Welcome to the online journal of larvatus. Stable texts are open to the general public. Squibs and sallies, schemes and stratagems, jaunts and taunts, are restricted to friends. Please note that locked texts subject to third party copyright are provided to my friends under the doctrine of fair use, subject to implied consent by all their readers to ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

A man walks into a backwoods bar in Kentucky and orders a cosmopolitan. The bartender looks the man over and says, “Not from ’round here, are ya?” “No” replies the man, “I’m from Providence, Rhode Island.” The bartender looks at him and says, “Well what do ya do in Providence?” “I’m a taxidermist,” says the man. The bartender looks bewildered, so ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

The essential predicate for a charge of sexual assault of an adult is a lack of consent on part of the victim. Nothing in Charlotte Waters’ original complaint, which has been modestly removed from Reddit, but happily remains available via the Wayback Machine, even begins to allege that she had failed to consent to any sexual act, any photo ( Read more... )

Emily Bazelon’s impassioned assault on the First Amendment, made in the names, and on the behalves of, receptive parties in failed romantic relationships, publicly shamed by their former mates, characteristically misses its mark. If speech is actionable, its kind will always already have been chilled, e.g. by statutes that penalize libel or ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I thank the social media commentariat for clarifying that school slashings perpetrated in China by mad people, are providentially mitigated by good laws that forbid civilan gun ownership, curtail political dissent, subdue public assembly, ban weird religious worship, and harvest valuable organs of executed enemies of the state. But in light of my ( Read more... )