I Grow Tired of These Arguments

John Slezosky is a teacher, and being a teacher he should realize that the collective rights interpretation of the Second Amendment has been so thoroughly discredited that not even a single justice signed onto the idea. I’ve gotten to the point with a lot of these people that I just want to say, “Go out and read the scholarship in this area, and then we can have the basis for an intelligent conversation.” I’m not even sure what point the author is trying to make here.

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7 thoughts on “I Grow Tired of These Arguments”

  1. They’re ‘true believers’. They really have no idea what they’re talking about, have gotten a bunch of ancient talking points from anti-gun groups and think their ideas are ‘groundbreaking’, not knowing anything about the last 10 years of litigation/debate. Then throw in some argument by authority, ad homs and false dichotomies and you have the default argument.

  3. Everyone’s argument becomes valid to them, as long as it supports their position.

    It doesn’t even have to be deliberate; by its utility for supporting ones position, it becomes true. That of course is an obvious logical fallacy, but the human brain runs on logical disconnects, for the most part.

    This is very related to the “Big Lie” approach. Many things are true simply because they have been repeated often and long enough. Any facts that contradict their truth, just cannot be facts. That includes SCOTUS decisions and any number of other objective facts. That you and your subculture agree that it is true makes it literally impossible for your mind to accept that it is not true. Orwell addressed that in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and in many of his non-fiction essays that contributed ideas to that novel.

  4. What makes you think that public education has any relation to facts, truth, or knowledge? That’s an odd notion. Indeed, it is probably racist/sexist/hateful to even suggest that teachers have an obligation to know and teach the facts of their subject.

    1. Teachers are in fact quite normal people, meaning most of them teach what “everybody knows,” i.e., the conventional wisdom. And as I alluded to above, being normal, they will not challenge the conventional wisdom even if they stumble over inconvenient facts that challenge that wisdom. In short, they teach what they believe to be true.

      But, having been married to a teacher for 43 years, so far, I can assure you they do not meet in covens and plot how to teach falsehoods. Anecdotally, my wife for a time taught fifth grade American History, and when I read the curriculum and the materials I was astounded at how much better and richer it was than the dopey pablum that had been taught us, fifty years earlier, even in high school. For example, it contained extensive material on the constitutional debates and about the writings of both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, presented in a way that would leave even a kid to his or her own conclusions. Much of it was material I had not known of myself, until several years after I had completed my own proverbial “twenty years of schoolin’,” and started reading on my own. And, it was an arch-“liberal” high school teacher — not me — who first steered my son into reading Ayn Rand, saying he knew he would appreciate her way of thinking. My son later won a statewide writing competition — judged by teachers — for an essay he wrote, inspired by those materials.

      1. Yep, I work in a school district. They are liberal for the most part, but there is no conspiracy, any more than there is a media conspiracy. Its just that they all believe the same thing in both cases, so it affects their job and what they communicate.

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