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Your Miracles Won't Do It - Cristopher Hitchens

Ami on the Street: Hipsters know nothing about taxes

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The True Core Of The Jesus Myth | Christopher Hitchens

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Five Things People Still Get Wrong About Slavery - Vox

In August 1619, the first ship with “20 and odd” enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of Virginia. Four hundred years later, we look back at this moment as the start of an enduring relationship between the founding of the United States and the unconscionable exploitation of the enslaved.

In a sweeping project published by the New York Times Magazine this month exploring the legacy of slavery, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, “[The enslaved] and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. ... But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom.”

Yet centuries later, the lasting impact of slavery continues to be minimized and myths continue to flourish. For instance, there’s the erasure of the many slave revolts and rebellions that happened throughout the nation, perpetuating the lie that the enslaved were docile or satisfied with their conditions. There’s also the persistent idea that black labor exploitation is over, when mass incarceration still keeps millions of black Americans behind bars and often working for “wages” that amount to less than $1 an hour. Then there’s the idea that our understanding of slavery is accurate based on what we learned in history textbooks, when in reality, misinformation continues to be taught in our public schools about slavery’s legacy.

To unpack what often gets mistold or misunderstood, we asked five historians to debunk the biggest myths about slavery. Here’s what they said, in their own words.

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The 1619 anniversary: 5 things people still get wrong about slavery - Vox

How The Federal Government Nullified the Second Amendment to 'Ban' Automatic Firearms

By William Sullivan

 

There are two competing theories being debated today about American individuals’ “right” to gun ownership.

The original theory is that Americans enjoy a fundamental right to self-defense, in order to preserve one’s person and property against any neighbors or government agents who might act against one’s individual liberty.  This is a natural right that predates our government’s formation, and was therefore enshrined in the Constitution by some very forward-thinking liberals of their time.  In the words of the Second Amendment:

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.

It should not be difficult for anyone with a passing grasp of the English language to understand that it is the “right of the People” that is protected in that sentence, and it is clearly not the expression of a peculiar power owned by the newly-founded centralized government created by our Constitution.  Such straightforward, simple language in our Bill of Rights was actually suggested by Samuel Adams and John Hancock to accommodate the antifederalists at the Massachusetts Convention of 1788 and to avoid confusion about the new government’s limited powers, meant to guarantee that “the Constitution shall never be construed… to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

Adams thought far too much of future generations, clearly, because a second, competing theory has emerged within the last 100 years which suggests that gun ownership is not a right, but a privilege granted by the government, and the kinds of firearms allowed to peaceable citizens depends on what neighbors and government agents would deem allowable at any particular point in time.

The latter is entirely incoherent when contextualized with the words the Second Amendment, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s the position that is broadly recognized as truth for most Americans.  Today, it’s just natural to assume that the federal government has the right to curtail gun ownership of this gun or that one among “peaceable citizens” if the federal government feels that some guns are too dangerous for law-abiding citizens to own. 

This is the progressives’ magic trick, and some Americans fall for it due to a simple deficiency in human nature.  For example, Chris Cuomo of CNN recently tweeted that “[t]here was no individual right” in the Second Amendment even “contemplated” until Antonin Scalia inferred the “individual right” in the Heller v. District of Columbia decision.

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How The Federal Government Nullified the Second Amendment to 'Ban' Automatic firearms

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Anti-Gun Laws Will Never Solve Gun Violence in America

Despite of what the left-wing media wants you to believe, there is not an epidemic of mass shootings, or an epidemic of gun violence in general, in the United States. The data make this clear.

In fact -- and again, in spite of what many in the media would have us believe -- by many accounts, mass shootings are not even on the rise. Definitions of what constitutes a “mass shooting” vary, but using “standard definitions,” a recent piece in The Conversation -- an academic and research journal -- declares that “Mass shootings aren’t growing more common.” 

In support of this conclusion, The Conversation article references data presented in USA Today:

Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, a leading expert with decades of experience on such matters, has long held that “There is no evidence that we are in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings.” This was true five years ago, as the graphic below, using Professor Fox’s data, reveals:

And it’s true today, as Fox recently revealed in a lengthy interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie: “There is no evidence that we are in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings.” Even the liberals at Politico agree. There, Grant Duwe, a research director for the Minnesota Department of Corrections and author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History, concludes that mass shootings are “roughly as common now as they were in the 1980s and ’90s.”

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Anti-Gun Laws Will Never Solve Gun Violence in America

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