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:: MAX BLACK ::
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."--C.S. Lewis
"The Swiss pocket knife of conservative thought on the web..." - Eli Kardrakian
"Bookmark Max and dump your subscription to the newspaper; if you don't have a birdcage you really don't need it anyway..." - Shirley St. James
:: Thursday, June 02, 2005 ::
"A bad constitution that reveals a secret cancer of our democracy"
"First principle of constitutional law: a Constitution is a readable text."
This is the story of Professor Etienne Chouard, a Frenchman who constructed a little blog and then published a clinical deconstruction of the telephone-book size European "Constitution". Mr. Chouard it seems, was possibly the only person in the world [besides maybe the author, Valery Giscard d'Estaing] to have actually slogged through the tediously worded and self contradictory, 485 page document. Upon it's publication, Chouard's critique - or Fisking if you prefer - was immediately seized upon by the French population; at it's high-point, Chouard's blog was getting 25,000 hits per day and the essay was faxed and emailed all over Europe. His blog was getting hammered because it was possibly the first concise and intelligible critique of the EU Constitution available; the French were certainly not getting it from their main-stream media. As Chrouard has posted on his blog:"journalists deprive to us of public debates."
Er, Well said Professor Chouard.
[To get a some idea as to the level of debate created by Chouard's blog, just Google it.]
Related: Joe Gandelman has an extensive post on the fallout from France's rejection of the EU Constitution.
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:: Max 2:48 PM [+] ::
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