How did one sentence become the Sacred, Inviolable Word of the Constitution?

You know the sentence: “A well regu­lated mili­tia, being neces­sary for the secur­ity of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It’s Holy Writ. It may not be questioned, or at least, the interpretation that means anyone can own a weapon of mass murder, may not be questioned. One may wonder how that came to be, especially given the more limiting interpretation that prevailed over most of American history. Here’s a good summary of the twists and turns that led to our current armed state.

“A fraud on the Amer­ican public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amend­ment gives an unfettered indi­vidual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conser­vat­ive appoin­ted by Richard Nixon was express­ing the long­time consensus of histor­i­ans and judges across the polit­ical spec­trum.

Twenty-five years later, Burger’s view seems as quaint as a powdered wig. Not only is an indi­vidual right to a fire­arm widely accep­ted, but increas­ingly states are also passing laws to legal­ize carry­ing weapons on streets, in parks, in bars—even in churches.

Many are startled to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amend­ment guar­an­tees an indi­vidu­al’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capit­al’s law effect­ively banning hand­guns in the home. In fact, every other time the court had ruled previ­ously, it had ruled other­wise. Why such a head-snap­ping turn­around? Don’t look for answers in dusty law books or the arcane reaches of theory.

You know, it has the words “well regulated militia” right there in the sentence, and it turns out the phrase “bear arms” had a very specific meaning to the Sacred Founding Fathers: it didn’t mean to just carry a musket in case you saw a squirrel to shoot, it had the implication of being armed in warfare. That’s all been lost, thanks to the activities of one effective organization, the goddamned NRA. The NRA has only a partial quote on the wall of their building.

Today at the NRA’s headquar­ters in Fair­fax, Virginia, over­sized letters on the facade no longer refer to “marks­man­ship” and “safety.” Instead, the Second Amend­ment is emblazoned on a wall of the build­ing’s lobby. Visit­ors might not notice that the text is incom­plete. It reads:

“.. the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The first half—the part about the well regu­lated mili­tia—has been edited out.

Interesting. Also revealing is this interview with attendees at the NRA conference this past week.

The gun-waving fanatics will defend to the death the Holy Second Amendment, but they don’t even know what it says, despite being only one sentence long.

Then to learn that the whole modern justification for ubiquitous guns is built on lies, half-truths, and quote mining…jesus, what an embarrassing foundation of pseudo-scholarship.

Thomas Jeffer­son offers numer­ous oppor­tun­it­ies for pro-gun advoc­ates. “Histor­ical research demon­strates the Founders out-‘NRAing’ even the NRA,” proclaimed one prolific scholar. “‘One loves to possess arms’ wrote Thomas Jeffer­son, the premier intel­lec­tual of his day, to George Wash­ing­ton on June 19, 1796.” What a find! Oops: Jeffer­son was not talk­ing about guns. He was writ­ing to Wash­ing­ton asking for copies of some old letters, to have handy so he could issue a rebut­tal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secret­ary of state. The NRA website still includes the quote. You can go online to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with Jeffer­son’s mangled words.

I thought creationists were the most shameless of liars, but gun-fondlers are giving them a run for the money. Although I also suspect there’s a huge overlap between gun-fondlers and bible-thumpers.

What is going on in Ohio?

The state seems to be a magnet for bad political ideas, and is striving to become the Yankee Texas. Recently, it was the extreme gerrymandering that no one wants to fix (hey, maybe political parties shouldn’t be in charge of defining districts?), and now…this new law.

If you’re unhappy that you lost a contest in high school, just accuse your opponent of being transgender, and demand a thorough investigation. Ohio Republicans will help by demanding that their pants be pulled down to inspect their genitals, followed by an invasive internal inspection, then a blood draw to have their testosterone levels measured, and a cheek swab to check out their chromosomes. FREEDOM! They’re the party that is going to get the intrusive legislation of Big Government off your backs by legislating that your school can insist on ad hoc genital, hormone, and chromosome inspections, all in the name of protecting women’s sports.

Yeah, that’s exactly what women athletes have been demanding, that others can request gynecological exams at will.

“University” is not a word that should be associated with “scam”

I think it’s part of the Right’s efforts to undermine education — steal the word “university” and attach it to rank garbage. Think PragerU. Think Trump University. Think University of Austin. All trash. Now how about this: a blockchain university, Woolf U.

In a lengthy August 2018 interview with Disruption Hub, Woolf’s founder Joshua Broggi — a philosopher of religion at Wolfson College, Oxford — tells how he was first inspired to blockchain by a student who wanted to pay his university fees in cryptocurrency.

Broggi thinks “blockchain” could solve all manner of issues in higher education, even the problem with adjunct teaching, the gig economy of academia — “when I look around my faculty, they spend a significant portion of their time acquiring their next temporary position, and that’s really a wasteful use of these extremely talented peoples’ time” — even though Woolf’s plan is also a gig economy. His answer to this detail is that the Woolf model will assure a steady supply of students for the independently-contracting academics to teach.

As of October 2018, Broggi was still confident in the blockchain approach — “We literally could not do what we are doing without a blockchain,” he told ABC News — though actual blockchain academic Michèle Finck told ABC she considered the project fundamentally “misunderstands what a university education is about,” and would be a GDPR disaster.

Broggi also stated at this time that tuition would be $5,000 per year — down from the $19,200 he had estimated in March 2018.

Perhaps it’s my limited imagination, but I fail to see how blockchain helps anything here. Broggi seems to be getting fired up about a tool (a bad tool) for managing payments to administrators, which is a bizarre focus for a university, but a pretty good one for a scam, where the money rolling in is all that matters. I’m trying to remember the 1980s when spreadsheets were all the rage…did anyone propose a Spreadsheet University, where everyone was excited about using VisiCalc to track budgets and grades? This is not to imply that blockchain has all the utility of a spreadsheet — it doesn’t — or that spreadsheets aren’t extremely useful for managing grades (I use them all the time), but that no one would look at a tool like that and say, “Hmmm. I am inspired to wrap a whole university in that, it’s far more important than trivialities like a curriculum.”

Poor Broggi. He seems to have lately realized that you shouldn’t name your scam “Scam University”, and “blockchain” has become synonymous with “scam”, so he’s had to delete the word “blockchain” from his promotional materials.

The word “blockchain” seems to have vanished from Woolf’s site some time between September 2018 and January 2019 — and the page title changed from “Building The First Blockchain University” to “Building a Borderless University.” The main headline is now “Not your typical online university,” and the front page speaks of video tutorials with a “real professor” and two or three students.

That leaves me wondering what makes Woolf University different from other fly-by-night student-loan-exploiting fake university out there. The answer is…nothing.

Oh hey, speaking of fake universities, let’s check in with the University of Austin. June 2022 is a big month for them, because this is when they have their very first course offering, “The Forbidden Courses“. They’ve had to scale back a bit, unsurprisingly. The courses will not be held in Austin — they’ve rented some lovely spaces in Dallas for the whole thing. The “course” is all of 4 days long, and there are two course sessions…you could apply for both if you wanted. It is not accredited.

No, our program is not a credit-bearing or degreed program. Students may not earn continuing education credits, credit hours, or a diploma for participation in this program. Each course will occur over ten hours in one week.

The “course” itself is an incoherent schmear. They’ve gathered together a set of ideologues and told them, apparently, to talk about whatever they feel like. There is no clear theme, no synthesis, just third-rate conservative rock stars asked to talk at the students.

WEEK ONE

Niall Ferguson on free vs. unfree societies in the 20th century
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on free speech, religion, and women’s rights
Dorian Abbot on approaches to climate change
Rob Henderson on the psychology of social status

WEEK TWO

Kathleen Stock on varieties of feminism
Jacob Howland on ideology
Deirdre McCloskey on capitalism: catastrophe or triumph?
Thomas Chatterton Williams on black male writing from Richard Wright to Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are also “workshops”. It is not clear what they are workshopping.

WORKSHOP LEADERS
Arthur Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership, Harvard University
Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, New York Law School; former President of the ACLU
David Mamet, award-winning playwright and author; Pulitzer Prize winner
Peter Boghossian, Philosopher and Author
Bari Weiss, journalist and best-selling author
Carlos Carvalho, Professor of Statistics, UT-Austin
Joshua Katz, Classicist, Princeton University
Lea Carpenter, novelist and screenwriter
Edward Luttwak, military strategist and author
Joe Lonsdale, CEO of 8VC, Co-Founder of Palantir
Balaji Srinivasan, Angel Investor and Tech Founder
Maleka Momand, Co-Founder & CEO, Esper
Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Robert Steffens, Co President, Marvel Entertainment
Geoff Lewis, Founder & Managing Partner, Bedrock
Amber Allen, Founder and CEO, Double A Labs
Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic
Michael Solana, Vice President, Founders Fund

So you show up for one of these forbidden courses, and there’s a mob of like 20 professors waiting to divvy up the 10 hours of instruction, and each one has their own peculiar hobby horse they’re riding, and they anticipate a group of 30-40 students, and then what?

I looked at that mess and figured their student body was going to be tinier than they expect, except they did one thing exactly right. They are paying bodies to attend.

Due to the support of a generous grant from our donors, there is no cost to attend the program. Hotels, some meals, and activities are covered by UATX. A $300 stipend will be given to participants to defray costs from travel, some meals, and other incidental expenses. Any additional costs will be the responsibility of participants.

Whoa. I wish we could just pay our students to attend my university, and take care of their housing and meals at no cost. This is what you get when millionaires and billionaires back your efforts to destroy public education. I wonder what contribution Elon Musk made?

Yikes, claustrophobia alert

I guess there are some caves or tunnels near St Paul — historically, the city was originally named Pig’s Eye, after a brewer/tavern keeper who owned a cave near the Mississippi, so it’s not surprising there are caves connected to the river. These actually look like old sewer lines, too.

Anyway, some people explore these places. (Note: there is no information in the soundtrack, it’s just noise, so you can turn it off and miss nothing).

Now I’m wondering, if someone rediscovers these caves in 50-100 thousand years, how will they interpret the cave art?

CFI disappoints me again, as expected

William had to go and remind me that CFI still exists. I used to have to roll my eyes at Ron Lindsay’s editorials, but now that Robyn Blumner is in charge, they’ve gotten even worse. Take a look at their latest: Identitarianism is incompatible with humanism. I agree with the title! But we immediately run into some problems. She starts by defining her terms (good), but her definition is insane.

Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary)

Wait, what? Her source is Urban Dictionary? That might be find for some obscure slang, but not for a topic that a presumable rationalist is about to jump headlong into with an op-ed. Who are the people she’s addressing here? I’m confused already.

If we take a small step upwards and look at the definition on Wikipedia, it’s radically different.

The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European nationalist, far-right political ideology asserting the right of European ethnic groups and white peoples to Western culture and territories claimed to belong exclusively to them. Originating in France as Les Identitaires (“The Identitarians”), with its youth wing Generation Identity, the movement expanded to other European countries during the early 21st century. Building on ontological ideas of the German Conservative Revolution, its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, who are considered the main ideological sources of the movement.

Identitarians promote concepts such as pan-European nationalism, localism, ethnopluralism, remigration, or the Great Replacement, and they are generally opposed to globalisation, multiculturalism, Islamization and extra-European immigration. Influenced by New Right metapolitics, they do not seek direct electoral results, but rather to provoke long-term social transformations and eventually achieve cultural hegemony and popular adhesion to their ideas.

Some Identitarians explicitly espouse ideas of xenophobia and racialism, but most limit their public statements to more docile language. Strongly opposed to cultural mixing, they promote the preservation of homogeneous ethno-cultural entities, generally to the exclusion of extra-European migrants and descendants of immigrants. In 2019, the Identitarian Movement was classified by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as right-wing extremist.

By the way, it begins with an important note: “Not to be confused with Identity politics.”

Anyway, that’s what I associate with the word Identitarian, far right nationalism and ethnocentrism. Not whatever she found on Urban Dictionary. And then she starts writing, and it’s clear what she’s really targeting: it’s those danged Wokeists again, who are not Identitarians, who oppose Identitarianism, who think Identitarians are racists and fascists.

Here’s who she’s whining about.

Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others.

This has given rise to a corrosive cultural environment awash in controversial speakers being shouted down on college campuses; even liberal professors and newspaper editors losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; the cancellation of great historical figures for being men of their time; and a range of outlandish claims of microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other crimes against current orthodoxy.

Oh. You know, these people who hate freedom (and are probably also ugly and smell bad) don’t exist. There are people who object when some people promote objectionable ideas. The humanists I know with ‘radical’ ideas about justice, for instance, don’t see simple discrete categories that deserve special protection, they see everyone as unique, with variations that ought to be respected and not judged through the lens of “good” and “bad” or “superior” and “inferior”, and insist that no one deserves to be singled out with a simplistic label. Everything about culture and experience and biology contributes to identity, and you don’t get to erase it. Blumner is taking the familiar “I don’t see color” claim of the privileged and trying to white every variation out.

Humanism should not reduce everyone to generic plastic people. It should recognize the variety of social forces that shape us all and make us each different. That’s not identitarianism, it’s a basic recognition of the diversity of human experience. She should have ended the essay with this:

There are a couple of tells in her complaint. losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; who is she to decide what is a tiny slight? Some of those slights are long historical slanders that have deeply harmed people! men of their time; there’s a poisonous phrase, suggesting that it was OK for slavers, for instance, to oppress and torture other human beings because, well, everyone else was doing it. There are humanist principles that are the next best thing to universal, and ‘treat others as you would want to be treated’ is one of them, and once, I would have thought, central to humanist thinking. And then, current orthodoxy. Is the status quo and orthodoxy something atheists and humanists necessarily support?

Then, who are the victims of this corrosive cultural environment? Name them. Give specific examples. As it stands, this is just bad essay writing, showing that she’s afraid if she did get specific, someone might track down the examples and find that the slights weren’t so tiny, that other men and women of their time were quite vocal about the wrongs they were doing, or that the microaggressions were severe enough that everyone should know better. And she’s right to be afraid, because she does name one person, and her motivations are clear.

Good people with humanist hearts have been pilloried if they don’t subscribe to every jot and tittle of the identitarian gospel. A prime example is the decision last year by the American Humanist Association (AHA) to retract its 1996 award to Richard Dawkins as Humanist of the Year. The man who has done more than anyone alive to advance evolutionary biology and the public’s understanding of that science, who has brought the light of atheism to millions of people, and whose vociferous opposition to Donald Trump and Brexit certainly must have burnished his liberal cred became radioactive because of one tweet on transgender issues that the AHA didn’t like.

Oh, yes, keep in mind that Robyn Blumner was appointed to her position by Richard Dawkins, and that she is the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Conflict of interest much?

It was more than one tweet, and it exposed that he had a bigoted perspective on those transgender issues. It is correct that the American Humanist Association didn’t like the idea of having given a distinguished award to a bigot, and one who has gone on to consistently take the wrong side in every matter of trans rights. He just recently got together with Jordan Peterson in a mutual back-patting session to say that he “totally agrees” with him that those transgenders are oppressing good wealthy white cis-het men like themselves. That wasn’t some trivial slip of the tongue, it’s what Dawkins actively believes and promotes, so why should AHA ignore an ethical violation like that?

But then, Blumner, and by association, CFI, have a crude and biased understanding of gender issues themselves. The clue is in the image they chose to illustrate the essay.

Get it? It would be unnatural to plug your VGA port and a USB cable together. Used to illustrate an article defending the primitive and simplistic views of a man on gender issues. The subtext is not very sub.

She might as well have illustrated it with this.

Johnny better get used to it

Roy Edroso speculates about future Depp projects.

Saucy Jack vs. The Sea Hags. The woke Disney corporation won’t revive the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise except in a feminazi version, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still have Johnny Depp riding the seven seas as legendary buccaneer “Saucy” Jack Grackle! In this totally separate and original IP he’s put on a little weight, but he’s still the drunk and disorderly rascal you’ve come to know and love. In his glad rags, mascara, and mannerisms he cuts a dashing figure and all the ladies love him — except for the Sea-Hags, an eighteenth-century gang of nasty women who, damaged by daddy issues, roam the high seas in search of psychic compensation and plunder. They despise Jack Grackle for his roguish masculinity and have vowed to sink his ship The Dark Gem and to literally emasculate him! But Jack leads them on a merry chase with much derring-do and CGI, ending in a literally ravishing, literally climactic physical struggle with Hag Queen Millie Bobbie Brown in which he shows her what “rolling in the deep” really means and makes everything work out! With several of Hollywood’s top young actresses as the Sea Hags (who, when they remove their spectacles and shake out their hair, are actually super hot) and, as Jack’s pirate gang, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro as “Half-Pint.” Special cameo by Tom Cruise as The Bitchmaster!

I like it. I wouldn’t watch it, but I appreciate the authenticity of his crew, none of whom could act their way out of a soggy, weevily biscuit. Reality is that while something that blatant wouldn’t get made, poor Johnny is going to have to resign himself to third tier movies and a lot of bad guy roles.

I also notice something in the comments over there: like me, a lot of lefties sat there quietly throughout the trial, doing their best to ignore it all. Maybe that’s not the best strategy? You think?

Giveaways incoming!

I’ve been held up by mobility problems lately, but I’m trying to get the things resolved and shipped out today. I can’t send out a couple of books until I get some addresses!

For Giveaway #1, logicalcat needs to email me a shipping address for the cell biology book!

For Giveaway #2, the winners are:

JoDee for the cancer text

ANB for the development text

NO ONE has spoken up for the neuro book! It’s not too late, let me know in the comments here.

Recipients should email me with a shipping address!

I’ll be posting Giveaway #3 tomorrow.

I was silent

Could he look more like a sleazy dirtbag? Maybe that’s what they mean by “authentic.”

To make excuses for myself, it was a court case, and my perspective wouldn’t have made a difference — I’d have just been one of the thousands or more yammering on the internet about a trial. I’d been through this before, in the OJ Simpson case, where the cacophony of noise did not contribute to justice, but almost certainly skewed the fickle court of public opinion in unfavorable ways.

I’m speaking of the Amber Heard trial, which was decided yesterday in favor of Johnny Depp. I’ve avoided news of the case because enough snippets had leaked through to leave me sickened. On YouTube and social media, it was made clear that Depp was the affable rogue who made light of Heard’s case; Heard, on the other hand, was the conniving sociopath who could turn on the waterworks at an instant’s notice, and then, moments later, revert to stone-faced heartless bitch. Obviously, she was lying. Obviously, Captain Jack Sparrow was a misunderstood rascal.

Except…whenever I watched a clip of the trial, what I saw was a woman in pain, controlling herself because she didn’t want to play into the public perception of women as hysterical, while Depp was just an asshole. Even more poisonous was the Depp camp, which seemed to consist largely of the usual bros who were gleeful about an opportunity to shriek insults at a woman while not getting the usual social opprobrium. It was a repulsive spectacle. While I averted my eyes and avoided the trial news as much as I could, Rebecca Watson dug deeper, and I agree fully with her take.

Now the case has been settled. Depp won. This is going to have serious consequences.

…on Wednesday after a jury in Fairfax, Virginia, found Amber Heard guilty of defaming Depp in a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, in which she identified herself as a public face of domestic abuse survivors, without explicitly naming Depp. Despite presenting photos of her injuries, video recordings of Depp’s meltdowns, and witness testimony supporting her claims of abuse, Depp was awarded $10 million plus $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million for winning one point in her countersuit.

But in truth, the highly publicized trial was decided in the court of public opinion weeks ago. As it played out over the last few weeks, with people on social media overwhelmingly aligning with the beloved Pirates of the Caribbean star, millions of stans and even brands and celebrities have excoriated Heard and accused her of fabricating the allegations against Depp, causing hashtags like #AmberTurd and #JusticeForJohnnyDepp to trend worldwide.

“This is basically the end of MeToo,” Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the death of the whole movement.”

As the verdict came in, sexual assault survivors expressed their disappointment with the decision, even if they were not surprised by it. “I don’t think it’s unexpected. But it’s horrible,” says one survivor, who herself faced a defamation claim after coming forward against her own abuser (and requested her name be withheld for legal reasons). She says the claim was dropped, but that watching Heard be dragged through the mud during the trial brought back memories of her own experience, which she says was traumatic and led her to consider suicide.

“I feel really glad to think my case didn’t go ahead. And stupid to think I could have won it,” she says. “Men always win.”

And I kept my mouth shut throughout. I’m always disappointing myself.

Rebecca didn’t mention the one case that impressed me with her point, that I mentioned at the beginning: the “trial of the century”, the OJ Simpson murder trial, which OJ won, because “Men always win.” Even after brutally chopping up Nicole Brown Simpson, he got off.

Well, sort of.

We all knew he did it, and his behavior after the trial confirmed it. His career in movies was dead, and you can’t even watch his old movies anymore without cringing deeply. I’m sure not going to watch a Naked Gun movie, ever again. It’s a similar situation now; knowing that Johnny Depp is a wife-beating arrogant dudebro means I’m not going to ever be able to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or any movie starring Depp, without feeling a little bit of disgust at the main character.

Not that that could be the slightest consolation to Amber Heard or especially Nicole Brown Simpson. At least Heard has escaped without being stabbed to death. This verdict makes it a little less likely that other victims of domestic abuse will get away with their lives.

Thank god for James Stephanie Sterling

I’m a pathetic excuse for a gamer — I’m not very good at the vidyagames, especially not the ones that require fast twitch reflexes — but still, I have to watch all of James Stephanie Sterling’s videos about games and the gaming industry. Watch this one and you’ll see why — let’s all call out those cowards everywhere who whine about not being political, not realizing that the luxury of pretending to shun political positions is in and of itself a political position.

I totally agree that one of the defining characteristics of conservative and centrist liberals is craven cowardice, desperately hiding from the consequences of their bad ideas.