'Breathe'

A woman to make your heart flutter. Just breathe.

Song background at Wikipedia. I'd forgotten how big it was.

Is Hate a Liberal Value? Reflections on Newtown

From Glenn Reynolds, at USA Today:

1. When Twenty Minutes Is Forever. According to the CNN timeline for the Sandy Hook tragedy, "Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls." Twenty minutes. Five minutes is forever when violence is underway, but 20 minutes -- a third of an hour -- means that the "first responders" aren't likely to do much more than clean up the mess.

This has led to calls -- in Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, St. Louis -- for armed officers or staff at schools. Some object. But we have people with guns protecting airports, hospitals and politicians. And leading anti-gun crusaders like New York's billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg and press lord Rupert Murdoch are protected by armed security teams that could probably topple some third-world governments. Why are our children less worthy of protection?

Then there are our homes. If police took twenty minutes to respond at a school, how likely are they to get to your house in time? For those of us without "security teams," the answer isn't reassuring.

2. Is Hate A Liberal Value? A 20-year-old lunatic stole some guns and killed people. Who's to blame? According to a lot of our supposedly rational and tolerant opinion leaders, it's . . . the NRA, a civil-rights organization whose only crime was to oppose laws banning guns. (Ironically, it wasn't even successful in Connecticut, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.)

The hatred was intense. One Rhode Island professor issued a call -- later deleted -- for NRA head Wayne LaPierre's "head on a stick." People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a "terrorist organization," and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a "terror baby."

Nor were reporters, who are supposed to be neutral, much better. As The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg commented, "Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever. "

Well, left-wing "tolerance" at work. Continue reading at that top link.

PREVIOUSLY: "Erik Loomis' Twitter Timeline Available Dating Back to June 2012."

Christmas Eve Roundup of the Roundups

I should probably do this more often.

We could just save readers some time by linking to all the good stuff.

Maggie's Farm always has great links, for example, "My Christmas Eve post," and "Monday morning links."

And at Director Blue, "Larwyn's Linx: The Perfect Prison."

The Other McCain usually has the "Live at Five" roundup posted, but Wombat must be taking the day off. So here's this, "Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Chains Rattling, and Who’s That Ghost?" And, "FLASHBACK: December 2010 - Christmas Cheesecake."

Plus, more at Theo Spark's, "Pic Dump," and "News..."

You know Instapundit's the place to go, and this one's really worth it, "LARRY CORREIA: An Opinion On Gun Control. (Reposted)."

And from The Never-Saw-It-Coming Department at Weasel Zippers, "Socialists Blame Capitalism For Newtown Massacre…"

Now, over at Right Wing News, you can get your fill, "Monday, December 24, 2012. Plus, "The Journal News Doxes (possible) NY Handgun Owners.

Check Pirate's Cove as well, "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup," and "If All You See…is an flooded world, you might just be a Warmist."

Also at Ninety Miles From Nowhere, "If Gun Free Zones Are Good Enough For Our Children...."

And at Astute Bloggers, "GUN CONTROL IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF ILLOGICAL LIBERAL POLICY-MAIKNG."

I'll have more blogging this afternoon. My wife and I are heading over to Costco in a bit to get some beef tri-tip and lobster for tomorrow's Christmas dinner.

Drop your links in the comments to be added. And have a Merry Christmas Eve.

Erik Loomis' Twitter Timeline Available Dating Back to June 2012

I wrote earlier, quite seriously, of Professor Erik Loomis:

No one's as stupid to violently rattle off the death chants while still an untenured assistant professor at a research university. "Dim bulb" is charitable.

Thinking back now, that's even an understatement, a big one. It's possible that no one --- no academic faculty member at a major college or university --- has ever acted as stupidly vis-à-vis his or her own viability as an employee. Loomis is behaving stupidly and recklessly, as if he's got a "termination wish" (like a death wish, but meaning instead a pathological need to get fired in pursuit of romantic martyrdom in some larger cause of crusading labor unionism, perhaps harking back longingly to an earlier, valorized era of violent class struggle).

In any case, see Robert Stacy McCain's report, "The Vocabulary of Professor Erik Loomis: ‘Motherf–ing F–kheads F–king F–k’."

Folks should be sure to read the whole thing at The Other McCain. Read it carefully. And then check the full Twitter timeline (available in pdf). Note especially how Loomis indulges in using the f-word quite a bit. Indeed, "overindulge" might be the better verb form (his f-bomb usage is clearly overdone and all too frequent, transparently uncomfortable as if a poorly-offered cover for insecurity). But it's always the context of things that's even important (an importance Loomis' defenders have proved beyond a reasonable doubt with their systematic omission of any of Loomis' statements outside of the key "metaphor" at issue). Rattling off death chants as an untenured faculty member isn't smart. But it's as dumb as one can possibly be to diss your own job responsibilities --- more so with so much obvious contempt for your institution and its structure of hierarchical authority. Here's a surprisingly revealing tweet as to Loomis' state of mind:

Again, read the full timeline for the context.

Committee service is a major part of serving as a professor --- and of the collegiate life of a university more generally. It's an especially important function to untenured faculty members because such work is a key manner in which unfamiliar and untested colleagues pay their dues. And it should be obvious, but when you're dissing committee work as pointless you are dismissing as useless the work of a great many of the leaders on a given campus, people who have put in enormous numbers of hours in attempting to have a voice in the institution's decision-making --- and to hopefully have a greater voice in final outcomes affecting the institution, the faculty, students, and the curriculum. Some faculty members earn most of their professional self-esteem through the work they provide on committees. It's a deeply embedded aspect of the academic culture. So, the kind of opposition to the norms of collegiality that Loomis demonstrates is utterly astounding --- even exponentially astounding, again, given that Loomis lacks the security of tenure. He is demonstrating that he is, by definition, as dumb as an ox. The problem with that, clearly, is that research universities are supposed to be populated with smart people. Really smart people. And a public university such as the University of Rhode Island is tax payer supported, so there's a particularly high level of public accountability. People on the outside, taxpayers as well as moneyed players supporting campus foundations, and so forth, want to think their support is in furtherance of an elite and respected body of scholars and practitioners. Educators at these places are cut tremendous independence because they are society's most esteemed role models. They are the masters of the (knowledge) universe who're transmitting society's essential values and learning to the next generations. But there are limits.

For someone like Loomis to show such outward contempt for all of this is simply mind-boggling. It's even more astounding given that Loomis spends so much time online. He should know better. The norms of academic hiring and promotion may have changed since 2005 when Daniel Drezner was denied tenure (largely on the suspicion that blogging was taking up too much of his time). But they haven't changed that much. It's just not well-advised to be so outspoken --- virtually all the time --- on social networking sites and on widely-read partisan blogs. For a lot of elite power-brokers in academe, such patterns of behavior are unscholarly. And to be so stridently unscholarly goes 100 percent against what the ideal candidate for tenure is supposed to be like. I would personally advise anyone entering the job market or working on becoming tenured to avoid hard-core partisan blogging and tweeting. To do otherwise is to court trouble, the kind of trouble that could ruin one's career. This is why I sense that what Loomis lacks in brains he more than equals in social insecurity. All that tweeting, and blogging too, is designed to buff this guy's creds among the hard-left commentariat. But for what? So the communist freaks at Crooked Timber will post a couple of huzzah! blog posts in solidarity. That's manifestly not worth it.

In any case, if anyone were really, truly looking to get Loomis fired this is the argument they'd want to make to the administration of the University of Rhode Island. One could contact the university and make the case that is isn't a matter of freedom of speech, or of academic freedom. It's a matter of basic professionalism toward one's vocation and the standards of institutional and professional decorum. Loomis reflects badly on the university. He reflects badly on the hiring committee that brought him there in the first place. Folks on the outside, the tax payers and other supporting constituencies will ask, "How could they have possibly hired this idiot? He's making the university look like a bloody circus." And they'll be well warranted to ask such questions. A lot of money goes into to recruiting and investing in productive academic colleagues. These are people who're expected to be teaching, publishing and performing community service. There are very high standards involved, or there should be. Which is why if people of professional standing raised these points to university president Dr. David Dooley it's quite possible the administration will reflect even more deeply on the problem in the days and weeks ahead. I mean, it's been well over a week since this story first broke and the university now has a huge and extremely prominent posting of the administration's condemnation of Professor Loomis. And looking at this again, President Dooley has updated the language since I last check over at the university's homepage:

Statement from URI President David M. Dooley

Over the past several days we have heard from many individuals concerning statements made or repeated by Professor Erik Loomis. Many writers forcefully expressed serious concern about his statements and many others expressed very strong support for Professor Loomis, especially in regard to his First Amendment right to share his personal opinions. In the statements at issue, Professor Loomis did not make it clear that he was speaking solely as an individual, and that the views he expressed were his alone and did not reflect the views of the University of Rhode Island. This was the rationale for our original statement.

The University of Rhode Island strongly believes that Constitutionally protected rights to free expression are the foundation of American democracy, and central to our mission of imparting knowledge and promoting the exchange of ideas. It is our conviction that Professor Loomis's personal remarks, however intemperate and inflammatory they may be, are protected by the First Amendment, as are the views of those who have contacted us in recent days.

Here's the link to the scanned document now available at the website.

I quoted and screencapped the president's initial comments at the time, dated December 18th, "University of Rhode Island Condemns Violent Labor Historian Erik Loomis." No doubt the backlash escalated enormously since then. In no time the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the story, "‘Head on a Stick’ Tweet Lands U. of Rhode Island Professor in Hot Water." And Inside Higher Ed also took it up, "Who's Overreacting? Professor's tweet and university's reaction stir debate on academic freedom."

So my sense is that this issue is far from over. It's Christmastime. That's the slowest time at the university. And if the administration feels it needs to have its statement placed so largely and prominently at the website, it's clear that the backlash isn't close to subsiding. People on campus will be dealing with these matters when business gets going again in the new year. Opponents of Loomis' tenure bid might not relent in their vocal outrage at this man's outward violence and incivility. But the more troublesome issue, on a practical working level, is Loomis' clear propensity toward uncollegialty and unprofessionalism. All together, the profanity-laced death chants, etc., and the dissing of the university's committee service responsibilities, could very well create a picture for outside constituencies of unworthiness for the honorific of academic tenure. As I've said, Loomis is really dumb. He's joking all about it over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, but when your professional future is so seriously on the line, this is hardly a laughing matter.

If you got haters...

...you must be doing something right!

Seen while out Christmas shopping earlier today and posted at Twitter.

'They’re lefty-defenders, not liberty-defenders...'

This is great.

From David Henderson, at Econlog, "Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee: The Case of Erik Loomis." Read it all at the link. Henderson hammers the anti-free speech dorks at Crooked Timber.

And Glenn Reynolds adds: "They’re lefty-defenders, not liberty-defenders..."

That's key. The idiot progressives I've battled online for years don't a shit about free speech unless it's for their own ASFL* partisan allies.

PREVIOUSLY: "Smirking Spectator? Guilty as Charged."

* "Adult sick-fuck losers" (cf. Amy Alkon).

'There are circumstances in which I think I’d advocate for someone’s firing, even for things they said...'

Well, it's no surprise, but this idiot progressive Bijan Parsia, in the comments at Loomis' latest Lumberjack ball-buster, advocates getting conservative academics fired for speech with which he disagrees:

Did Erik call, in any meaningful way, for anyone to be jailed for political advocacy? Are a few tweets sufficient? What actions were the tweets either intended or likely to trigger?

Contrariwise, people didn’t just tweet back: “I hope you get fired.” Or “I think you should be fired”. Or “You don’t deserve to be a professor.” They did things like call the FBI and the University (indeed, they called Erik’s ultimate boss). There were people calling for that as well (e.g., in this comment).

I don’t know that there were any direct calls for Erik’s firing from blog proprietors and there were a round of posts (e.g., Instapundit’s) saying that Erik wasn’t making threats, etc.

Given e.g., Malkin’s history, I’m not so convinced that the intended effect of all this wasn’t exactly what happened.

Now, with the possible exception of the call to the FBI (really?!) and some arguably defamatory statements, none of this is illegal. Nor, I think, should it be. There are circumstances in which I think I’d advocate for someone’s firing, even for things they said. I want those to be relatively rare, of course. Probably even exceedingly rare. I prefer them to be cases where there is a direct job connection.

An interesting case is Brad Delong’s explorations as to whether John Yoo’s tenure should be revoked.

(Personally, I think even if the case is reasonable, it wouldn’t be worth pursuing because of the potential backlash and precedent.)

Look, there's one standard for free speech. You're either for it or you're against it. Professor Parsia (yeah, a professor; follow the link at his login creditials) would like John Yoo's tenure revoked. He cites Brad DeLong. I don't care to follow the links, although I'm pretty sure what the outrage is. Hint: think "enhanced interrogations."

These people are authoritarian tools, progressive tools. I made the case against such hypocritical idiots yesterday: "Smirking Spectator? Guilty as Charged."

And Robert Stacy McCain has an update on Loomis the Lumberjack: "‘Candyass Blogger’ Update: Free Speech Absolutists Who Banned Mr. Althouse UPDATE: ‘These Are Historical Dildos’."

Hey, speaking of the "Candyass Blogger," remember this? "Althouse Slams Robert 'Porn Guy' Farley!" Douchebag.

Smirking Spectator? Guilty as Charged

Folks must be sure to read this piece at Popehat, "Professor Loomis and the NRA: A Story In Which EVERYONE Annoys Me." (At Memeorandum.)

What defenders of Erik Loomis conveniently overlook is his long history of violent death-wish rhetoric spewed at his political opponents. Should he be fired for this? Of course not. But that's not to say I'm not amused by the whole thing, a fascinating spectacle, to be sure. Here's the quote I'm referencing:

I support, without qualification, people writing about Professor Loomis. I find his expression contemptible. But I also find the efforts to get him fired or arrested contemptible, and I find it highly regrettable that some blogs are, at the most charitable interpretation, acting as smirking spectators to that effort. The effort is not without cost, even if neither the police nor the University take action. Trying to get a professor fired for clearly protected speech promotes and contributes to the culture of censorship in higher education that FIRE fights and that Greg Lukianoff exposed persuasively in his recent book "Unlearning Liberty."

Perhaps I'd be more bothered by efforts to get Loomis fired if I hadn't been on the receiving end of identical efforts by his co-bloggers at Lawyers, Guns and Money and by his ideological allies in the progressive ASFL fever swamps. Indeed, I almost fell off my chair laughing at this mewling piece of "free-speech" grandstanding at Crooked Timber, "Statement on Erik Loomis." You'll notice in the comments that Scott Eric Kaufman "signs" the statement in solidarity, which is about as hypocritical as one can be ---- considering that the f-ker tried to get me fired, not for threatening him, but for simply pointing out that he loves using profanity in his teaching. There was some history of flame wars before that, but my post nailing Kaufman bragging about dropping f-bombs during lectures really must have hit a nerve. The next thing you know the guy was libeling me at my college (smearing me as a pornographer and sexual harasser), posing as a concern troll with the most demonic intentions imaginable. None of these same academic and progressive idiots said a word in my defense at the time, because they all hate me with the passion of the 1000 burning suns. But when one of their own idiots gets caught in the crossfire (metaphor) ---- and Popehat does indeed slam Loomis as an anti-free speech lunkhead --- they get all stiffer than a black-stallion steroid-pumped homosexual erection. These people are the epitome of double-standards and partisan posturing --- an example of hypocrisy also hammered at the Popehat post.

Here's my post on SEK: "The Lies of Scott Eric Kaufman — Leftist Hate-Blogger Sought to Silence Criticism With Libelous Campaign of Workplace Harassment."

And as regular readers know full well, Walter James Casper III used his blog, with his co-bloggers, to post my contact information and exhort his readers to contact my college. See: "Intent to Annoy and the Fascist Hate-Blogging Campaign of Walter James Casper III." And don't miss: "Roundup on Progressive Campaign of Workplace Intimidation and Harassment."

When you see the idiot progs get all bent out of shape like a bunch of homos, be reminded of Michelle Malkin's comments:

So, it’s come to this: Advocating beheadings, beatings, and mass murder of peaceful Americans to pay for the sins of a soulless madman. But because the advocates of violence fashion themselves champions of non-violence and because they inhabit the hallowed worlds of Hollywood, academia, and the Democratic Party, it’s acceptable?

Blood-lusting hate speech must not get a pass just because it comes out of the mouths of the protected, anti-gun class.

No one is as vile as these people. Loomis is just roadkill in the partisan wars, and he won't be the last on either side. Is it decent or fair? Perhaps not, but not so many people are as stupid as Loomis the Lumberjack. No one's as stupid to violently rattle off the death chants while still an untenured assistant professor at a research university. "Dim bulb" is charitable.

Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain's having a field day with Loomis, to the hilarious benefit of the conservative 'sphere. See: "#Metaphor: Academics Sign Their Own Death Warrants by Defending Loomis."

Screw these people. They reap what they sow. When they start calling out the workplace harassers among their own partisans maybe I'll give a f-k about stooges like Loomis.

BONUS: From Glenn Reynolds:

I KNOW I HAVEN’T: Don’t get too excited about Professor Loomis. “Professor Loomis’ vivid tweets are not actionable threats. That is to say, they aren’t ‘true threats’ outside the protection of the First Amendment.”

That’s right. They’re just hate-filled “eliminationist rhetoric” of the sort that lefties are always accusing people on the right of, but seem to engage in rather a lot themselves. Not a firing offense, but certainly worthy of widespread mockery.

RTWT.

Please Contribute to Blazing Cat Fur Defense Fund

Well, yet more in the ongoing freedom to blog series: It turns out my good friend BCF --- a.k.a Arnie, Kathy Shaidle's husband --- is being sued by serial litigant Richard Warman, a so-called "human rights activist" and actual member of the white supremacist Stormfront group.

See, "Blazingcatfur Legal Defense Fund Raising Drive."

There's a PayPal widget at that link. It's a dreadful feeling opening up that letter of service, so no doubt Arnie deeply appreciates all the help he's getting.

And don't miss Mark Steyn with the background, "Warman sues Blazing Cat Fur for linking to 'far-right' hate site."

Coping With Existential Angst

I think Robert Stacy McCain is much too modest, but if you're going to emulate someone, you'd hardly choose better than AoSHQ.

See: "The Neitzschean Existential Angst of Blogging in the Same Sphere as Ace."

Top Five Fox News Blogger Picks From Aleister at American Glob

Check it out: "Five Bloggers I’d Like to See on FOX News."

Both Althouse and Instapundit are mentioned, plus others you're undoubtedly familiar with.

Michelle Malkin's a blogger and appears regularly on Fox. We need lots more like her.

Overdue Sunday Rule 5

I think I'll take a break from troll blogging.

Here's some Rule 5, from First Street Journal, "Rule 5 Blogging: Haute Couture."

Also at American by Birth, "Rule 5 Friday."

And at Pirate's Cove, "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup," and TCOTs, "Rule 5 Saturday."

More from The Daley Gator, "DaleyBabe Bahara Golestani and a Rule Five Feast!"

And Wirecutter has "Good Morning." (Very good!)

Now at Randy's Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart (on Friday)."

At Guns and Bikinis, "Cute Babe/Hot Bikini." And Proof Positive, "Friday Night Babe: Courtney Henggeler!"

More at TrogloPundit, "Whatever you do, don’t show this to Stacy McCain." And at The Hostages, "Big Boob Friday."

Reaganite Republican gets political, "Red Hot Conservative Chicks."

And Theo Spark has the nighttime treat, "Bonus Totty..."

I don't do these link-arounds as much any more, so if I missed your blog, just leave your links in the comments and I'll add your entries.

Added: From Subject to Change, "The View From Above."

Some Lovely Saturday Rule 5

Via Theo Spark.

And from Doug Ross, a rare Rule 5 entry, "HEY, I'M DOWN WITH JUSTICE GINSBURG'S IDEA: We do need an all-female Supreme Court!"

Runway Inspiration

From Victoria's Secret:

Last's night's show was almost a blur.

You have to watch the videos to absorb it all, things happened so fast.

60 Top Conservative Blogs 2012

At Right Wing News, "The 60 Best Conservative Blogs For 2012 (6th Annual)."

AmPower comes in at #38.

Watching Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

We're getting it late on the West Coast, but it's worth it. Quite lovely.

The #VSFashionShow moment you’ve been waiting for: @angelalessandra in the @londonjewelers #VSFantasyBra: instagr.am/p/S1xuVxmlY-/
— Victoria's Secret (@VictoriasSecret) December 5, 2012

Expect updates...

More: GQ's got a slideshow, "The 2012 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show."

Notes on the State of Thomas Jefferson

On the heels of a vigorous discussion of how best to tell the story of emancipation prompted by the November release of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, an interesting debate on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson erupted online late last week.* While the Spielberg movie had clearly prompted the earlier discussion, the occasion for the Jefferson discussion was a bit more obscure, though all involved knew that Henry Wiencek's Master of the Mountain was somehow the cause of the dispute.

The foundation of this recent discussion about Jefferson seems to have been not Wiencek's book itself (which appeared back in October), nor even the controversies about the book, but rather a November 26 New York Times piece by Jennifer Schuessler about these controversies.

The Schuessler article does a somewhat better job conveying the heat of this dispute than casting light on what exactly is at stake.  Wiencek, an independent scholar, indicts Jefferson for his involvement with the institution of slavery and for his treatment of his slaves. While the book received some positive reviews, most academics have been very critical of it.  Wiencek, at least as portrayed by Schuessler, suggests that these scholars "inside the Jefferson bubble" are reflexively protecting the third president from criticism.  Meanwhile, Schuessler presents academic scholars as dismissive of Wiencek in part because he is not an academic.  What gets a bit buried in the article is that the criticism of Wiencek is largely that little in his book is new, and what is new isn't very convicing. Wiencek apparently argues that, in the middle of his life, Jefferson suddenly realized how profitable slavery was and promptly abandoned his previous objections to the institution (“It was all about the money,” Schuessler quotes Wiencek as saying. “By the 1790s, he saw [slaves] as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”).  Historians seem to be particularly irked at Wiencek's attempts to cast all of his opponents as reflexive Jefferson defenders. I don't have a view of Master of the Mountain, which I haven't read. But Wiencek's suggestion that Annette Gordon-Reed is "inside the Jefferson bubble" is ridiculous. Gordon-Reed came to Jefferson studies as a complete outsider.  Her pathbreaking first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, was a broadside directed against Jefferson's actual reflexive defenders.  

The nature of the controversy over Wiencek's book and of its coverage in the New York Times is worth noting in part because this week's online discussion of Jefferson, while centering on Wiencek's subject--Jefferson and slavery--has said relatively little about Wiencek and his book. The opening salvo seems to have been fired by Paul Finkelman, an academic legal historian and author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.  Finkelman was quoted by Schuessler as a critic of Wiencek's claims of great originality.  As if to emphasize that his disagreements with Wiencek did not concern the negativity of Master of the Mountain's evaluation of Jefferson (nor, for that matter, the desirability of alliterative titles evoking the third president's home), last Saturday, December 1, Finkelman published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "The Monster of Monticello," which argued that Jefferson was a "creepy, brutal hypocrite."  The main source of Finkelman's disagreement with Wiencek involves the latter's claim that Jefferson's devotion to slavery dated from the 1790s.  In fact, argues Finkelman, "Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free."

David Post, a blogger at the conservative academic blog The Volokh Conspiracy and a Professor of Law at Temple and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, responded with hostility to Finkelman, accusing him of purveying "truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense."

Much of the rest of the academic blogosphere followed with a series of posts agreeing wholeheartedly with Finkelman's indictment of Jefferson. For example, Corey Robin wrote a long post arguing that Jefferson's thought was a tributary of fascism (though he later emphasized that the connection between Jefferson and fascism was more related to his views on race than on slavery per se).  Scott Lemieux blogged for Finkelman and against Post on Lawyers, Guns and Money.  Yesterday, Kathleen Geier of the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog noted the controversy.

Geier pointed out that negative views of Jefferson and his relationship to slavery have become much more mainstream than they were even in the very recent past.  I'd agree with this assessment and think that, in general, it reflects progress in scholars' coming to terms with Thomas Jefferson's life, thought, and legacy.

However, to me what stands out about this entire debate is how it violates a lot of our expectations when it comes to academic historians' forays into the public sphere.

Compare it, for example, to what I think is a much more stereotypical example of the form: the debate earlier this year over David Barton's The Jefferson Lies. As most readers of this blog know Barton, an evangelical Christian minister, popular historian, GOP activist, and favorite of the far right, enjoyed his national fifteen minutes of fame last year.  The publication of his Jefferson book, however, was greeted with lots of very effective scholarly pushback, eventually leading his publisher to pull all copies from distribution.

The controversy over Barton's The Jefferson Lies thus fulfilled a lot of what one might expect from a conflict between academic and non-academic history in the public sphere: a popular, ideologically-driven author attempted to pass fabrications off as history in order to defend a peculiar, hagiographical portrait of a Founding Father.  Academic historians effectively fact-checked him and manage to win the war...or at least the battle.

What's interesting about the more recent Jefferson scuffle is that the main divisions between the non-academic historian, Henry Wiencek, and his academic opponents are considerably more subtle.  Though some have tried to defend an idealized vision of Jefferson, the main conflict is between two negative portraits of him.  And the main areas of disagreement involve issues of interpretation (e.g. did Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery change in the 1790s?) and tone, rather than relatively simple issues of fact and honesty.  The result is an opportunity for a more complicated, but still largely negative, portrait of Jefferson-on-race to reach a broader public.  This is a good thing. But my guess is that the underlying debate over Wiencek's book is still rather mysterious for non-historians playing along at home.

________________________________
* I posted on the debates about Lincoln last Monday, which prompted a fascinating discussion in comments that I did not adequately respond to.  Ray then added a fascinating post on Hollywood history later in the week.  I plan to return to the questions raised in that conversation and in Ray's post, though I may not get to it until next Monday.

'Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind...'

Inspired by William Jacobson, who's been posting Seals and Crofts videos at his sidebar over the last few day

Facebook Censors Photo of Woman in Bathtub With Elbows Showing

This is an amazing story, at Theories of the Deep Understanding of Things, "This was probably the craziest situation we ever had to face one post created this unstoppable swirl..."

And at London's Daily Mail, "Given the elbow: Facebook remove risqué picture of blonde woman reclining in bathtub (whatever did they think it was?)," and Huffington Post, "Facebook Reinstates Image Of Woman In Bathtub – After Apparently Mistaking Elbows For Nipples (PHOTO)."

'Anonymous as an organization now must be considered a national security threat...'

An extremely interesting post, at The Other McCain, "Neal Rauhauser’s Sick Obsession and the #Anonymous #OpIsrael Hamas Scam."

BEWARE: #OpIsrael is a deliberate fraud. #Anonymous is being dishonestly manipulated by anti-#Israel activists.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 17, 2012

Read it all at that top link.

RELATED: At the Daily Caller, "Anonymous declares cyber war on Israel, targets The Other McCain blog [VIDEO]." And at Zero Hedge, "Israel Releases Another Gaza Pinpoint Strike Video, Anonymous Retaliates By Taking Down IDF Blog."