One of the good guys.

It's JS Mill's birthday today. Randoms:

1. Mill, it's often forgotten, was of Scottish descent. Probably all the really great British philosophers except Russell have been Scottish.

2. "The Conservatives, as being by the law of their existence the stupidest
party..."[1] = the shortest refutation of conservatism I know of.

3. Mill was the subject of this week's In Our Time.

4. Roger Scruton does the outraged authoritarian conservative howl here; Andrew Sullivan's retort is pitched just right:

Think of a Tory squire hunting foxes, muttering about Jews, before attending Evensong. When all is said and done, that's Scruton's idea of the "sacred and the prohibited.

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[1] footnote 4 of Representative Government(pdf), via Stumblingandmumbling.