The Founders never intended for Indiana to be a state and yet here we are. https://t.co/zf2jbhy9x0
— Peter A. Shulman ?? (@pashulman) August 9, 2021
The Founders intended senators not to be directly elected — are you going to resign?
The Founders intended the Senate to be run on simple majorities — are you going to push to end the filibuster?
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 9, 2021
Wanna feel old? From the Washington Post:
… Ever since White House operatives broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate office in 1972, employing the suffix “-gate” has been an irresistible way to name a scandal. The Wikipedia page on “-gate” controversies lists more than 240, from the well-known — such as 1976’s Koreagate — to the lesser-known. I had somehow missed Ponytailgate, the scandal that erupted in 2015 when New Zealand Prime Minister John Key pulled a waitress’s hair…
Around the time of Ponytailgate, Amy Marquez was teaching a business presentations class at a university in the South, where her night school students ranged from recent high school graduates to at least one retiree. The semester’s last major assignment was a team presentation on a crisis that a business had made significantly better or worse because of the communication choices the company made.
One pair of students, both recently out of high school, gave their presentation on Antennagate, the controversy that erupted in 2010 when users of Apple’s iPhone 4 found that calls were being dropped. The cause? If the phone was gripped in a certain way, its antenna could be blocked, weakening the signal. (Another name for the problem was Gripgate.)…
… “They said that the word ‘antenna’ was obvious because the problem with the phone was related to the antennas. Then they said the ‘gate’ part of the word was referring to the shape a person’s hand made when they held a phone.”
Amy let them continue. When the presentation was over and it was time for questions, she asked whether they had found that particular definition for “gate” somewhere in their research. They told her they had.
After class, Amy pressed them on where they had they found that definition.
“At that point, they admitted they hadn’t seen the term defined anywhere and had just decided that was what it meant,” she wrote. “I asked if either of them had ever heard of ‘Watergate.’ Neither had. Which kind of made me want to cry.”…
“Both students were really irritated about this,” she wrote. “One asked me how they were supposed to know about things that happened before they were even born…
glc
That’s a poser … how are we supposed to know about things that happened before we were born.
If only there were some technology for that.
cain
If only there was a book where people put historical things that happened in it.
ETA: Yaazzzzzzzz
Another Scott
(via dick_nixon)
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
“Rudy who? Never heard of the guy. Was he my caddy once? Shine boy?”
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
?Don’t know much about history?…
Ruckus
@cain:
Or I don’t know, taken history in school, say at least some of the 12 yrs they supposedly gone to high school before they arrived at college.
Just Chuck
Bad that they don’t know about Watergate, but it’s still long past time to retire that stupid fucking -gate suffix.
Brachiator
My brothers and sister regularly talk about how much in the world has changed, especially in tech, and the sweep of history.
My sister’s kids have never written and mailed a personal letter. They grew up sitting in their mother’s lap while she used a computer. They played with a mouse as infants and grew up with touch screens.
I tell my nephew to keep a journal about the pandemic. If he later has kids they may ask them about this bit of ancient history they are studying in school.
I was in elementary school in Dallas when JFK was assassinated. I had never seen my teachers cry before.
I had a summer job proofreading the Los Angeles Times during some of the Watergate testimony. Later my friends and I sat in a bar laughing and reading a late afternoon special edition with the headline “Nixon Resigns.”
The first website was launched 30 years ago this month.
This was as revolutionary as the printing press, but how many people remember this? How many recognized the significance of what happened?
Ain’t history something?
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: Never ceases to amaze me how everyone – EVERYONE – who comes into Trump’s orbit never seem to notice the troublesome fact that he will waste no time abandoning them when they inevitably run into trouble on his behalf.
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
Rudy’s Schade brings me Freude.
anon
“She gave them a brief history of the Watergate scandal, explained how the “gate” suffix was a way to signify a major controversy and provided other examples: Iran-Contragate, Monicagate.”
LOL! no one calls it “Iran-Contragate”. It’s just Iran-Contra
Ivan X
Oh ffs. The kids were wrong for making shit up and lying about it, but I’m sure Watergate, the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and the rest of the epochal, history defining events of our gen get filed into the same part of their brain as the Great Depression and the Civil War and the Declaration of Independence and other old things that don’t feel immediately relevant to their lives. Language evolves, and we use all kinds of words whose origins we no longer know, despite the horror our ancestors might feel about that. Meanwhile, she got to do the very thing a teacher exists to do, which is catch them where they need catching and use the opportunity to make them better educated and show them the relevance of what they feel to be irrelevant.
Delk
Something that happened in the ‘70’s? They probably spent so much time in their American History class discussing how great the confederacy was that they never made it past the 1870’s.
dmsilev
@trollhattan: It was inevitable, but no less sweet to see.
Roger Moore
@Just Chuck:
Yes. Everything is supposed to end in “ghazi” instead.
billcinsd
The Founders never intended a standing Army, or an Air Force, so let’s disband the military
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I started using The Web in the very early days- the browser of choice when I started was NCSA Mosaic- and everyone around me recognized it as a huge change from anything we had seen before. It instantly became the main way people used the net. I don’t know that we expected where we are today, but we definitely understood it was going to turn the Internet into something non-geeks would be interested in and able to use.
Bobby Thomson
@Ivan X:
With all due respect, qu’est-ce que fuck? There’s no excuse for not knowing the basics of the Great Depression and the Civil War.
trollhattan
@billcinsd:
Hey man, we’re keeping Space Force. Because Space Force!
Also, Amendment 2 limited to muzzle-loading weaponry only. Well-regulated ones. And swords, because swords are cool.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Did you have a clear idea of the geek and non-geek?
Did you see yourself as a geek?
schrodingers_cat
OT: This happened in Delhi yesterday. There was a rally in the heart of Delhi replete with eliminationist rhetoric about Muslims.
A group of vigilantes circled a journalist covering the rally and trying to make him chant Jai Shri Ram (a slogan popularized by the BJP since the 90s)
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: Yep this was in the 90s when Mosaic and Silicon Graphics computers were the bomb.
Roger Moore
@anon:
In practice, calling something “X-gate” is a way of trying to make it sound more serious than it really is by associating it with Watergate. Really big scandals like Iran-Contra and Katrina don’t need to borrow seriousness from anywhere. Even Benghazi, which was a faux-scandal ginned up to discredit Hillary, managed to stand on its own. Tagging something as a “gate” is a tacit admission it needs to borrow gravitas to get attention.
Ken
@Delk: I have a friend who is a middle-school US history teacher, and he says it gets a little more difficult every year because there’s another year that should be covered, but the same number of days in the school year.
Zelma
One of my most rewarding teaching experiences was the 20th century world history course required of all students at my university. I taught it for almost 30 years and it was probably the one shot we had at providing future pharmacists, nurses, business people, etc. with some basic historical knowledge. The course sort of naturally broke in half at the end of World War II and I remember often remarking to my class that what was history to them was current events for me.
As you can imagine, the gap between my experiences and my students’ grew as the years passed. Perhaps the best indication was something that happened to my husband who also taught the course. While discussing the Russian Revolution, he noted that it was Lenin as in Vladimir rather than Lennon as in John. A student raised his hand and asked, “Who’s John Lennon?” It may have been shortly thereafter that my husband retired.
debbie
@trollhattan:
An American Tragedy. //
Served
I don’t think I ever made it to the 20th century in a history class in K-12. If we did it was a 2-week skipping stone of WW1->Roarin’ 20s-> Great Depression->WW2->MLK Jr fixes racism->Vietnam at the end of the year when everyone was already checked out and even then half of them were “taught” through movies. We spent weeks and weeks obsessing over every detail of the first colonists, but barely touched recent history.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I first used the Web on a Unix workstation at Caltech. Hell yes, I saw myself as a geek and absolutely outside the mainstream in terms of affinity for technology.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
The news I mainly saw was about the president of India congratulating the Olympians.
This is worrisome. Are the rallies instigated by the government or are they spontaneous?
You would think that with the pandemic still raging no one would have time for this bigotry.
James E Powell
Anyone who says “The Founders intended . . . ” has either never read or is ignoring what those guys said was important to them.
I haven’t seen evidence that the Founders intended that future generations would be forever bound by their understandings of the document they were drafting or the various things they wrote & said about it during the convention and ratification.
And why should we be bound by their intentions? It’s a ridiculous proposition.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: This was not in the MSM coverage. I am pretty sure that the Sangh is involved and the BJP has plausible deniability.
Citizen Alan
@anon: I’m hopeful that eventually Bill Gates will get embroiled in a big enough scandal for the media to start calling it Gatesgate. That or we have another scandal related to the Watergate Hotel and people call it Watergate-gate.
Another Scott
Interesting article on how Germany finances its elections, campaign limits, etc.
We don’t have to have the system we do in the USA…
German election: Party and campaign financing
https://p.dw.com/p/3ykTh
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
@James E Powell:
Well, ya’see, the people who believe that we should be slavishly devoted to “what the Framers intended” are also the people who weep bitter tears into their pillows every night over the fact that they can’t own slaves.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
Many “originalists,” including Supreme Court justices, often know little about American history. The Founders had to compromise in order to put together a country, but there was always debate and dissent, never some homogenized agreement about everything.
Brachiator
@Citizen Alan:
Wouldn’t that be Gates Squared?
How would you express that as a binary number?
citizen dave
@James E Powell: “And why should we be bound by their intentions? It’s a ridiculous proposition.”
Almost as ridiculous as my state sending a guy who looks like Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day to DC as our Senator (https://tinyurl.com/jnjzmu7f)
It’s like these guys try to outdo each other in the art of stupid [Ivy Leaguer (true!) Mike Braun]
gwangung
@James E Powell: This is the sort of ancestor worship that’d be the envy of traditional Daoists….
Just Chuck
@James E Powell: It’s kinda why they allowed it to be amended. And FFS, it’s not like they all agreed on the thing even after it was written
Mindless ancestor worship. And the mindlessness is the point.
mrmoshpotato
The Washington Post is referencing Wiki-fucking-pedia!?! Surely they have archives, no?
You lazy assholes!
And WHERE THE FUCK IS CONSENSUAL COCK-SUCKING-GATE IN YOUR REPORTING?
Brachiator
I have been watching some YouTube clips of young adults reacting to classic films.
When I was a college student attending film society screenings and going to art house cinemas, classic films were late 30s and 40s movies like “Holiday” and “The Maltese Falcon” and “Bride of Frankenstein.” This was a time distance of about 30 years.
So, 30 years from today would be 1990/91. Top films included Rocky V, Dick Tracy, Die Hard 2, Home Alone, Ernest Goes to Jail, Ghost, The Hunt for Red October, Dances With Wolves, Pretty Woman, Goodfellas. Oscar Best Picture of 1990 was Driving Miss Daisy. For 1991 it was Dances With Wolves.
I had friends who would not watch silent movies. I know people today who avoid black and white films and who think that the pace of films made prior to 1990 is so slow that they are unwatchable.
RSA
@Brachiator:
Berners-Lee was given the Turing Award in 2017, but I suppose no one remembers Nobel Prize winners either.
I wrote a popular science book once about computing concepts. I won’t claim that it was good, but I did try to explain why certain ideas were important, independent of technology, implementation, or application. It tended to be shelved with Computers for Dummies and other such books, though. It’s a funny thing—even educated people tend to think of computer science as information technology or even just “tech”.
emmyelle
“One asked me how they were supposed to know about things that happened before they were even born…”
I gotta say, “old” is far, far behind the other things I felt when I read that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Once on the Bill Maher show, long before trump, Meghan McCain (John McCain’s daughter, coincidentally) was doing the high-volume, aggressive whining she thinks is bravely and sarmtly defending Republicans and she dismissed the “Southern Strategy” as something that didn’t matter because it happened before she was born. Paul Begala said, well I wasn’t born during the Civil War but as an American feel like it’s pretty important to know what happened and why.
She was alive when her father voted against a national holiday honoring MLK Jr
Poe Larity
Should we expect everyone at BJ to remember Mustardgate?
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
Fools.
Poe Larity
@Brachiator: Showed a young one Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia and at the end he said “So, it’s like all those great movies but really old.”
Yes, weedhoppa
Brachiator
@RSA:
And who was Turing and what did that Nobel guy do to make the money for his prizes.
I kid.
What was the book? Interesting notion, but aren’t some ideas important because of the innovations or discoveries that have a tangible impact on the world and the lives of people?
Danielx
The Founders were also okay with slavery, Senator, if I recall correctly…
mrmoshpotato
@Poe Larity:
I need to rewatch that.
Ivan X
@Bobby Thomson: I didn’t say there’s not an excuse for it. I’m just saying they’re kids, and as such might not give them the gravity we feel they deserve. But I probably chose those examples poorly to make my point, since, in the grand scheme of our history, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars are among the very, very most important events. Watergate is certainly also important, but not quite at that level.
Flanders Other Neighbor
My about to be a senior HS student knows a bit about Watergate, but not all the details. She feels these kids should not have asked that question, but also that it’s not their fault they haven’t been as well educated as they should have been.
She agreed that a US senator should at least have people smart enough around him to stop him from getting dunked on like Braun, even if he’s a dope. Like Braun.
Anon
@Citizen Alan: gatesgate was when Henry Louis gates got arrested for breaking into his own house, Obama commented on it during his health care presser and we had the beer summit
RSA
@Brachiator:
Oh yes, you’re right about that. I’d thought there would be a market for the science of computing as well, but either it wasn’t there or I wasn’t able to tap into it.
Recall Edsger Dijkstra: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” That is, in this context, there’s a rich store of books aimed at non-experts on astronomy but relatively few about how to use telescopes; the situation is reversed for computer science and how to use computers.
The book was Computing for Ordinary Mortals, published by the trade arm of Oxford University Press. That may also reflect poor marketing skills on my part. :-)
Brachiator
@RSA:
Ah. OK. Makes sense.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Miss Bianca: It really is his darkest evil superpower, isn’t it?
Bonnie
When I was in high school (so many years ago), our history classes never even got to what would be considered a modern era of the FDR administration. However, we also had to take a class called “Civics”, which taught us how to be good citizens of the United States. I graduated from high school in 1963. Ouch! Now, I suspect that history classes in high school still do not get past the FDR era; and, they don’t have Civics classes any more. Boy, are the young people missing so much in education today. They should start with Watergate and, maybe, go backwards in history. In fact, one of the coolest thing I learned from my Civics teacher was the term, “the epitome of asininity.” I have seen numerous such actions by Americans since then; and, just shake my head and thank Mr. Whitney for his great teaching.
dopey-o
Lynx was the original browser. Text only, no inline graphics. The first time I got NCSA Mosiac to connect, my jaw dropped and Dog said “Behold the Future!” And so it was.
Just Chuck
@dopey-o: The original browser was text mode, but it was just called “www”. Lynx came much later and with many more features.
RSA
@Just Chuck:
Is that true? Here’s Tim Berners-Lee:
It was graphical.
Matt McIrvin
@RSA: Berners-Lee’s browser was graphical in the sense that it ran in the NeXT user interface (NeXT’s OS was actually the ancestor of today’s Mac OS, imported into Apple when they hired back Steve Jobs). It could display images if you linked to them.
On the other hand, it didn’t have the IMG tag to embed inline images directly into hypertext–that was NCSA Mosaic’s innovation, and I think that was what really made the Web interesting to non-geeks. Berners-Lee didn’t like IMG because it didn’t fit his idea of logically separating content from presentation, but it won out.
The www line-mode browser came second after the NeXT WorldWideWeb, I think. CERN had a public telnet site you could log into that just ran the line-mode browser to show it off, and that was how I first encountered the Web, I think sometime in late 1992. I’d been directed there by Ed Krol’s O’Reilly book “The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog”.
Several months later in ’93 my fellow grad students started getting excited about NCSA Mosaic, which you could run on the campus mainframes using the X terminals, and that was when things really took off.
burnt
Ahh, nothing better to make one feel old than to be reminded of the days when most web sites were links to gopher servers, and veronica, jughead, and archie were useful utilities.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Roger Moore: hughhewittgate.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Poe Larity: is that related to arugulagate
Viva BrisVegas
@Brachiator: There is always time for bigotry.
It may not be connected to the India outbursts, but Pakistan has been undergoing pogroms against hindus recently due to an 8 year old hindu boy who apparently urinated in a madrassas. The boy is currently in jail on blasphemy charges.
Splitting Image
@Roger Moore:
I was going to say that it tends to be Democratic scandals which get the -gate suffix, usually because the Republicans are eager to compare the scandal du jour with Watergate and the bobbleheads are eager to make a false equivalence.
Thinking about it, this is exactly what you were saying here in slightly different words.
Brachiator
@Viva BrisVegas:
Some background from the Guardian:
An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country.
The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest….
The boy is accused of intentionally urinating on a carpet in the library of a madrassa, where religious books were kept, last month. Blasphemy charges can carry the death penalty….
Speaking from an undisclosed location, a member of the boy’s family told the Guardian: “He [the boy] is not even aware of such blasphemy issues and he has been falsely indulged in these matters. He still doesn’t understand what his crime was and why he was kept in jail for a week….
Blasphemy charges filed against a child have shocked legal experts, who say the move is unprecedented. No one this young has ever been charged with blasphemy before in Pakistan.
Blasphemy laws have been disproportionately used in the past against religious minorities in Pakistan. Although no blasphemy executions have been carried out in the country since the death penalty was introduced for the crime in 1986, suspects are often attacked and sometimes killed by mobs….
Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, condemned the mob attack on Twitter and said he has ordered the provincial police chief to take action against anyone involved, including negligent police officers. He promised the government would restore the temple.
In New Delhi, India’s external affairs ministry summoned a Pakistani diplomat to protest the attack and demand the safety of Hindu families living in Muslim-majority Pakistan.
In December last year, a large violent mob of conservative Muslims demolished a century old Hindu temple in the north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
According to a report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedoms, published last year, Pakistan reported the highest number of incidents of mob activity, mob violence, and/or threats of mob violence as a result of alleged blasphemous acts.
** please excuse formatting issues, posting from phone. Also, I think the Hindu population of Pakistan is 2 to 4 percent. There are around 207 million Muslim citizens in India, around 11 percent of the population.
Citizen Alan
@Anon: Oh God, I forgot all about that! What a simpler time that was, when a President could point out that a stupid cop was acting stupidly and it could become an international incident.
The thing that pissed me off the most about Gatesgate was this: the ONLY reason Obama was even asked about that incident was because he was black. You think President John McCain would have been asked during a presidential press conference about a black Harvard law professor getting arrested in front of his own home? Hell, who here thinks the MSM would have EVER asked Pres. McCain about Trayvon Martin?
Llelldorin
@Bonnie: What kids today learn is hugely a function of where they are. California, for example, requires a semester of Civics as a high-school graduation requirement, and requires that 11th grade history reach at least the fall of the USSR. There are at least 49 other sets of requirements, though, so I can’t speak for everyone everywhere!
Central Planning
@Matt McIrvin:
when I was working on my Masters project in ‘93 or ‘94, I brought my wife over to the lab one night to show her Mosaic. She didn’t quite get it at the time, but I knew that was going to change the world.
also, like RSA @54, my marketing skills sucked. I should be a billionaire based on that project, but the school didn’t teach any entrepreneurship classes so I didn’t know any better.
Uncle Cosmo
@mrmoshpotato: I was a master’s student at UMBC when that flick came out, and The Retriever (the campus newsrag) published the following review, which I quote in its entirety:
YMMV.
Uncle Cosmo
@Brachiator: According to the World Population Review, India has the 3rd largest number of Muslims in the world by nation, after Indonesia and Pakistan and just above Bangladesh.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
Nothing is as important to fascists as getting their hate on. More important that getting vaccinated, more important than getting an education in actual facts and real history.
Nothing is more important than hate to a fascist.
Thanks, Schrodinger’s Cat for keeping up posted on real events in your homeland, I know it is depressing as all hell. The daily news here is pretty depressing also, but we learn about it anyway.
glc
A colleague showed me lynx. I said “That’s not it.”
A year later he showed me Mosaic. I said “That’s it.”
Not that I had any concrete idea what “it” was until it came along.
(As background, there’s an old Milton Berle joke about a soldier picking up random pieces of paper, saying “That’s not it” and throwing them away. When he gets his psychological discharge he picks it up and says “That’s it!”)
cain
@Citizen Alan:
They might just call it Bill Gate
cain
@Central Planning:
I was in college same time as you and yes I also remember Mosaic and then eventually Netscape Navigator which was truly amazing.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
A co-worker, circa 1987, came to me with tears in her eyes because some kid she was talking to didn’t know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.
Another, circa 1998, said it was time for him to retire when a kid wanted to know about the “old days”, meaning the Reagan years.
SteverinoCT
@Served:
If you’re not up to speed on the XYZ affair… actually, a lot of that history has (gasp!) repeated itself. Jefferson, I recently learned, was playing footsie with the French, a lá TFG/Russkies. Go figure.
RSA
@Matt McIrvin: Cool, thanks for the details (assuming you ever see this).