I don’t have the book with me right now, so I can’t verify the descriptions immediately, but as I recall the Silmarilli are present in the Book of Lost Tales, having been crafted by Feanor, then stolen by Melko, one of them recovered by Beren, etc. If so, then they would have been conceived of by late 1916 or early 1917.

Prof. Gutzman: The preamble to the Declaration was similar in content to the philosophical sections of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, yes, but while the Virginia Declaration of Rights was binding on Virginians — since they had consented to it …

I wonder, Sir, how many of the 300,000 or so Virginian slaves living at the time of the Revolution “consented to” the Virginia Declaration of Rights?

Perhaps the Newspaper of Record’s partial retraction was too hasty…

Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy.

There’s a little-known and rarely-observed rule of English grammar to the effect that “like” excludes and “such as” includes. So, for example, if I were to say “university towns such as Auburn have good used bookstores,” I am thereby stating that Auburn (inter alia) has a good used bookstore. But if I were to say “university towns like Auburn usually have Indian restaurants,” I am not saying anything about Auburn, but rather saying something about other university towns, which resemble Auburn in some salient respect.

So if the Times had a good grammar-stickler on hand, they could insist that when they say that “Victorian-era Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer” supported imperialism, opposed labor unions, etc., they have not said anything at all about what Herbert Spencer believed; they only said something about what other Victorian-era Social Darwinists, Herbert Spencer not included, believed. After all, they didn’t say that “Victorian-era Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer” did those nasty things.

On the other hand, “can” does not always imply “ought.”

Seriously, though, good work, and congratulations.

I notice that several videos of Ron Paul’s answers have been uploaded to YouTube. (Cf. for example [1].) I also note that none of the edits I’ve seen so far include Paul’s support for forced pregnancy. I wonder why that is, and what that tells us about the Paul apparatchiks.

Here’s the quotation, as promised. It’s from letter # 294, on 8 February 1967 to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had interviewed Tolkien for the Daily Telegraph Magazine and sent him a draft of their article in advance of publication. He commented on their quotation of him as saying, “I don’t read much now, except for fairy-stories,” by saying:

“For ‘except,’ read ‘not even.’ I read quite a lot–or more truly, try to read many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy). But I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention.”

Tolkien adds a footnote to this:

“There are exceptions. I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote, in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy. I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner-up when The L.R. was given the Fantasy Award: Death of Grass [by John Christopher]. I enjoy the S.F. of Isaac Azimov [sic]. Above these, I was recently deeply engaged in the books of Mary Renault; especially the two about Theseus, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. A few days ago I actually received a card of appreciation from her; perhaps the piece of ‘Fan-mail’ that gives me the most pleasure.”

As far as the Letters go, unfortunately I can’t find any reference in the index to Verne. The index entry for H.G. Wells turns up only a passing reference to Eloi and Morlocks (#109, 31 July 1947) in a letter about the prospects for publishing The Lord of the Rings.

I’m away from my books at the moment so I can’t give you the quote yet, but somewhere in the Letters there’s a draft of a letter that he wrote in response to a press interview from later in his life. I don’t precisely remember the context, but he mentioned along the way that outside of his professional studies, he read very little other than fairy tales and science fiction, mentioning Isaac Asimov (which he misspelled “Azimov”) by name. If that’s a reading habit that persisted from earlier in his life, rather than one he picked up later, then he may very well have read Wells and Verne as a younger man.

I’ll post the quote and the reference when I get back home in a couple of days…

It must surely take a bold and original understanding of civil war and imperial-era Rome to portray the whole of that society as an endless parade of debauchery, intrigue, spectacle and gore.

Nobody’s ever done that before.

For what it’s worth, the impression I got, at least from Mark Rudd’s account of himself in The Weather Underground, is that he is genuinely repentant and a lot more thoughtful and self-critical about his actions and his role in RYM and Weather than some of the other former Weathermen and Weatherwomen — Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and David Gilbert in particular — have been. I don’t know whether he’s a good or bad candidate for the MDS board — I’m not involved enough with SDS redevivus and don’t know enough about Rudd — but I don’t think it’s fair to rule him out simply on the basis of having once been involved with RYM and Weather, or on the basis of what other people who were once involved with RYM and Weather may be like.

Unfortunately, Bernardine Dohrn is another one of the nominees to the MDS, Inc. board — something that I’m less than thrilled to see.

It’s a good video; and it’s now today’s feature at Dulce Et Decorum Est.

It reminds me of all the members of the know-nothing blowhard brigade who were so outraged by Michael Moore’s use of stock footage — including children flying kites, quiet city scenes, happy people riding a ferris wheel, etc. — in depicting pre-war Baghdad in Fahrenheit 9/11. As far as I know nobody claimed that the footage wasn’t actual footage of Baghdad; apparently the problem with this was that it’s somehow irresponsible to so much as suggest that, even under a truly ghastly tyranny such as Saddam Hussein’s, there might still sometimes be children who are happy, people with ordinary lives to live, and many things of value that could be destroyed by aerial bombardment and urban combat. (Of course it is true that if your awareness of the world only goes back to last Tuesday and got all your information about pre-war Iraq from the film footage in Fahrenheit 9/11, then you’d come away with an awfully distorted picture of what Iraq was like during the reign of Saddam Hussein. But I don’t think that newborns and Kaspar Hauser were Moore’s intended audience….)

A little bird tells me that Roderick’s discussion with Bidinotto will not be in this book because an expanded version of it is forthcoming in an anthology on the anarchy-minarchy debate from Ashgate Press.