It’s happening. The Supreme Court, packed with regressive assholes, intends to overthrow Roe v Wade and throw the country into chaos. A copy of “Justice” Samuel Alito’s decision was leaked, and quotes from this terrible document are circulating on the internet, and we can see where Alito waxed poetic about his decision.

I have wondered sometimes if a man, to be a man, must not master a woman and if a woman to be a woman must not know herself mastered.

No man who has seen a woman in Pleasure Silk, or watched her dance, or heard the sound of a belled ankle or watched a woman’s hair, unbound, fall to her waist can long live without the possession of such a delicious creature.

It is said, in a Gorean proverb, that a man, in his heart, desires freedom, and that a woman, in her belly, yearns for love. The collar, in its way, answers both needs. The man is most free, owning the slave. He may do what he wishes with her. The woman, on the other hand, being owned, is institutionally and helplessly subject, in her status as slave, to the submissions of love.

Perhaps it should only be added that the Gorean master, though often strict, is seldom cruel. The girl knows, if she pleases him, her lot will be an easy one.

It is one thing to own a woman, and it is another to have her within the bonds of an excellent mastery.

Oh, sorry. Those are quotes from John Norman’s Gor series, you know the fantasy novel where men enslave women and the women like it. I wonder if Alito has a basement stash of those horrible old books?

Here’s what he actually wrote. The sentiment is similar, if not quite as openly expressed.

Alito’s draft ruling would overturn a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Mississippi law ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent by seeking to effectively ban abortions before viability.

Roe’s “survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant to the plainly incorrect,” Alito continues, adding that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak,” and that the original decision has had “damaging consequences.”

“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes.

Hmm. Well. Roger B. Taney — I mean, Slimy Sam Alito — is right, you know. The oppression of women has a long history in this country — after all, women only won the right to vote 100 years ago, with the ratification of the 19th amendment. Let’s just roll all the progress acquired in the last century to something more like the era when women were chattel. Instead of recognizing that it takes roots a long time to grow, just rip them out now.

Hey, you know what else isn’t deeply rooted in this country? Equal rights for black people. Using Alito’s reasoning, one could argue that we should bring back slavery.

But don’t worry. This decision won’t strip away abortion rights in and of itself, it’s just going to give state governments the right to do so. The Supreme Court will then sit back and smile benignly on every repressive measure the Republicans impose on their citizens.

“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft concludes. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

Well then, our elected representatives need to get to work and pass legislation to make abortion and health care a protected right. For once, I might agree with the old fossils of the Democratic party.

“If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans,” read a joint statement from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “… Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation — all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century.”

I notice that they don’t say what they’re going to do about it, other than be outraged and send more fundraising letters to me. At least Bernie Sanders has the right idea.

“Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter on Monday night, calling for an end to the Senate’s filibuster rule to enact such a bill with a simple majority.

In fact, a Democratic bill that would have done just that garnered only 46 votes in February, thanks to the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and the absences of several other Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are more upset that anyone dared to leak the decision.

It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) May 3, 2022

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) deemed it a “a shameless attempt to pressure justices into reversing their correct position that individual states can outlaw killing unborn babies.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called on the court and the Justice Department to “get to the bottom of this leak immediately using every investigative tool necessary.”

Sure, women will die because of this decision, but oh, dear, the decorum! The loss of trust!

Poor guy. Who wants to break the news to him that our trust in the Supreme Court was broken a long time ago? The final straw was when Mitch McConnell decided to deny a nominee so that he could pack the court with the assholes we’ve got there now. It’s a politicized pigsty for the Right.

To be fair, though, obviously there are some citizens who approve of any decision to restrict the rights of other women to get healthcare and abortions.

A woman named Hannah, who declined to provide her last name, stood in the middle of First Street and prayed that the justices “would find resolve.” She said she was “very sad to see people cheering to kill our children” and “was praying that people’s hearts will be softened.”

Yes,” she said, “we also wish to be free.” She smiled. “In every woman,” she said, “there is something of the Free Companion and something of the Slave Girl.

Except we don’t know what random consequences that would have. After all, Letters from a Birmingham Jail and Mein Kampf were both produced by prisoners. I think that’s also the fatal flaw in long-termist thinking — you can’t plan as if every action has a predictable consequence. It is extreme hubris to think you can derive the future from pure logical thinking.

But that’s what long-termists do. If you don’t know what “long-termism” is, Phil Torres explains it here.

In brief, the longtermists claim that if humanity can survive the next few centuries and successfully colonize outer space, the number of people who could exist in the future is absolutely enormous. According to the “father of Longtermism,” Nick Bostrom, there could be something like 10^58 human beings in the future, although most of them would be living “happy lives” inside vast computer simulations powered by nanotechnological systems designed to capture all or most of the energy output of stars. (Why Bostrom feels confident that all these people would be “happy” in their simulated lives is not clear. Maybe they would take digital Prozac or something?) Other longtermists, such as Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill, calculate that there could be 10^45 happy people in computer simulations within our Milky Way galaxy alone. That’s a whole lot of people, and longtermists think you should be very impressed.

But here’s the point these people are making, in terms of present-day social policy: Let’s say you can do something today that positively affects just 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the 10^58 people who will be “living” at some point in the distant future. That means, mathematically, that you’d affect 10 trillion people. Now consider that there are roughly 8 billion people on the planet today. So the question is: If you want to do “the most good,” should you focus on helping people who are alive right now or these vast numbers of possible people living in computer simulations in the far future? The answer is, of course, that you should focus on these far-future digital beings.

Long-termism is, basically, philosophy for over-confident idiots. Otto would love it, if you know your A Fish Called Wanda memes. It takes a certain kind of egotistical certainty that you personally know all the very best choices which will shape all of the future, and that you know exactly how the future is going to be.

It’s a good article. Only one note struck me as jarringly false.

Nonetheless, Elon Musk sees himself as a leading philanthropist. “SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company are philanthropy,” he insists. “If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy.” How so?

The only answer that makes sense comes from a worldview that I have elsewhere described as “one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about.” I am referring to longtermism. This originated in Silicon Valley and at the elite British universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has a large following within the so-called LessWrong or Rationalist community, whose most high-profile member is Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur and Trump supporter.

That’s not the only answer that makes sense. Another, simpler answer that comes from an understanding that proponents of long-termism are naive twits is that Musk is a narcissistic moron who operates on the basis of selfish whims, and that idea is better supported by the evidence of his behavior. It’s looking at it through the wrong lens. It’s not that LessWrong promotes an influential, principled philosophy, it’s that unprincipled, arrogant dopes find it a nice post hoc rationalization for what they choose to do.

At least not if they’re Russian. All those photos from Ukraine of tanks with their turrets blown off? There’s an explanation. See if you can recognize the design flaw.

“For a Russian crew, if the ammo storage compartment is hit, everyone is dead,” said Robert E. Hamilton, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, adding that the force of the explosion can “instantaneously vaporize” the crew. “All those rounds — around 40 depending on if they’re carrying a full load or not — are all going to cook off, and everyone is going to be dead.”

Yikes. My son briefly drove tanks — American ones — before joining the signal corps, and it’s a good thing his mother didn’t know that job involved driving a large steel-encased bomb. I feel a lot of pity right now for Russian mothers.

Journalists got their hands on 8 of the 26 math books banned by Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans, and tried to puzzle out what was offensive about them. It’s a revealing exercise.

On April 15, the Florida Department of Education issued a dramatic press release: “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.” In the release, Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran announced that he had rejected 54 math textbooks submitted by publishers for the next school year. According to the Florida Department of Education, 26 of those math textbooks were rejected because they contained “prohibited topics,” including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL).

To underscore the importance of this decision, the release contained a quote from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” DeSantis said. Corcoran said the math textbooks were rejected because children deserve “a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms.”

OK, that’s a good hint. Their goal is to expunge any trace of CRT, SEL, and Common Core, so we should see what pieces of those concepts are in any of these books. I can pretty much guarantee, sight unseen, that CRT isn’t going to be present — that’s a legal concept that you might get taught in law school, but it’s not going to be anywhere in primary school texts, and especially not in math books. As the analysis reveals, though, the Republican clown show doesn’t know what CRT is, and confuses it with any mention of race or SEL. But what is SEL?

In a press conference on Monday, DeSantis defended the decision, focusing on SEL. Right-wing activists claim that SEL is CRT by another name but that is inaccurate. SEL focuses on the development of “critical thinking, emotion management, conflict resolution, decision making, [and] teamwork” — skills that are necessary for students to excel in school and in life. The term dates back to a 1997 book but the concept of character development dates back at least to Benjamin Franklin in the mid-1700s.

“You know, math is about getting the right answer and we want kids to learn to think so they get the right answer. It’s not about how you feel about the problem or to introduce some of these other things,” DeSantis said. DeSantis noted that “most of the books that did not meet Florida standards… happened to be in the early grades.”

Oh, gosh, we do SEL all the time then. For example, all of my lab classes require students to work in groups, because that’s how science is done, so get started on that cooperative teamwork right now, and learning how to work together efficiently and effectively is as important as learning how to measure yeast respiration. Probably more important — some of the experiments we have them do are rather basic, but learning to work in groups and use core instrumentation and do reasonable analysis are the goal. I guess I’d be banned in Florida, along with all of my colleagues in biology.

And no, math isn’t about just getting the right answer. I do some basic math work in my classes — much of it is more statistics than anything else — but there’s a reason I demand intermediate answers in their calculations. It’s because understanding the process is more important than just plugging and chugging and seeing the “right” number appear on your calculator.

Well, then, maybe the Florida textbooks were laced with discussions of race and gender. Nope.

According to the Florida Department of Education, “the highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies.” Popular Information obtained three of the K-5 books that were rejected for “prohibited topics.”

There was no discussion of race, racism, or anything that could be construed as related to CRT in any of the textbooks. While the vast majority of the textbooks focused on basic math skills, they also encouraged students to reflect on how they learn and work with their classmates. In general, the textbooks encouraged young students to be nice to each other and themselves.

This could be considered SEL, which focuses on “social and emotional competence” and helping “children develop emotional literacy when it comes to their feelings and other people’s.” But nothing in any of the rejected textbooks could be described in good faith as “dangerous” or “indoctrination.”

Damn. Now I understand — teaching kids to be nice to each other is antithetical to raising them as Republicans. Better ban them!

Some of them do mention race, though.

The textbook also includes short write-ups of mathematicians from throughout history. Two write-ups spotlight African American mathematicians––Elbert Frank Cox, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, and Dorothy Johnson Vaughan, an African American mathematician who led a NASA unit.

But there are also several other short historical summaries of mathematicians from different backgrounds, including James Garfield and Liu Hui.

Regardless, these historical vignettes are not an example of CRT. Nor do these brief biographies constitute “race essentialism.” Rather, this content is consistent with Florida Department of Education’s “multicultural representation” requirement for all 2021-2022 instructional materials in K-12 mathematics.

Learning about famous mathematicians is not a form of indoctrination.

I don’t know about that. If they learned what a colossal, freaky asshole Isaac Newton was, and that he was white, they might get the idea that being a white physicist/mathematician was a wicked thing.

Kids are also not allowed to learn that the mundane subjects of story problems might be black or Asian.

Florida’s decision to reject several high school math textbooks is especially puzzling. Popular Information obtained a digital copy of Functions Modeling Change, one of five precalculus books that were rejected by Florida for the inclusion of prohibited topics.

Functions Modeling Change contains 10 mentions of “race” but all are related to running and biking. There is no discussion of racism and no math problems that deal with racial issues. There is also no discussion of emotions, teamwork, conflict resolution, or anything else associated with SEL. Instead, it is full of quadratic functions, trigonometry, and parametric equations. Another rejected precalculus book, Precalculus with Limits, has very similar content. So why were these textbooks rejected?

Good question. I still don’t know. Could it be Common Core?

It is impossible to know for sure absent an explanation from the Florida Department of Education, but the initial press release delineated three categories of “prohibited” topics: CRT, SEL, and Common Core. DeSantis has made a priority of “eliminating” Common Core from the curriculum. Common Core is a set of national standards championed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (R) and many other Republicans. Since Common Core was also embraced by former President Obama (D), it has become a target for DeSantis.

But Common Core’s math standards are just a set of basic skills needed at each grade level. It is impossible to “eliminate” Common Core because many of those skills are foundational. For example, the Common Core standards for 1st Grade math include the ability to count to 120. One cannot eliminate counting from the math curriculum. Florida’s B.E.S.T. standards, which DeSantis created to replace Common Core, also include the ability to count to 120 as a core standard for 1st Grade.

Learning to count could lead to accounting, which would detect Republican corruption, or accountability, another concept that is anathema to Republicans.

I think the answer is simple. Stupid people hate math. Stupid people are the Republican core demographic. This is just pandering to their electorate. There is no rational reason behind DeSantis’s politics, it’s all a reactionary lashing out against knowledge & learning & science.