Quick! Stock up on beef jerky and batteries. (Thanks, Jender-Mom!)
Day: January 20, 2013
The real history of the 2nd amendment
UPDATE: Apparently this is not true. (Thanks, HL!)
ANOTHER UPDATE: Or maybe it is true. (See below, in comments.) Keep your views and links coming; I’m learning a lot!
Its purpose was to preserve slavery. (Stick that in your originalist interpretation.)
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
Talking Philosophy: Motherhood and Moral Luck
The blog of The Philosophers’ Magazine, Talking Philosophy, currently has two posts up that may be of interest to feminist readers. One is a sensitive and excellent treatment of motherhood, moral luck, and how to do philosophy in the face of tragedy, by Claire Creffield. I really appreciate her care in writing:
At its best, though, philosophy can restrain its tendency to glibness by taking seriously the Socratic point, that wisdom lies in the awareness of how little we know: rather than expertise, philosophers offer tools for the sustained interrogation of their own ignorance and everyone else’s. When philosophy is conceived in this way its reigning sentiments are bewilderment and hesitancy, amounting to a kind of intellectual pessimism, about the possibility of finding the kind of answers that ultimately satisfy. Those sentiments aren’t out of place at the scene of a tragedy, I think.
Her post deserves feminist and philosophical attention. It’s not getting the traffic of the other post up, about which our readers are contacting us in much greater numbers, and which is not sensitive or excellent: Rupert Read’s argument for what he calls “a Feminist case against some of the discourse of the trans lobby.” (Apparently there’s a “the lobby.”) Unfortunately, much as some of us contributors to FP might wish to criticize and host criticism of his post, not one of us is available in the next few days to moderate a comment thread here, and we’re not wild about hosting a blog conversation about another blog anyway. Go there instead, but seriously, you’re missing out if you read Read’s work and not Creffield’s. Her attention to “bewilderment and hesitancy” is exactly what’s called for.
on seeing the video, you think…
i. I had no idea.
ii. Not me, not ever.
iii. I like her shortcuts.
iv. Other………
WHO IS THIS WOMAN? FROM THE NY TIMES:
Henny Garfunkel, 65, may be the closest thing the Sundance Film Festival has to a reigning queen. A celebrity photographer with a wild personal style — gobs of red lipstick, 19 ear piercings, bouffant hair in the front and a ponytail in the back — she has been high-tailing it here every January for the last 19 years. She photographs stars for outlets like PaperMag.com and New York, but mostly she likes the hubbub, and the hubbub likes her.
“Before people got to know Henny,” said the director John Waters, “I used to describe her by saying, ‘You know my friend, right? The one who looks like the back end of a Plymouth? They would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that one. She’s fabulous!’ ”
Ms. Garfunkel, who cites Diane Arbus and Liberace as influences, figures she has photographed thousands of stars over the years and not just at Sundance. She specializes in festivals of all kinds.
Feminist Philosophers 