I’m intrigued by Adrian Vermeule’s ideas and wish to subscribe to his newsletter

You may remember Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule from such fustigations as “Boniface VIII: Upholder of the Faith or Liberal Squish?” and “Throw Bernie Sanders Down the Well So My Country Can Be Free.” Well he has some further thoughts on what is to be done:

The part of this that most intrigues me is the demand to “ban positivism.” In jurisprudence, positivism is the view — one minute university version here — that the legitimacy of legal rules is wholly internal to the system that generates them, and that “external” considerations of morality are irrelevant to that legitimacy. For example, I may think that as a matter of political mortality the Senate is a horrible institution, but that doesn’t mean that as a judge I can declare that California gets 20 Senate seats now because that would be fairer.

(This is a super simple example for illustrative purposes. Obviously there are vast areas where the appropriate relationship between the interpretation of formal legal rules and considerations of political morality is vastly more problematic and complex. See, e.g., all non-trivial contemporary constitutional litigation).

Anyway . . . assuming this is the positivism Vermeule is talking about, as opposed to say Rudolph Carnap’s definition of the word, I have some trouble imagining how one would even attempt to operationalize his proposal. How exactly do you “ban” an approach to legal interpretation, and doesn’t such a purported rule run instantly into interpretive contradictions? Can you take a positivist approach to rules banning taking a positivist approach? Does a non-positivist interpretation of such a rule require refusing to actually enforce it? Etc.

Oh who are we kidding here? This guy is obviously as nuts a syphilitic howler monkey.

One of our commenters — Gator90? — speculated the other day that linear extrapolation suggests the next Republican presidential nominee will be a syphilitic howler monkey rather than Donald Trump. This is quite possible, and makes me look forward to such tomes as The Faith of Syphilitic Howler Monkey and of course John Yoo’s Syphilitic Howler Monkey: Defender of the Constitution, as well as various Conradian journalistic journeys down the Ohio River to find out just what it is about Syphilitic Howler Monkey that is so attractive to the denizens of the Heartland).

I’m also intrigued by the Sabbath laws thing: Vermeule’s twitter feed seems rather obsessed with this particular reform.

Maybe those reforms could be twinned with banning Critical Race Theory, to create a Black Sabbath if you will.

But that’s probably paranoid.*

If pressed on any of this Vermeule will probably claim that nobody on the Left can take a joke. That’s the thing about theocratic fascists: they’re just laff a minute guys, as the history of the previous century demonstrated in such colorful detail.