The Value of the History of Philosophy

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name where it was presented in a different format.

It can be easy to accuse philosophers of disregarding the important issues of their day and wasting their efforts debating issues of little to no practical use. I find that people feel pretty ambivalent about philosophers. This critique might be even easier to apply to those who study the history of philosophy. And I can’t really argue that these kinds of criticisms are always necessarily unwarranted. But philosophical thought, even that of the past, is often much more relevant to today’s issues than it may seem. To limit our thoughts to only “useful fields” is to miss useful knowledge. And those who demand that we focus solely on matters they deem important demand that we live less full lives.

The 17^th-century philosophers we studied were engaging meaningfully with contemporary issues. Although not all their views seem plausible today, when we read Robert Boyle, Margret Cavendish, and John Locke disagreeing about the utility of microscopes, for instance, we see them trying to answer practical questions. Without these discussions, we could not know how, why, or even if to use these instruments. We shouldn’t take what seems like common sense today for granted—or for certain. We also saw philosophers dealing with social change. Locke’s Essay was motivated in part by an increase in religious and political conflict. Discussing how to handle intractable disagreements was—and is—deeply important to managing diversity of thought.

By studying how these thinkers thought about the world, we engage with today’s world as well. Some of the ideas we read are more directly applicable to the present than others: The value of self-knowledge is timeless; intractable disagreements don’t seem to be going away any time soon; et cetera. But all the ideas we read influenced ideas in the present including those which seem implausible today. When we understand past thought, we better understand present thought. When we, like those in the past, try to address timely, practical concerns, we are well served to understand how this has been done before and how the ideas created then are influencing the ways in which we think today.

Every time period has had major pressing issues. If people throughout history had focused only on considering those directly, they would have cut themselves off from the knowledge that enabled real progress. The philosophers we read certainly drew from and considered older ideas to address the issues of their times. The truth is, we cannot know where we will find ideas that help us. We have no reason to believe that all useful ideas will be found by engaging with what seem like useful fields. So many of the ideas that created the things we value about today’s world in philosophy, in technology, in medicine emerged from a broader inquiry not limited to only considering that which was pressing at the time.

Those who would broadly criticize anyone who studies the history of philosophy make a timeless error: They forget that people and groups of people can focus on multiple things. It’s possible and also wise for us to take on the issues of our time directly and also study fields that aren’t clearly related to those issues. People aren’t productivity robots. For us, meaning is not limited to constantly taking the set of actions that will materially improve the world at every minute. We can’t all live full lives without engaging with the world more broadly, and that includes engaging with the world’s history. I’m not actively fixing the wider world when I read a novel, when I with friends, when I learn a skill, but I think it’s ridiculous to declare these activities meaningless, and we have reason to think that engaging with philosophy and its history may be an even more useful activity than these.

Sor Filotea demanded that Sor Juana rein in her curiosity and focus on useful matters. For Filotea, those matters were those which served the church as an institution. Sor Juana responds that, among other things, her curiosity allows her to live a full life, in part for her own sake.¹ She could not live well and only ever consider those things that others deemed important. I think many of us are better at identifying what matters are important today. But when we demand that others put an end to their curiosity to solve the problems we identify, even those we identify rightly, we treat others as a means to our ends. We imagine the minds of others as mere resources expended to solve a certain set of tasks. But when we encourage curiosity as well as social action, we encourage people to live full lives for themselves as well as for others. We can criticize those who use philosophical inquiry as a shield to hide from big problems, but to actually solve those problems, to progress, we should think broadly.

Week of September 27th, 2020

Howdy,

Somehow these weeks seem to be flying by at lightning speed, but at the same time, the first events of the week feel like they took place months ago. I hope you're doing well.

College COVID Recap

This might be the last of these for a while. Things are going better than I expected. We finally passed that 1000 number I had so feared, but we've done it so slowly that about 800 of them have already recovered. Of course, this could all go bad fast, but so far it hasn't gotten totally out of hand. I'll bring this section back if it does. This isn't exactly related, but did you hear about the otherwise healthy App State basketball player who died of COVID last week?

Election Recap

Welp. This week is the story of the White House getting Coronavirus. It all starts with the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. As I predicted in my last message, I was dead wrong about her. I still think it's odd she wasn't on that list, but it is what it is. I've read a bit more of her writing, and I'm not unsatisfied with the pick, though I have a lot more to read. With how quickly they're trying to confirm her, I don't know if I'll have the time to study her in full before she takes up the ninth seat. Her nomination was also quite possibly ground zero for the recent White House COVID breakout. Just look at this behavior at the event. Judge Barrett couldn't get it since she's already had it. But we'll get to all that later. As far as I can tell, she's got a very clean record. I've seen two strange attacks on her. The first is against her Catholic Charismatic religious group, the People of Praise. I've seen a lot of people who are very disturbed by this affiliation. Though I disagree with it, I can understand some of this fear. Members of the People of Praise must submit themselves to the church covenant and be subject to the organization's discipline and spiritual direction. I get how these words can sound very scary to those who aren't familiar with religious communities! David French wrote a great article about this issue which I highly recommend. But I see this fear manifesting as a sort of sick religious bigotry which secular people think they can get away with. There's a myth going around that the novel The Handmaid's Tale and the Hulu adaptation of it are based off of this community—a claim with no basis in reality. Liberals just really like that show. People call it a cult and suggest that Judge Barrett is unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court because she's a crazy Christian who's pledged allegiance to a cult. I think some of this reaction is just rooted in “Charismatism weird.” Bill Maher was particularly shameless about this. On his show, he suggested she was unqualified for believing in speaking in tongues, a bog-standard Charismatic belief but one that's usually held by Protestant Charismatics, not Catholics like the majority of the People of Praise. Not only do these people have no understanding of religion, they do not even try to understand. While I certainly wouldn't want to be a Person of Praise myself, this kind of anti-religious fear-mongering pisses me off. The other insult relates to her black adopted children. I shit thee not, some folks have called the Judge racist for this. The funniest part is that Richard Spencer—who still has a Twitter account somehow—agrees wholeheartedly.

Then came the tax scandal. Headlines stated that President Trump paid only $750 annually in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. Ten of the last fifteen years, he paid nothing. Understandably, people were pissed. It felt like this was the big secret the President was trying to hide all along by not disclosing his tax returns. Unfortunately, a lot of folks were pissed at the wrong people. The correct response to hearing that school teachers are taxed less than billionaires is to say that school teachers should be taxed far less, not to rage at the billionaires. The IRS is not a charity—though they do accept donations. Of course President Trump is going to pay as little in taxes as possible, as he should. Tax avoidance is one of the few cool things about President Donald Trump. It's appropriate to be angry at the President for not being transparent about his tax returns or for not doing enough to fix our federal budget and tax policy which allows the very wealthy to make everything they do look like a net loss, but it is ridiculous to be angry at him for paying as little tax as possible as a private individual. When President Trump manages to deduct $70,000 in hair styling expenses, I'm not angry; I'm impressed. Of course, he still paid a positive shitton in business taxes and property taxes as well as social security, medicare, etc. Many of the comparisons people are making aren't apples to apples. The bigger problem in this leak is the President's failing businesses, something which doesn't surprise me, but doesn't look great for his “businessman in the White House” pitch. The whole Times story is worth reading for all the details. Biden supporters celebrating being robbed by the Federal government as a mark of pride are embarrassing.

There was a debate! It was terrible! President Trump managed to dominate the event, which was clearly part of his plan, but he failed to do anything to save his ass. He tried to do what's worked for him in the past. He tried to make Joe Biden get in the mud with him, and Biden didn't fall for it. Sure he called the President a clown and told him to shut up, but otherwise he stayed on message and did a good job at communicating the kind of exasperation a lot of America is currently feeling. Also, as we already discussed, President Trump lost hard on race. Your average President Trump supporter isn't half as racist as the coastal liberals believe them to be, and they're deeply uncomfortable with President Trump on race. Anytime race is mentioned to a general, non-partisan audience, even if it includes rhetoric attacking rioters and looters, President Trump loses and Joe Biden wins. I saw a lot of folks point out that President Trump straw-manned Biden as a Socialist with some saying that it looked as if President Trump wanted to be debating Senator Sanders. I think that those pointing this out are missing one of the more successful parts of the President's debate strategy. He wanted to get Biden to disavow highly popular left-wing ideas such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and alienate the leftmost side of the Democratic party which isn't sure whether they want to vote for him. I don't think that it was enough to make a meaningful difference, but Biden took the bait here. If this sounds like 4D-chess bullshit to you, I think that these two tweets from the President make it a bit more obvious.

By far the most disturbing part of the debate was President Trump declining to disavow white supremacists, instead saying, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” I've seen some idiots on the right asking whether it matters that the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacy since it should be obvious. But, like, that's seriously in doubt right now! If I were asked in seriousness whether I would disavow murder by someone who honestly wasn't sure whether I was against it, of course I would disavow murder! And this kind of rhetoric does have a real-world effect. I saw Richard Spencer celebrating immediately after the debate. The Proud Boys have been bolstered. These are the people President Trump is enabling. I highly recommend watching this timely video interviewing many members to get a sense for the vibe of the group. Of course, a lot of other things were said during the debate, including Joe Biden making up total lies about US manufacturing, but you watched it, too, so I'll leave that here. Honestly, the most important detail from the debate is that President Trump didn't infect Joe Biden.

And that leads us to the biggest happening of the week. Yes, somehow I've talked about a Supreme Court nomination, a tax scandal, a Presidential debate in which a President refuses to denounce white supremacy, and I haven't even gotten to the biggest story: The President is in the hospital as I type this, reportedly having been on oxygen. And he's not the only one who's gotten sick. Take another look at this image from the Supreme Court nomination. How many more red circles do you think we'll get? How far has it spread? So far, we have the President and the First Lady—but notably not Baron—Bill Stepian, Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway (more on her in a bit), Chris Christie, Senator Mike Lee (lol remember this video?), Senator Thom Tillis, Senator Ron Johnson, Ronna McDaniel, John Jenkins, and at least eleven staff from the first debate. It's a full-scale breakout. It seems like the D.C. Republicans have been outright irresponsible. Hope Hicks tested positive on Thursday morning, but it didn't stop the President from going mask-less to a fundraiser in New Jersey that same day. This stupid, conspiratorial tweet from Congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine is hilarious. Of course, many people on all sides are coming up with outlandish conspiracies about the infection. Also, many are celebrating the President's illness and praying for his death. You already know how I feel about this, so I won't waste keystrokes here. At his age and with his health, he has about a 94% chance of survival, which is wild for this stage in a Presidential election, but let's not dig the grave quite yet. We don't know much about the President's status, and Twitter has been arguing all day about HIPAA (or “HIPPA,” as they tend to call it) which no one on the site remotely understands but on which everyone considers themself an expert. The video President Trump posted last evening was strange to watch. He really wasn't looking great. I've never seen him look like this.

A Washington Post bot tweeted this at an inopportune time.

Alright, as a final, lighter bit of election-related news, I want to talk about how we learned that Kellyanne Conway caught COVID. Most people found out when she tweeted about it, however, the news first broke on TikTok. (By the way, if TikTok does get banned, I'll talk about it, but I've been holding off). Kellyanne Conway has an odd family life. Her husband George Conway is one of the founders of the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump organization that's gained some traction. Her 15-year-old daughter Claudia is also vocally anti-Trump (and anti-Kellyanne for that matter), has accused her parents of abuse, and is trying to get emancipated to live on her own. Claudia Conway posted this highly irreverent TikTok (sound on) to share the news. Honestly, her whole TikTok is wild. She posted another immediately after which says, “im furious. wear your masks. dont listen to our idiot fucking president piece of shit.” I feel bad for this girl. I can't imagine being in her shoes.

Everything Else

Steve's in Smash. That's pretty weird. I like it. Also Minecraft is getting the cave update. I remember people asking for that when I was playing the game in middle school.

Cream of Wheat is removing the black chef from their packaging for no reason.

Hillary Clinton was more oppressed than President Obama because she was called “bitch” whereas Obama was rarely ever called “nigger.” There's some real white, liberal feminism going on here. I don't know how some of these people have stayed so online and yet so detached.

Terrible online magazine Queerty published this unbelievably cringy article calling Dr. Jill Biden a gay icon—you know, despite being married to Joe Biden. This article is absurd. It deserves a read. Why is every gay magazine like this?

After the President's Proud Boy shenanigan, some trans men started (or possibly continued, I'm not sure) using the term to refer to themselves just to fuck with the Proud Boys. George Takei apparently had a different idea: “I wonder if the BTS and TikTok kids can help LGBTs with this. What if gay guys took pictures of themselves making out with each other or doing very gay things, then tagged themselves with #ProudBoys. I bet it would mess them up real bad. #ReclaimingMyShine.” He's literally begging teenagers to produce softcore with a hashtag he can easily search for under the guise of owning the Orange Man. Every time I look at this guy's twitter, he's saying something super cursed. And there are a number of replies basically saying, “Haha, I'm totally straight, but we we should make out on camera to own Drumpf lol.”

Finally, here's a spectacular hour-long deep dive into a facet of the authorship of the infamously terrible 2006 Harry Potter fan-fiction My Immortal. I share this because it reminds me quite a lot of a movie I've wanted to write for some time now featuring a character who for no straightforward motive makes dozens of online accounts pretending to be different people who all talk to each other. I'm fascinated by this kind of internet history.

Thanks,

Jacob Morris

Week of September 20th, 2020

Howdy,

My semester has finally kicked into gear as tests roll around and projects ramp up, but I think my hardest semester is behind me. I'm really just trying to stay sane and graduate and see what professional has to offer. Oddly enough, my social life is kind of flourishing during the pandemic semester. It's a bit easier to manage when the standard for a positive social interaction is a Zoom call where I don't have to go anywhere, and folks don't seem to have much else to do, so they tend to be down for longer conversations. By a total fluke, I've been talking quite a bit with a girl my year in CS, a partner on a project, whom I discovered lived only a few miles from my house! I didn't think this would be the semester to meet new people. Film club is fine, but, obviously, we can't really make the same kinds of movies, so we've been trying to do other things. I ran for president of the club, and I'm pretty glad that I lost by a vote to be honest. I hope you're finding good ways to occupy your time, and I'd love to hear from you. A great deal has happened this week, so I'll jump into it and try not to ramble on about anything. This'll probably be a pretty unfocused one.

College COVID Recap

I don't have any big update here. There were over 1,500 tests this week, a great deal above average, due at least in part to the mandatory random testing they've implemented, though I'm still not sure it's enough. We're nearly at a thousand positive cases since move-in. Growth certainly hasn't stopped, but it's still not blasting off in the way that I had feared. Hopefully, I'll have pretty much the same non-story next week.

Election Recap

To try to repeat what I did last time, I'll start with something funny that doesn't make me want to die. Joe Biden—or, more accurately, his campaign—actually made a funny Twitter campaign ad. Orange Man Bad™ really is a perfectly fine campaign method in this election and being even a little self-aware about it helps.

Later, in a classic Biden gaffe, he stated that over the course of his speech 200,000,000 people would die. Okay, I guess elder abuse isn't that funny, but let me have this. Okay, onto the existential dread.

I should start where I left off: the vacant seat in the Supreme Court. At this point, I have to acknowledge that I might have been dead wrong about Judge Amy Coney Barret. I thought that President Trump wasn't considering her very closely since she didn't appear on the list of considerations published mere days before Justice Ginsburg's death. And I still hold that early speculation about her nomination was totally unfounded. However, reportedly, there are now inside sources confirming that she has already been selected and that an official announcement will be made today. If he does select her, I'll eat my words and discuss her views and record, but I'll wait until there's an official statement one way or the other. Perhaps more important than the selection itself is the question of whether the Senate will actually fill the seat. Folks were very angry with Senator Romney this week after he said that he would consider whomever President Trump nominates. Everyone angry with him is way off base. Senator Romney never said any of the stupid shit other Senate Republicans said about the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, so it isn't hypocritical. He's just doing his job as a Senator. And we shouldn't expect that he would assent to anyone President Trump could nominate. Senator Romney voted to remove him from office for Christ's sake. There's no way President Trump wants to cut this vote any closer than it already is, and with Senator Susan Collins now joining with Senator Murkowski to dissent from any nomination before the election, albeit with some vague and ambiguous language, President Trump really wants to keep Senator Romney's vote, which may force a more moderate nomination. This is how the system is supposed to work. Of course, a whole lot of people have lost their minds over this whole thing and understandably so. Here's a positively deranged video of Speaker Pelosi.

President Trump did quite a bit of campaigning this week and said quite a bit of crazy shit while he was at it. Here's an unbelievably racist clip in which he discusses Congresswoman Omar. Here he is praising police for shooting MSNBC Contributor Ali Velshi with a rubber bullet. But the biggest Trump story this week was probably his comments, or lack thereof, about a peaceful transferal of power come January. When questioned about the subject, he said, “Well, we'll have to see what happens,” and made the same bullshit complaints about mail-in ballots he's been making since the start of this pandemic he's helped to prolong. Obviously, no one backed him up on this, but even as empty words, this kind of shit genuinely degrades our republic. It's not just empty rhetoric just because it's an empty threat. That being said, if he refuses to leave office when Biden is elected—okay, okay, I should say “if,” but Biden is going to win—whether by force of will or by some hypothesized elector bullshit, I'll be taking a road trip to Washington D.C. with a gun or two, and I won't be the only one. It isn't going to happen, but it isn't really an overreaction to prepare for it when the President indicates that it's a possibility.

Police

A grand jury made a single indictment in the Breonna Taylor case: wanton endangerment for shooting into a window with the blinds on without a line of sight. No charges were made for shooting a totally innocent woman in her own home. Obviously, people have taken to the streets once again. I'm not going to be able to discuss everything in this email, but I want to take a minute to talk about this case since I wasn't writing these when it first became well-known and since it's so important to the way we talk about police accountability. This case has already had an impact on police procedure, including bans on no-knock warrants, which is a good thing. In case you're not familiar with the details of the case, I'll run through the gist. I think that's important to do since so much of the information getting spread around is unverified or flatly false. A judge signed off on a search of Breonna Taylor's apartment as part of an investigation into her ex-boyfriend who had never lived there whom they believed was selling drugs out of a house about ten miles away. They were speculating that drugs had been delivered to or stored in the apartment. Her ex had been seen taking a package from her apartment to the house they believed drugs were being sold from. There were other crimes that the ex had committed that related to Taylor, but they were not the evidence given for this warrant, so I don't give a fuck. An hour before the planned raid, the cops tell the ambulance on standby to leave, counter to standard practice. Apparently, they don't think anybody could get hurt. Around midnight, three plainclothes officers started pounding on the door with a fucking battering ram. Obviously Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who like Taylor herself has absolutely nothing to do with the run-of-the-mill drug case taking place ten miles away, and Taylor, who was not asleep despite the popular narrative, think they're being robbed, so he grabs his legally-owned pistol. And then the three men in plain clothes break through the door, so he shoots one of them in the leg—one shot. Remember that Kentucky is a stand-your-ground state. Then the three jumpiest cops in America indiscriminately fire 32 shots between the three of them into the apartment—just unloading those mags—and with Star Wars Storm Trooper precision, manage to hit Walker a grand total of zero times and hit the unarmed Taylor standing in the hallway five times. So the cops render medical assistance... to the police officer who had been shot in the raid. They call back the ambulance. Not only do these cops have terrible aim, but they claim that they didn't even notice that they'd shot Taylor until at least 5 minutes after they did it. 5 minutes is a long time not to realize you've shot someone. The cop was fine. The woman trying to sleep in her own apartment was not. They charged Walker with assault and attempted murder. Those charges were dropped, obviously.

So much stuff went wildly wrong here. First, none of this happens without the war on drugs. This isn't that much of a hot take these days, but the war on drugs is one of the great evils of American domestic policy and leads inevitably to deaths like this one. When more shit is criminalized—for unambiguously racist reasons, I might add—there are more crimes to investigate, warrants to sign, and doors to knock down. Even people who don't commit these victimless crimes inevitably are harmed by and die due to their enforcement. We cannot be blasé about this. Second, holy shit that was a stupid warrant, but not an uncommon one. All over this country, too many warrants are getting approved. We can't just trust the judgment of state judges to dictate when it's acceptable to break into someone's house in the middle of the night. Remember, they were investigating her ex-boyfriend who had never lived there for doing shit somewhere else, and their evidence connecting the crimes to that apartment was video of him at the apartment holding an unidentified box. It's good to eliminate no-knock warrants (though police say they announced their presence in this case, though none of the neighbors heard it), but we need to eliminate no-good-reason warrants, too. Third, the officers were in plainclothes. Why? I'm actually asking here. Why on earth were they in plainclothes? They were performing a raid. If someone breaks into your house in plain clothes, you're going to think you're being robbed. There's a certain kind of presumption of guilt here. Walker's mistake was aiming at their legs. Fourth, these police officers were incompetent. I don't know what kind of readiness training these dudes go through, but they emptied their magazines and hit just about everything but their target. Per the indictment, one of them was shooting totally randomly. It's fucking pathetic. This part in itself is an indictment on police training and culture.

So the outrage about this case is totally justified. But calling to end policing in America isn't a solution. We need to resolve the actual problems here. I also understand anger at the lack of other indictments, but that's where this case gets a lot trickier. I believe that self-defense is #1. It's among the most fundamental rights a person has. However—putting aside the indiscriminate gunfire for a moment—we want law enforcement to be able to respond when they get shot at while carrying out a warranted search. That starts with not signing bullshit warrants and not wearing plain clothes to a raid, but should these officers really be charged with murder? According to precedent, no. We afford a huge amount of leeway to cops in these kinds of situations. And supposing that it were Walker who died, I'm not sure the officers should have been charged with anything—though I would certainly hope they would be fired. Of course we want to make these situations as rare as possible by decriminalizing nearly everything, signing far fewer warrants, uniforming all officers executing warrants, and ending no-knock raids. However I think that higher charges were justified in this case since the unarmed, non-aggressive Breonna Taylor was the one who died. Three men broke into a house and recklessly shot an uninvolved third party. In Kentucky, I don't think that meets the standard for murder, but it should absolutely be considered first-degree manslaughter. This case is the perfect counterargument to qualified immunity.

So hopefully you can understand when I fucking seethe when I read right-wing shills writing shit like this. Yes, the liberals who get the facts wrong and call for overblown murder charges are annoying and sometimes destructive, but they're reachable (note that I'm not talking about the communists looking for any opportunity to burn cities down). I've lost interest in sharing a planet with people like this. I think that the civil unrest this year has greatly clarified my political allegiances. I have no place on a side that houses these folks. They are utterly unconcerned with truth. The shit they say can be discredited by a Google search. I'm still typing words to fit more links. THE DRUG-DEALING EX WASN'T THE ONE WHO SHOT AT POLICE, YOU FUCKING MORONS. All these people want to do is protect the police and the status quo where innocent black people die. I have even more links, but I don't want to type about this anymore.

This wasn't the only police-related story this week. A mom called 911 when she lost control over her white, autistic 13-year-old Linden Cameron who was having a mental breakdown and making violent threats. She told police he didn't have access to a real gun. Police showed up, chased him down, and shot him eleven times in the back when he didn't follow commands to get on the ground. He's currently hospitalized. I'm not going to discuss this case in any more detail because it makes me feel ill. A lot of right-wing idiots have been saying, “Hmmmm, why isn't BLM talking about this?” They are. BLM are kinda the only people talking about this. Imagine a world where these people actually took a stand in this case instead of using it as a nonsense prop to attack BLM. These people literally think this is a race war.

Everything Else

Fucked-up new FDA policy.

Fucked up “LGBT-free zones” covering a third of Polish households.

Finally, you gotta watch this cringe Jimmy Kimmel video where he lets himself be totally walked over to score woke points.

Thanks,

Jacob Morris

Week of September 13th, 2020

Hi,

We talked yesterday. It's been a hell of a week. I hope you're doing well.

College COVID Recap

We have some marginally better news here. It seems that the growth is definitely not exponential for now, so something seems to be working. Recall that we're on a delay, so we're seeing the results of the actions we took about two weeks ago. We'll see how stable this is, but I pretty much have all the doubts I did last week. I fully expect another spike unless everything goes remote. It may well have already happened and just needs to show up in our test results. It's news like this that makes people feel safe, and I don't feel that my peers are treating the situation with nearly enough gravity.

 

The really good news is the update to the testing policy. They are finally implementing a mandatory random testing policy for all students in town on or off-campus. This is exactly what I was arguing for immediately after move-in. It'll go a long way in giving us the information we need and catching breakouts earlier. They didn't say anything about the scale of this testing, but I hope they're going big. About a thousand tests in the last week is just not enough in a deadly pandemic. There are some idiots whining about this policy who apparently just want the school president to solve Coronavirus without anyone having to do anything. Some folks are scared to go on campus to get tested. Obviously, I hope all this is successful. It's taking longer than I predicted for everything to get shut down, so maybe I was wrong. We'll see.

Election Recap

Because apparently just about anybody can claim a month, it's Hispanic Heritage Month. This brought Joe Biden to an event in Florida where he spoke immediately after Luis Fonsi, who sang “Despacito.” So, Biden took the stage and played “Despacito” from his smartphone into the mic to the whole audience as his opener for a speech about Hispanic heritage. It's a wonderful, hilarious moment, and you owe it to yourself to watch the clip if you haven't seen it. Some folks are mad at Biden for pandering and whatnot, but I'm trying to enjoy what I can. As you might imagine, a lot of people made edited versions with different music. It's since been deleted, but the President tweeted an edited video in which Biden played “Fuck the Police” without clearly stating that it was a joke, and Twitter had a field day, etc, etc. This stuff is getting kind of rote if you ask me.

Here's an unbelievable clip of President Trump gloating about his COVID performance.

Obviously, we've already talked about the most important political happening this year and probably one of the most important of this presidency. Justice Ginsburg died yesterday from pancreatic cancer. This was her fifth battle with cancer. The truth is that she should have resigned under President Obama, and, really, I wish she had. I can only imagine that she didn't because she wasn't able to foresee a President Trump on the horizon, a deadly error I think most of us made. Now we have this situation. I want to clarify something we discussed briefly yesterday. I absolutely still hold that it was proper for a Republican Senate to delay the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and that it would be proper for that same Senate to affirm a nomination in Justice Ginsburg's place. The Constitution and other founding documents couldn't be clearer about this: Confirmation is a political process. If the Senate couldn't deny appointments at will, they wouldn't be part of the process. The real difference between now and historical confirmations is the still-active nuclear option requiring only 51 votes instead of 60, something I generally oppose. There are 53 Republican Senators, so Trump is going to be able to make an appointment. The real problem here isn't the political process, but the rhetoric that Republican Senators used in 2016 to justify blocking Garland. They all said so much stupid shit that should be held against them if they try to fill the seat before the election. Here's Senator Graham explicitly telling people to use his words against him in this kind of situation. And here's Senator Cruz making up an 80-year precedent as if that means anything. Of course Senator Cruz has already called for President Trump to fill the seat. Their angle seems to be that at the end of the Obama administration, the American people had elected a Conservative Senate as a referendum on President Obama who was leaving office anyway whereas Trump is in his first term with a Republican Senate backing him up. Obviously, that's not what the GOP was saying in 2016, but besides dealing yet another wound to our political spirit, it doesn't really matter. And this reasoning is total BS since the Senate isn't supposed to represent “the will of the people,” but, again, it doesn't really matter. It's all just empty rhetoric. Senate Majority Leader McConnell uses this reasoning in his official statement. They're going to fill the seat. These people are snakes. At least Senator Murkowski is sticking by the 2016 precedent.

Since the GOP is signalling that they're going to fill the seat, the natural question is, “With whom?” The betting markets say Judge Amy Coney Barrett. The betting markets are fucking stupid. It's not going to be her. We don't actually have to search far for a firm answer. Perhaps the Trump administration knew something we didn't. Just ten days ago, it published a list of Supreme Court candidates President Trump would consider were a seat to open up. Unsurprisingly, Judge Barrett is not on that list. Let's look at who is. When this list was being shared around last evening, many were particularly startled by the inclusions of Senators Cruz and Cotton. I don't think either will be nominated. First, Senator Cotton is seen as a fascist by a huge swath of Americans for the “Send in the Troops” op-ed and not without good reason. Most of Trump's court picks have been fairly moderate despite all the hullabaloo, and I think the Trump Administration is wise enough to know that nominating someone seen as a right-wing radical in Justice Ginsburg's place would give too much ammunition to the other side. I eliminate Senator Cruz by similar reasoning. Senator Cruz is well-known enough that a lot of Americans already hate his guts. And I suspect that despite their current alliance, President Trump still holds a grudge against the guy and doesn't like the idea of handing him an elevated life-long position.

No, Trump's going to try to get what he wants while stirring the pot as little as possible. I predict that Trump is going to make his most liberal appointment yet while not going too far to anger his base. I think anyone else on that list is a real possibility, but I also predict that President Trump will nominate a woman. Justice Ginsburg will be remembered as a feminist hero. Keeping that seat female is probably the best tactic. I also think it's most likely that the President will pick a judge. So, if I'm going to wager a guess, I'd keep an eye out for Judges Bridget Bade, Barbara Lagoa, Martha Pacold, and Sarah Pitlyk. We'll have to see what happens.

Everything Else

If you already thought Alexa and other smart home devices were terrifying, prepare yourself for Amazon Echo for landlords. Not only can Bezos listen to everything you say, now your landlord can drop in so long as you haven't set the device to “not disturb.”Basically the landlord can drop in and initiate a 2-way conversation at any time as opposed to, you know, making a phone call. You can pay rent through the thing, too, so now Bezos can listen in on that.

Here's Alex Jones talking directly to a vaccine telling it to give black children Polio in a ridiculous voice.

JK Rowling cannot stop with the TERF shit. Apparently her latest book is about a cis male serial killer who dresses as a woman to murder people. I really don't understand what motivates these TERFs. It seems like her distaste for trans women is almost pathological. Why can't they shut the fuck up and stop being terrible. In particular, Conservatives defending her out of some misguided sense of unity are morons.

As a short update to the Cuties business from last week, here's a deranged review from a guy who can't stop perving over the film's pre-teen stars. I understand that the film criticizes the sexual exploitation of children, but this video perfectly explains why that backfired horribly. Netflix is still hosting child pornography. I'm honestly impressed this pedo has the balls to keep this up on YouTube with comments enabled and everything. I'm kind of hoping he's just doing it for attention.

Finally, here's a really bizarre story about South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnzborg. Apparently, he struck and killed a guy on a rural road while driving his car a long way away from his home coming back from some event. He states that he thought the guy was a deer (since humans famously look just like deer) and called 911 to report the accident. Whether this 911 call ever took place hasn't been confirmed. He said he looked around with his phone but couldn't find what he'd hit in the dark. He called Sheriff Mike Volek over who assessed the damage to the vehicle and also apparently just didn't see the body. Since his car was wrecked, he borrowed the sheriff's personal vehicle to get home.

A.G. Ravnzborg's wrecked car

The next day he returned with his chief of staff to return the sheriff's vehicle. He stopped at the accident site, saw the body lying in plain sight on the shoulder of the road. Despite the purported 911 call, the site hadn't been investigated at all. Apparently, he and Sheriff Volek are just really bad lookers. A.G. Ravnzborg reported the finding not by calling 911 immediately, but by driving all the way to Sheriff Volek's house and telling him. Then, despite being involved in the incident, the two returned to the scene and investigated it themselves with Volek promising to lead the investigation. A.G. Ravnzborg has gotten eight traffic tickets in the last four years. This story is sketchy as all hell and I'm going to try to keep up with it.

Thanks,

Jacob Morris

Week of September 6th, 2020

Hi,

I didn't send one of these last week since I was at home for the long weekend and my time was pretty occupied. It's a shame, too. I could have written a damn essay on Kyle Rittenhouse alone and just be getting started. I don't have nearly as much stuff this week. I'm back in the school grind, but I think my hardest semester is behind me now, and since I already have a job, I'm really just trying not to drop the ball. So it's been pretty chill up here, at least compared to previous semesters.

College COVID Recap

Pessimism wins again; we are fucked. If you'll bear with me, I think it's a good idea to peruse the information, since I think my school serves as a microcosm for all kinds of chaos happening all over the country. After the explosion of cases, they switched to daily updates, so I have a lot more information to work with here.

The number of positive tests since move-in is currently making its way toward 1000. By itself, that's a worrying number, and it has nowhere to go but up, though fortunately the growth doesn't currently look exponential. Also, it's now very obvious that this growth is happening internally rather than being brought in from outside. Far more tests were conducted before three weeks ago than after, since everyone moving into on-campus housing had to get tested, but only a handful of those tests were positive. After that date, there have been far fewer tests, but the number of cases has exploded. My understanding is that the university is now testing people if they feel sick, were exposed to someone who tested positive, were out of town, or who requested a test for some other reason. Of course, the university has a limited ability to perform contact tracing, so they can't really lock down everyone who's been exposed to someone who just tested positive, and most people who are positive haven't gotten test results yet. Luke, the point is that someone is going to die, and it will have been fully preventable. Obviously the dipshit freshmen who don't care about the health of their peers are terrible, but the blame for this falls squarely on administrators who had the resources to predict this possibility.

The school is scrambling, and I don't know how long they'll keep this up before they send us all home. This week, they unceremoniously kicked everyone out of one of the residence halls to make room for more isolation space. No one had any indication this was a possibility, so I can't imagine this was part of the plan. I believe they're moving a number of these kids into a nearby hotel, so have fun walking to class, I guess.

All the primary schools in town have shut down, so you have to imagine that it won't be too long until we meet the same end. Maybe they'll hold out to the tuition refund deadline of October 15th. Hopefully nobody's dead by then. Many students have now been suspended for misconduct, but it's probably not enough.

I've been going pretty hard on the administration in this message, but I don't really believe most of the conspiracies. I think they genuinely thought that students would be more adept at slowing spread and didn't anticipate many of the problems that have arisen. But others are going much harder. Many are pretty much calling the university president a killer. I've seen some socially-distanced protesters about. I think a lot of folks really believe that the administration fully anticipated what has happened and did it anyway to make more money. So tensions are pretty high.

Apocalypse Recap

I think it's not a bad idea to start grouping together all the new apocalyptic events since they just keep coming. I'm sure you've seen it, but California's on fire and the whole west coast is red now.

It'd be a cool aesthetic if it weren't so terrifying.

Someone cut together a Blade Runner video from unedited footage. One of my professors who is teaching remotely from the west coast literally got evacuated from his apartment during a lecture when burning ash started raining down from the sky. At this stage of the apocalypse, why the fuck not? God have mercy on us. One thing I should point out is that this was not caused by a gender reveal party gone wrong, no matter how much Twitter wishes it were. Yes, pyrotechnics at one ridiculous gender reveal party did cause one of the earlier fires, but if it were just that, it wouldn't have gotten like this.

From CNN. The El Dorado gender-reveal fire.

No, most of them were caused by a big dry lightning storm. No tragic irony was involved. It was just God smiting us the good old fashioned way. Okay, there may still be a bit of tragic irony here. We'll be seeing red skies more frequently as the planet gets hotter.

The other apocalyptic thing I saw this week was the Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem, a Republican, is currently using millions of dollars of federal Coronavirus relief aid to fund a marketing campaign for tourism. South Dakota has the second-highest number of new cases per capita of the US states. I'm so fucking done.

Everything Else

I could make this whole email about Shoe0nHead and Chris Ray Gun, but I'm going to try not to. In case you don't know who I'm talking about (though I'm sure you do to at least some degree) they're both left-leaning semi-political YouTubers who gained notoriety from making fun of “SJWs” in the #GamerGate era. They both followed a similar trajectory. They always avoided getting into “save the west” territory and were more focused on comedy. And they're both pretty funny. You'll recall I sent you Shoe's “Hell World” video when the George Floyd protests took off. These two have been through the ringer the last two weeks like you wouldn't believe. It starts when Shoe starts hanging out with leftist streamer Vaush and starts evolving and discussing her leftist political views, particularly on her Twitter. Since her fans are pretty politically diverse, quite a lot of them weren't happy about this. These guys could get so ridiculous that there's now a novelty account dedicated to right-wing Shoe0nHead simps. Chris Ray Gun was also a guest on one of his streams. To be clear, I didn't like any of this either. Vaush is a complete dumbass and a complete commie. He's very polite to people and has an inviting “anti-woke” vibe, but he's really competing for dumbest “Internet leftist,” and there's some tough competition for that title. I also think there's a fighting chance that he's a nonce.

I don't think that he's a good person to be aligning oneself with. But whatever, Shoe0nHead can talk to whomever she pleases. I'm not going to do the whole guilt by association charade.

But then Shoe went on a 24-hour trans rights stream hosted by The Serfs which was probably a mistake given all the commie guests. There's been a number of these trans rights megastreams and they seem to inevitably get out of hand. This one definitely did. After Shoe had left the stream, a bunch of LARPers started discussing what would be done with all the cops after the violent communist revolution. It's cringe. After this stream, her ex-friend fellow “anti-sjw” right-wing YouTuber Sargon of Akkad made a pearl-clutching video attacking Shoe in pretty ridiculous fashion. As evidence that the people she was spending time with were no good, he included a clip of one of the other guests engaging in the “what to do with all the former cops” discourse. But Sargon's single-digit-IQ fans thought that the person talking in the clip was Shoe, and have gone after her aggressively, and then after Chris for defending her among other things. There's this raging mob of people attacking them as communists or concern-trolling about their tragic descent into left-wing politics. Also there's a lot of simps.

But that's hardly the end of it. That'd be too easy. Now that they're trying to engage more in left-wing online politics (well, mostly Shoe. Chris tends to get shit by extension), they're getting scrutinized by the insufferable people in that circle. So while one mob is running around calling them both communists 24/7, an entirely separate group is running around calling them Nazis 24/7 for participating in #GamerGate to purity test leftists who dare speak to them. Chris Ray Gun is a Nazi and a communist at the same time. There was even a group of leftists literally body-shaming Shoe using some kind of pretzel logic.

I can't remember the last time I saw anyone get hammered this hard from the far right and the far left at the same time by no real fault of their own. It has been incredible to watch.

Moving on, The Daily Beast has now published the “more female drone pilots” meme unironically. It really reads like satire. “She kills people from 7,850 miles away.”

In a strange government overreach, Naples has imposed a mandatory DNA registry for all dogs so that they can determine what dog owners don't pick up their dog's shit. You have to imagine that it'd be cheaper to just hire people to clean it up. No, government, you may not have my dog's blood. Jesus Christ.

Okay, finally I want to talk about the movie Cuties, recently released on Netflix. Unlike other people criticizing this film and Netflix's decision to host it, I will not be posting child pornography in this email, so if you really want confirmation that what I say is true, you can look it up on your own or follow a few of the links here. If you haven't heard of Cuties, that's probably a pretty frightening introduction. But it is a fitting one. Cuties is a French film by female director Maïmouna Doucouré about a Muslim girl who winds up split between her conservative upbringing and dance culture when she joins a dance troupe composed exclusively of 11 to 13 year-old girls. Crucially, those are the ages of the actresses. The characters are young kids, they're played by young kids, and they look like young kids. When the film was first released, it was not controversial. It premiered at Sundance to acclaim. The stated purpose of the film is to criticize the hypersexualization of young girls in online culture. Here's the movie's American poster.

But this is not the original poster on Netflix. I will not show you the original poster on Netflix because I consider it to be pornographic. As you might imagine, that poster sparked controversy. Netflix apologized and changed it. I thought that it probably wasn't a good reflection of the film since no one involved in the project had a say in the Netflix marketing, and I was hoping that this controversy would be the end of the Cuties discourse. Then the movie came out. Obviously, I have not watched this movie. I have seen clips. I have seen enough. I don't give a fuck about the artistic intent. These are real kids, and this movie is a pedophile's dream come true. It's hard for me to demonstrate this without showing it, so if you'd really like to have this proven to you, I'd recommend you watch PaymoneyWubby's video about it. But I wouldn't watch it with anyone else in the room. And then I'd probably throw my laptop into a fire when I was done watching and wash my eyes out with dish soap. I don't know if I have a favorite way to criticize the hypersexualization of young women, but it's definitely not filming extended close-up sequences of real scantily-clad 11-year-olds twerking and putting it up on Netflix for all to see. Remember, Netflix has vehemently defended this film.

You'd think people would be able to criticize this regardless of political views, but unfortunately that isn't the case. The outrage has been almost entirely from the right. Conservatives have rightly called out how negative changes in our culture regarding sex positivity have made this kind of soft-core child pornography appear acceptable. This is a case where I agree with the conservative view with zero reservations. Of course, there were also a number of QAnon folks who jumped on this train to call out their elite pedophile cults and whatnot, but that was a minority. It was mostly conservatives being 100% correct and concerned parents cancelling their Netflix accounts. There were a few call-outs across the aisle, but very few. Notably, Congresswoman Gabbard used the #CancelNetflix hashtag.

This resulted in some weird shit. Please try to remember that Congresswoman Gabbard is a Social Democrat at the far left of the Democratic party.

But many people on the left have been defending this filth. Here's an article from The Verge which epitomizes the trope “conservatives pounce.” If your reaction to the obvious sexual exploitation of young kids is to go after Republicans for being too mad about it, you're pretty sick. This isn't about a “harassment campaign” against a “female POC filmmaker.” It's a campaign against the normalization of child pornography. And if rejecting this film makes me a prude or a pearl-clutcher, I'll gladly accept the title.

I think the world might be ending,

Jacob Morris