(Well, without significant comment. Because, well…)
It’s been nearly a decade. You folks are really going to have to learn to trust me on this stuff.
Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
But the translation of the Federalist Papers into English is number one! Yay!
He seems like a most reasonable, intelligent man, JG. The easy smile and relaxed head-bobbing do it.
It sounds like a good idea now that we’re so good at stuff all these years later. I mean, who could possibly disagree.
“The Second Amendment is a grammatical mess.” “It’s nearly incomprehensible as a sentence.”
I wonder what these two sooper-jeenyusses would do with a monstrosity like this one:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Somebody’s going to have to do me the kindness of summarizing the vid, because the chipmunk that powers my 10-year old computer just said “you want me to put that where?”
I inferr that Beck’s attempt to make the Federalist relevant predictably opened some can of worms or other?
Just because it’s overstated doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily untrue Squid. That damn conditional phrase hangs their like the sword of Damocles.
Zakariah, et al., in addition to calling for an end to the electoral college and the statistically “unfair” representation in the Senate, is now arguing that we need to “modernize” the Constitution into a kind of intelligible language.
It can’t be understood, you see. Being old and written in language that even such supposed Constitutional fetishists as Glenn Beck admit can’t be understood today.
He doesn’t actually say that last part. I’m just connecting the dots for them. They’ll get there themselves eventually, the poor dumb dears. And thankfully, we’ve given them support for the argument.
I’m going to go outside and lift weights for a bit. I’m sure you can find some sites in the meantime that are OUTRAGED by something the left did, but which won’t burden you with this kind of red on red “violence” which is so terribly unhelpful.
If only there was some kind of process in place to change the Constitution! I’m going to have one of my slaves look into this, provided he’s not too drunk on bathtub gin or at some forbidden religious ritual with more than ten other slaves and I am able to write a note without any of the damn soldiers the government has forced me to quarter reading it over my shoulder. The last time that happened I was imprisoned for years without trial or the ability to face my accuser.
I think Our new constitution should be only available in mp3 format read aloud by the guy who voices Spongebob.
can’t we just have the Coast Guard’s guns they’re not using them
In ebonics
and Spanish
And every clause should start with “Let me be perfectly clear…”
Many thanks to Jeff and sdferr for letting me play in the sandlot without making fun of the twine holding my two sizes too large canvas shoes together.
LMC, you’re going to need two slaves to get to work on that, otherwise you’ll be 2/5ths short of one mind!
The 2nd isn’t incomprehensible; it is a grammatical mess.
The grammar of it doesn’t strike me as a mess. It’s just been framed that way by the textualists looking to problematize it. When it’s read in its obvious context — these people still had to kill their own food, were clearly distrustful of centralized authority of any kind, in many cases lived spread out in areas where large animals still ventured, and had just fought a revolution using their own arms — the 2nd Amendment can mean nothing else.
And we all know it. The rest is just playing games.
The only saving grace here is that virtually no one watches CNN, or listens to Messers Toobin or Zakaria, save maybe Obama…
But I see your point JeffG, unfortunately, and hopefully unwittingly, Beck gave their arguments support, even if in a tangential fashion.
Of course, none of the gun grabbers will ever find it significant that the 2nd Amendment is, well, second on the Bill of Rights.
If the right of self defense were not important, why have the Amendment #10 on the list? Why have the 2nd at all?
People like Fareed seem to think the Bill of Rights was thrown together with the same intent as throwing spaghetti against the wall.
Personally I think they fucked up the proof-reading and we’ve been stuck with it ever since because of excessive deference to that stupid piece of parchment in the National Archives.
The problem is simply with the comma, which we’ve removed these days.
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State [as the Revolutionary War made quite apparent], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
The well-regulated Militia was the people.
I don’t know how to do links on a mobile, but Ric Locke has a link over at his place to a doozey of an essay about the police that relates a bit to this if any one is interested.
A link for B. Moe.
Even with all the commas, the meaning is clear. The only question is whether “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” is meant to modify “a well-regulated Militia” or meant to stand alone as a separate clause.
But that’s a distinction without a difference.
I tend to think “the right of the people…” is an elaboration of “a well-regulated Militia.” (“Everyone knows what we mean by Militia, Franklin!” “Well in a couple hundred years things might be really different, I think we should spell it out in no uncertain terms; put in ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,’ then nobody can possibly wonder.”)
If that’s correct, and we were writing this today, we would indicate that with dashes. (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State — the right of the people to keep and bear Arms — shall not be infringed.)
But even if they were meant to be two separate clauses, the meaning is the same; in that case, “shall not be infringed” modifies both “Militia” and “right of the people…” meaning that neither shall be infringed.
Well if Jeffrey and Fareed want to start amending they better start cracking. They should start at Article V.
It’s only been amended 27 times because it’s DESIGNED to be difficult to amend. And rightly so. Let’s keep jackasses like Zak away from it, they’d have it looking like the monstrosity the EU pushed on everybody over on the continent.
Did the “social experiment” of the 18th amendment (later repealed by the 21st) not rather painfully demonstrate the idiocy of attempting to use it to amend human nature?
Why is it that Fareed and Toobin are completely unafraid of being kicked in the teeth?
“The well-regulated Militia was the people.”
More to the point, “well-regulated” in this context means “suitably maintained and capable of correct operation”, NOT “overseen by a massive regulatory apparatus.”
As one would “regulate” a fine watch.
Toobin is an idiot. He’s also a dirtbag.
These people must be stopped.
If that’s the debate they want to have, I’d simply ask them if they’ve read The Original Argument and what their rebuttal is.
Well, except for the people who are the channel for the “news” consumed by 80-90% of the population.
Solving differences in such a personal way is heavily frowned upon by society these days, and that is backed up by the police.
You’re all idiots. The Constitution is a LIVING BREATHING DOCUMENT! And if we don’t Amend it and reinterpret it, then it will become stagnant and die, then it will rise as a ZOMBIE CONSTITUTION that will eat the brains of all other Federal documents!
You don’t want that, do you!? Now step aside and let us reinterpret the hell out of it. The way it was intended!
I would say they’re headed towards a confrontation that will personalize what the second amendment means.
OMG! DEATH THREAT!
Beck gave their arguments support, even if in a tangential fashion.
Except that I’m not sure that the streams cross: Glenn might say that the language of the Federalist Papers (not the Constitution) is difficult to plow through, but he’s also adamant that the arguments they made are intensely relevant and we need to know them backward and forward and we need to know them NOW.
Glenn’s footprint is about 30 million people, and none of them, having listened to Glenn’s promos for The Original Argument, are going to be susceptible to the idea that because the language is difficult to parse, the baby has to go out with the bathwater.
Likewise, the morons who make and buy the “obsolete language; obsolete ideas” arguments are hardly going to use Beck’s promos to support their case, lest it backfire.
An OED comes in handy when divining original intent. That plus the federalist and anti federalist writings.
Someone much smarter than me observed when challenged that the second amendment was a collective right, that nothing any of the framers wrote prior to or after the constitution was adopted ever mentioned a limit to the individual right to keep arms.
Human behavior hasn’t changed.
It might be good were Beck to stress the extent to which one makes oneself a slave to the translator though. Certainly couldn’t hurt I think. We could think of it as just another in an ongoing series of minor life-lessons.
Nor, for that matter, would it hurt to stress how readily available the original documents are to inspection on the internet, come to think of it.
Your support of Beck’s ill-advised pitch is touching; but it is what it is, and it does what it does. Which is why I counseled that he reconsider the pitch. Language that is difficult to read through easily, given a change in diction, is not the same as language that “can’t be understood today.”
Period. End of discussion.
I’m not damning Beck by saying that dicentra, but was only saying that it’s not above these dirtbags to try and use him as a prop, by saying something like, “even Glenn Beck thinks the language is out-dated and hard to understand”…
Without mentioning the part about him believing that the ideas embodied within are transcendant.
And you’re right that none of Beck’s audience would buy it, but they’d be pushing that fallacy onto the low-information, low-involvement, mushy-middlers that generally are operating eclusively on feelings. Who wouldn’t bother to investigate, but merely decide, CONSENSUS!-kaching.
Kind of like, “Palin said she can see Russia from her front porch”.
There is nothing too low for these dirtbags, Bob. They lie and lie and lie. It’s what they do.
Is Beck making a “Forget the originals and just read this instead” pitch, or simply offering a Federalist Papers for Dummies, which people will actually read?
The argument vis a vis the Constitution seems to confuse rewriting law with rewriting argument.
Ah, I get it; the ol’ res ipsa loquitur run :)
His pitch is that the original is incomprehensible.
I’m sure Fareed Z would agree, and happily work to modernize it — though he’d probably do it in a different way than Beck, and in such a way that reasonable men might even accept the rewrites as keeping with the spirit of the original.
Again: I don’t have a problem with the project. In fact, the project is laudable. As I said. At the time. I want more people to have a grounding in the foundational documents. And as I also said at the time, had he pitched it as a kind of Cliff’s Notes, that would be cool with me.
But that’s not what he did. And It’s the way he chose to sell it, the argument he made for its existence, that is the problem. Which, as I also wrote at the time, is an argument that is silly on its face: if it’s incomprehensible, how can it be translated?
The argument made in the pitch is dangerous for precisely the reasons I expected it would be: it lends credence to a silly idea and rewards as natural and acceptable a kind of laziness that the left often relies upon to jerk us toward “progress.”
The sense of “forget the original(s)” is of a forgetting of an unopened volume, a kind of an empty thing, an object the contents of which one does not know. As opposed to a forgetting of those very contents in their detail, having once committed them to memory in a species of reverent or respectful act, say.
I need to get elected Mayor of St. Paul, if only to get busy regulating the local militia. I figure we’ll start with formation and drill in the city parks every 2nd Saturday, and work our way up to marksmanship once we’ve sorted the wheat from the chaff.
Just the look on Garry Keillor’s face would make it all worthwhile.
Especially when he realizes whose effigy is being used for the bayonette drill, eh Squid?
Toobin and Zakaria have just spent too much time around “Timesmen” and it has given them a false view of what the average American can understand Constitutionally.
I heard it more as it being that it’s difficult to read, not being utterly impenetrable. I completely concur with your Cliff Notes comparison. From the description:
The Original Argument cannot and will not ever replace the Federalist papers. They cannot be rewritten, and TOA is based on them, it is not the New Federalist Papers. It is a retelling of old arguments, with analysis. The Constitution, however, can be rewritten and/or replaced. That would bear no resemblance whatsoever to what Beck has done here.
If we’re going to go that route I vote for Unknown Hinson doing Early Cuyler. After all, surely the protection of the Appalachian mud squid would be written into the new Constitution, right?
I intended it in the casual “Don’t worry about them” sense, not the strictly literal “Lose all knowledge of their existence” sense.
I wrote the original post after I heard him say the original was incomprehensible. On the air. As he was announcing the sale of the book. That’s what I reacted to.
If he has since dialed that back, fine. But his marketing, last I heard — having people affect faux Queen’s English with a lot of rolling r’s and reading the most complex sentences in ways designed to show their supposed impenetrability — reinforces this idea that our founding documents so don’t speak to our generation, man, what with the stuffy diction and the long, complicated sentences. Old white men. Like, who cares? Shouldn’t we get to rewrite that shit? WHO’S WITH US?
I wish he’d have thought it through better.
Thing is, (and admittedly, I have not read it) TOA seems intended to repopularize the arguments that support the Constitution being respected for exactly what it is, as well as being a primer on why it is what it is. It is a defense of the Constitution as it was written. Trying to offer that as proof that it’s OK to go ahead and rewrite the Constitution is just silly. That doesn’t mean some yahoo won’t do it. There is no end to the dopey arguments out there, but the idea that the left is going to elevate their reading of a Beck comment to the standard we should treat the founding document with is quite a stretch.
I’d rather he’d not said “incomprehensible”. I hope he doesn’t repeat it. But I’m glad that there are hundreds of thousands of people getting their first taste of the Federalist Papers.
Funny, I think I said that.
But there’s been an uptick — and these are trial balloons — in trying to undermine the founding documents by making the case that they are old, unintelligible, and their authors racist monsters who hated women, etc.
We should give NO INDICATION that such an argument is intelligible. TOA suggests that the way to get at the original arguments is to read a book by Glenn Beck. I think the left would be loathe to do that, and might just argue that if that’s what we need to do to get at the original arguments, than the original arguments aren’t terribly clear — and no rightwing revisionism is going to stand in their stead.
Therefore, REWRITE!
Yes. Beck is quite aware of that, as I’m sure you know. Surely not to the extent that you’re aware of it having made a study of it, but certainly aware. This book is intended to present those authors and their arguments to an audience that is sorely unfamiliar with them. They just don’t teach that shit anymore.
I’m seeing a swerve into “We really have to watch what we say or they’ll use it against us” territory here, and it’s confusing me. That argument is ridiculous and Beck hasn’t changed that.
It’s a way, and it seems to be working. Again, haven’t read it, can’t speak authoritatively, etc. But if the sales numbers are any indication, those arguments are making the popular rounds these days.
Glenn Beck’s books are utter tripe written by a devious lunatic who’s peddling lies and hate to his racist, knuckle-dragging worshipers so he can drain every last dime out of them. It’s going to be pretty frigging tough to juke out of that narrative to one where Glenn Beck has told us exactly what we ought to do FOR AMERICA!
The unintelligible one, that is.
No you aren’t. You’re seeing a “watch what we say because it’s a bad argument that just so happens to match what they believe, so they could use it against us.”
He’s trying to make money off what he knows to be true: the original documents and their arguments are unintelligible. The devious opportunistic lunatic.
Really. Not hard to juke.
Goeffb made that one comment “hasn’t this already been done?” with a link to the product after all of a 30 second internet search I’ll betcha. What, no-one trusted that translator?
Next thing we know there’ll be an academic industry set up running multiple translation comparisons, cross-correlations and disambiguation. That’ll be fun to watch.
They don’t believe anything Glenn Beck says. That’s an article of faith. He is to be despised at all times. He’s said a million things that a lefty ought to love (which kinda reminds me of this blogger I know) and I’ve never once seen them used as proof of the lefty argument. The natural course is to run with the “See, even Republicans hate him” meme.
Sorry, that argument remains obvious nonsense. Intelligibility is not central to the anti-Constitutional arguments anyway. It isn’t that we can’t understand them, it’s that they couldn’t possibly understand us, what with them being old, dead racists, thus rendering their ideas as to how we should conduct ourselves void. The idea that they’re going to take a poorly chosen phrase from Beck’s TOA pitch and extrapolate that (or anything else that comes out of Beck’s mouth) to proof that the Constitution is defunct is just too silly to contemplate.
If such an argument ever takes serious purchase, I’ll eat my hat. On the odd chance that anyone ever tries it (and I suspect we’d already have seen it if they had, unless it’s already condemned to oblivion) it has no legs.
I get why it bugs you, Jeff, but from where I sit the risk/benefit meter on this thing is pegged on “Hell, yes! Go Go Go!” Who puts a Revolutionary era history book atop the NYT book list, and moves hundreds of thousands of units in the process? I’m just not seeing how this potential downside comes to pass and what difference it would make if it did.
No. That’s just one side of the triangulation. I posted the video.
I pointed out the potential downside. Whether or not it comes to pass, or the likelihood it does being vanishingly small, doesn’t mean the potential downside hasn’t been created when it needn’t have been.
And I hope somebody, somewhere recognizes that and takes heed so that it not happen again. Because it needn’t.
Put another way, I appreciate what Beck does. But he can get things wrong.
It’s true.
And I can point them out, especially when I can in them the germ for an argument against the very documents he’s hoping to champion.
OUTLAW?
Beck is fucking OUTLAW, dude.
Seriously, are you watching the GBTV thing or the Israel thing? This guy has a rocket up his ass and he’s shoveling coal into the boiler. Or something.
We live in very, vewry interesting times.
He’s been great on Israel and on sussing out the larger transnational socialist/progressive trends. And I love the thing he’s doing in Israel.
I find his radio show very informative and funny at times.
I think he fucked up on his approach to marketing an idea that is a laudable one.
Yes. But also blogger.
Dude is riddled with ADD, according to him. He is a spaz, no doubt about it. If you’re looking for a perfect messenger, you can definitely keep looking. Meanwhile, who do we have who’s doing a better job?
Levin gets my vote.
I’d agree with that as far as that particular quote goes. I don’t agree with that in terms of the marketing of the book, because I don’t see that in anything but that quote. Which wasn’t a great thing to say. But that’s all it was, something he said in a book pitch on his radio show. He’d be the first to tell you that he occasionally says dumb shit.
Are we taking fire on this one?
Levin definitely knows his shit. But what’s his reach? He’s preaching to the choir.
White House shout-outs help with that audience thing, and when they fire people in fear of what you might say, that tends to up your profile too.
Levin doesn’t do what Beck is doing. Rush doesn’t do what Beck is doing. The only person who comes anywhere near doing anything like what Beck is doing is Sarah Palin.
I embedded the video. The arguments are being made that we need to modernize. That the second amendment can’t be understood.
I am sounding an alarm bell and warning OUR side off any such arguments. Is all.
Liberty and Tyranny sold very well, by word of mouth. If you listen to his show, you’ll hear LOTS of ex-liberals calling in who’ve been turned by him.
Levin works with Landmark Legal and is involved in the litigation against ObamaCare, as well as the EPA, the NEA, etc. His reach and influence is growing. And he was an early avid supporter of the TEA Party, and wasn’t afraid to support upstart candidates against GOP incumbents.
He’s the go-to guy for DeMint and Bachmann and Rubio; he is a HUGE pain in the ass to Boehner and Cantor.
So he’s doing more than just preaching to the choir. He’s GALVANIZED the choir.
It states the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. It lists a well-regulated (i.e., trained) militia as a (not the) justification for why such a thing is important.
Not incomprehensible, they just want to find an excuse to ignore it as well as anything else they find inconvenient in the Constitution.
Like, oh, great effort is made expounding on Congress being forbidden from establishing a religion, but they seem to ignore the injunction against preventing free exercise of religious beliefs when they need to stop icky Christians from… *gasp* praying out loud. That part is too inconvenient for them.
When the fucking congress can write a law that the taxpayers can read and understand without a bevy of lawyers, these guys might have a point. But since nothing that comes out of Washington (or any government entity for that matter) is digestible by anyone including those who wrote it, these guys can eat a copy of Obamacare and die.
At least the fiber will assist Gaia with that whole ashes to ashes shit… for the children.
All of which is great. But it’s still the choir, by and large, which is why Spooky Dude isn’t crawling up his ass.
No. Just the FCC.
And a galvanized choir acts. I have no idea how many people he’s gotten involved in Americans for Prosperity — a group you’ll recognize by name because Obama keeps singling them out for scorn.
And because of the Kochsuckers! In terms of getting people involved…