least engage to be confident of our ideas and from whom we may learn things we didn't know. Including that they are correctt about some things. Judge Posner. Carl Schmitt (in fact an actual Nazi.) Leo Strauss. Nietzsche -- not very political but no friend of the left. Etc.
Hitchens, evidently,
> has been ditching the
> left in his thinking.
No kidding. But also the brains and the style. Now he's just a boring hack.
Judge Posner, by contrast, was never a leftist, but has brains and style to spare, and has written a heap of really good books as well as some really annoying ones. Wish I could time share on his brains and style some of the time -- he uses them a lot more than most people do, but he SO much energy that maybe I could just, like, use them for a few secobds every hour while he was sleeping. If he sleeps.
jks
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