My, for a fellow who's weary of the whole issue and wishes it'd go away that's a lot of passion and sour grapes.

I don't follow Volokh closely enough to render any judgments. But I would like to say that Rauch's essay is spot on in my opinion and oddly pertinent to your post Jason.
It seems to me that it should be expected that a centrist lawyerly site like Volokh.com could be expected to go from vigorous support of gays when they're in the minority to a more tempered and worried tone once their supporters achieve majority status.
I agree with you that the structural laws of this country would prevent the kind of oppression that Volokh fears. But I also think that gay rights supporters and the gay rights movement still should assert, as I strongly believe, that even if the structural laws didn't protect the rights of the religious we still wouldn't pursue and harry them the way they pursued and harried us.
As Rauch says, we're after equality, not revenge (though thankfully equality would be our most vicious revenge against our historic oppressors as well).

Billie:
The only reason anyone would be "defending it as not racist" would be the grievance trollers bringing the issue up in the first place.
If you want to share your favorite book with your kids feel free to. Rather than plopping the tyke down before the plodding behemoth of the movies I'd suggest reading the book to them instead. As a parent you have the right and ability to lie and say that Samwise Gamgee was a black/hispanic/gay/(insert minority of your choice) hobbit in the interest of diversity plus you're not cooking their brain matter with television microwaves and you're also interacting with your child. Win/win/win

I fail to see, however, how injecting the question of race into a movie that is generally silent on the subject is productive. As for counterproductive consider that if the great masses of the people hear anti-racists and think of Martin Luther fighting institutionalized racism then they will generally admire them and be sympathetic to their concerns. If those great masses hear anti-racist and instead think of a bunch of comfortable academics screening through children’s shows and movie scripts for incidences of "euro centrism" and other such nonsense they will tune them out as useless wastes of time. There is only so much political oxygen in the room. Why not save it for real incidences of racism and real problems rather than taking the crusade into peoples souls where it'll fail and tarnish itself both in turn?

When the people worried about racism spend their time and energy slamming Dumbo and burning Disney in effigey for instance the real racists win.

The US political system at the Federal level is structurally unsuited to rapid changes of direction since it requires supermajorities and because the current two party system skews political incentives. Particularly difficult are changes of direction that command support that is wide spread but shallow like debt reduction is. People agree heartily that federal debt should be reduced but scream furiously and vote punitively the moment spending cuts touch something they benefit from.
Europe by contrast is principally run by parliamentary majorities or coalitions between multiple parties (more than two) where the governments, once formed under an electoral mandate, suffer few hindrances in enacting their chosen agendas.

I found your long post charmingly worded but would it have killed you to put it behind a break? Having Stacy McCain taking up this much space even if it's an item rebuting him strikes me as somehow... ... I don't know wasteful?

Well some people really don't like Tolkien and it's understandable. He had a tendency to write like what he was, a professor and an linguist.

I dunno if Liza is really Tolkienesque... she's too etherial to be a mortal but too down to earth to be a Tolkien immortal. But as a general rule more Liza is better than less Liza so I'm sure she'd have been better.

I only endured the movies once through. So I never saw the extended footage. Good to know they weren't as bad as I thought in the final form.

Yes yes, the European author working off the northern European base material with his primary focus on fantasy linguistics had a Eurocentric bias, astonishing. The point is that one can racial greif troll 100% of the works written prior to 1980 and probably 90% of the works written after that point and haul in a rich harvest of pointless greivances to harp on. And this activity is, if not utterly useless to fighting racism, probably counterproductive to the cause as a whole.

Willow sucked? How dare you sir! How. Dare. You?!?!?

In Two Towers the Ents were robbed repeatedly by the adapters. They were robbed of their self determination; in the novels the Ents took council among themselves and decided to make war on Isengard, in the movies they were emotionally conned into it by the hobbits. They were also robbed of their major contribution; the semi-awake ent army the Hurons were primarily responsible for ending the orcish seige of Helms Deep. In the movie this accomplishment was transferred to human hands.

I love your optimism.

Never meant to exclude the left Dex of course.

Plus four points to House Gryffindor for a Discworld link.

As to the racial portrayal of hobbits; some people seriously need to find something better to complain about. Like the abominationable interpretation of the Ents involvement in the second LOTR movie.

Abomination!! Abomination I say!!! *whipes spittle from the screen*

Possibly, also NASA plays very well towards the National Greatness strains that many on the right are fond of. The Moon landing as a victory over Communism for instance probably still warms many a right wing boomer memory.

Wow Barrett, you're hard to impress. Sentient life would rock the foundations of our understandings of religion and our place in the universe. Sentient life visiting out little corner of the galaxy would imply the shattering of our very understandings of physics and quantum physics. That'd be potentially a singularity.

For what very miniscule little it's worth Mike I actually think I understand what your stated position was and thought it was very even handed of you to say.

What I got was that in your eyes both the right and the left are (by and large) statist. But the left is openly and relatively up front in their statism where as the right cloaks itself in the rubric and garb of antistatists.

So the left is statist, but the right is also statis AND hypocritical.

This strikes me as a correct assertion considering your very vehement anti-statist position. And for my part as a market neo-liberal I'll readily cop to the plea that the left doesn't hold up anti-statism as a desirable goal. The lefts asserted priorities are heavily equality, prosperity and justice oriented (and yes yes I know that anti-statists believe that a minimal state society would achieve those goals best).

Okay so stating that federal employees keep their extra income as cash and hide it in the mattress = serious analysis of fiscal stimulus but stating that the wealthy keep their extra income as bullion and bury it in the ground = folk Marxism?

That's some seriously magical economic thinking there Koz. By your rationale confiscatory tax rates on the rich are an excellent policy as well since the money would otherwise be used to buy gold bars to hide in huge underground vaults. By taking all that money away the government could put it to use paying barely livable wages to more civil servants and thus improve the economy by increasing the velocity of money even further!

Let me guess, you're a supporter of "Starve the Beast" and Laffer curve economics too right?

Hmm wouldn't you want to be nominating him for the left wing equivalent of the Malkin award; the Moore Award? Malkin and her right wing screeching brigade would never use "Cheney-like" as a detractory or negative statement.

Pot kettle me lad.

The League is a Randian echo chamber? You're joking. We didn't let that many libertarians on board.

In the order you present the examples:

Close Gitmo: He tried but a unified GOP opposition, voter indifference when it came down to it plus utterly feckless congressional Dems and his own unwillingness to spend serious capital on the issue caused him to fail.

Bringing the troops home: He partially has, drawing down in Iraq but either the people at the Pentagon can make a really good arguement against withdrawing completely or he's terrified of causing a 'Nam redux because he's since reversed course on that in Afghanistan.

Reforminging the Patriot Act/draining the tourture swamp: He never tried. He had a choice; commit his first term entirely to unravelling Bushes abominations and the conflagration that would ensue if he confronted it or punt and then have the time and energy to persue other goals. Obama chose the latter. History will judge whether it was a feckless choice or a prescient one.

I'm 100% down with your second premise 62across. In theory on the first premise I object not because I think airport security companies would be particularily altruistic but because they'd be competing and trying to get airport contracts on the grounds of speed, user satisfaction and actual terrorist catching. If most of this is theater then any cold blooded screening company would dispense with it in the interest of speed and user satisfaction. The TSA on the other hand doesn't have to care what the users think, and they really really don't.

Jgabriel, we have not caught any terrorists using our current stringent screening process. So what the heck is the point of it? A great deal of the nonsense the TSA does is public security theater. It doesn't make people safer, it just makes it appear like something is being done to make them feel safer. As many have observed any terrorist seeking to cause casualties would be able to easily do it simply by targeting the security lines. Besides, what with reinforced cockpit doors and a passenger population no longer willing to sit quietly when a hijacking occurs there's not much likelyhood that terrorists could be able to replicate 9/11 again regardless of what hoops they do or do not have to jump through at the airport.

Dude, you're kindof gibbering. You may want to take a few deep breaths and compile your arguements into a single rational post rather than this. It'd be more persuasive.