ACTUAL REPORTING AT INSTAPUNDIT: Yeah, it happens now and then. I finally managed to speak with Tom Boyer of the San Francisco area Pink Pistols, who was at the NRA Convention, though he didn’t actually attend the speeches reported in this PlanetOut article by Steve Friess. But, he said, “I think it [the article] was probably accurate.” Boyer said that Friess was unfamiliar with the Rosie O’Donnell / Tom Selleck on-air confrontation over gun control, and probably just couldn’t grasp the depth of hostility against O’Donnell among gun owners, which has more to do with her position on gun control than anything else. He also said that “in my own experience with the NRA I’ve had nothing but support,” and that many NRA officials had offered to help the Pink Pistols in any way they can.

On the other hand, Boyer said that there were homophobic remarks made by individual members around Friess that Friess didn’t report, because he didn’t think it was fair to saddle the organization with the views of a few random members out of the 40,000 attending — but that speeches are a different matter. He’s right about this and — subject to the fact that one of the speakers, Debbie Schlussel, has denied that she said anything anti-gay — the remarks are a real problem for the organization.

As far as I’m concerned, no organization ought to have speakers making nasty anti-gay remarks at its annual meeting, and the NRA needs to get the word out to its speakers. Those who want to make such remarks should be invited to go elsewhere, and those who honestly don’t realize that certain remarks are offensive need to learn a bit more. Boyer says that he thinks the NRA is responding to this pretty well, and is trying to address this sort of thing in the future. They’d better, because the NRA has a big enough image problem as it is, and a lot of gun-rights supporters are libertarian types who have no sympathy for anti-gay slurs — or simply people with good manners who have no sympathy for slurs of that sort anyway. (On the other hand, though I’m okay with gay marriage and gay adoption, I think that opposing those isn’t, in itself, a “slur” — but it’s not really part of the NRA’s mission either, now is it?)

My conversation with Boyer, which ran over a half an hour, gave me a pretty nuanced view of an organization trying to deal with a real culture clash (or maybe mutual cultural ignorance would be a better description), with mixed results. It’s a lot more nuanced view than I got from Friess’s report, but of course he didn’t have half an hour, he had something like 800 words. I hope that the NRA leadership will have a lot of similar conversations in the near future.

UPDATE: A reader says that Grover Norquist is big on getting gays involved in the Republican Party, and suggests that his remarks contrasting “Gay Pride” parades with the absence of “Gun Pride” parades were probably meant to hold the former up as a positive example to emulate.

EUGENE VOLOKH has posted an interesting piece on terrorism and the middle east by Robert Turner, of the center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia Law School.

MEDIA ETHICS: Oxymoron? Or just moron? Matt Welch reports — you decide.

As with professional ethicists in most areas, media ethicists exist to pretend to do what competition would actually do if it were allowed to exist.

READER JEFF HUMMER WRITES:

I received my Instapundit hat in the mail yesterday, and boy do I look good
in it! I’ve already had to flee from a horde of beautiful women. Thanks for the style!

Coming soon: An all-new InstaPundit Store with a snazzy, James Lileks-designed InstaPundit Logo! Hold on to your, er, hats!

BELLESILES UPDATE: Military historian Kevin Hurst writes:

I am a historian employed by the Navy at the Naval Historical Center and I have been slavishly following the Bellesiles controversy for nearly two years. Bellesiles, and his defenders, are fond of pointing out that the probate records represent only a small fraction of Arming America. I guess I forgot the part in Grad school where they said it was OK to make things up as long as most of your footnotes are accurate. Regardless, Bellesiles’ errors and misrepresentations extend into every area of his book where I feel qualified to pass judgement, particularly military history and weaponry. For instance, he strongly implies that bayonets were much more effective than muskets on the battlefield of the late 18th century, a ridiculous notion, and misleading[ly] refers to the Paoli Massacre as a battle to confuse ignorant readers on this point. (At Paoli, the British suprised Anthony Wayne’s troops in the middle of the night and used bayonets to avoid alerting the Americans before they entered the camp) Given that he also sees bows as vastly superior to muskets, one is left to ponder why the musket and bayonet ever superceded archery and the pike? One could go on for quite some time with regard to Bellesiles’ apparent ignorance of military history.

Unfortunately, few of the academic reviewers of the book were even minimally competent to discuss military history, so they accepted his version at face value. Most of the reviewers I read took Bellesiles to task for mistakes he committed in their respective areas of expertise. However, all seemed to think these mistakes isolated incidents in an otherwise persuasive book. I think Bellesiles correctly judged that academics loathe military and diplomatic history by and large and that he could get away with almost anything he said in that area (“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”). The probate records ended up tripping him up because they could not be spun as a “difference of interpretation” as Knopf is fond of saying about the controversy. In any case, no one can say that the book is solid if the probate records are ignored. Bellesiles brings the same level of mendacity to his discussions of military topics in the book.

SLATE has picked up on the Reason / Corner feud. Say, you don’t think this whole thing was just a publicity stunt, do you? Naah, couldn’t be.

H.D. MILLER says the Saudis are going nowhere. You can say that again! — but that isn’t what he means

READER RICHARD ROARK isn’t persuaded by James Taranto’s anti-cloning post today:

Maybe being raised on a literary diet of R. A. Heinlein results in different thought patterns, BUT I thought incest was taboo because of the heightened possibility of birthing defectives and Royal Families.

Also, the ranting that a clone would be a carbon copy discredits human intelligence, freewill and everything we’ve been led to believe about environmental influences on human development. Genetic copies would be unlikely to develop in exactly the same way. Or do we now believe in genetic predetermination? If so, maybe the eugenics crowd were right and society could use some pruning by not letting genes for (name your favorite pet peeve) be passed along. Oh ! I forgot we shouldn’t do the research to identify those genes.

To counter the meeting of a man with his younger cloned wife may I suggest that James Taranto contact his local PBS station and get them to replay “The Cloning
of Joanna May”.

ANOTHER FUKUYAMA RESPONSE, from Dan Hanson.

LETTER FROM GOTHAM says there are no 1967 borders.

THE UNITED STATES: Secret colony of Australia, with help from Canadian fifth-columnists.

FUKUYAMA, YO MAMA! Well, James Taranto doesn’t actually say that, but there’s a response to “Libertarian Blogvillians” (a term I kind of like) in today’s Best of the Web. I’m not, to put it mildly, persuaded by Taranto’s cloning/incest equivalence, but like everything he writes it’s thoughtful and well-written.

QUESTION: Why doesn’t Reason just start a group blog of its own? (Charles Oliver’s Brickbats gets them halfway there anyway). They’ve got plenty of interesting people, and interesting things to say.

SPIKED! The Stanford Law Review pulled articles giving the wrong side from a gay rights symposium issue, according to this report from Stanley Kurtz. I likely disagree with the spiked articles and agree with the ones they kept in — I’m pretty pro-gay-rights, as InstaPundit readers know — but that’s no excuse. This is just plain tacky behavior, and has the effect of making what’s left of the issue less credible.

UPDATE: A several readers write to say that it’s the Stanford Law & Policy Review, not the Stanford Law Review that’s involved. That’s a different journal. Reader Marty Lederman adds: “Don’t know whether the behavior was “tacky” or not — what if the anti-gay articles were miserably bad and/or horrifyingly hostile and bigoted? (Not saying they were — I haven’t read them; but if they were, what would be wrong with spiking them?).” Well, nothing. Though presumably they were solicited by the review in question (which is how symposium issues work) meaning that such is rather unlikely. And how likely is it that all such articles would just happen to be miserably bad or horrifyingly bigoted?

CHRIS SUELLENTROP offers a surprisingly positive assessment of Crown Prince Abdullah in Slate.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s an interesting discussion thread on H-Net, a historians’ email list. Bellesiles, consistent with his agenda of showing that only the government, and professional soldiers, were possessed of, and competent in the use of guns, frequently dismisses the Revolutionary militias as ineffective. In this post Bellesiles is taken to task at great length for misrepresenting the Battle of Cowpens, where revolutionary militias defeated the British. (Note the British letter quoted at the very end). Another post by the same author suggests that Bellesiles misrepresents the effectiveness of the militia more generally.

A Bellesiles defender responds here to the effect that Bellesiles’ views on the militia may be biased but are consistent with other sources, but this reply indicates that those “other sources” are rather old and have been discredited by more recent work that Bellesiles (and his defender) ignore.

Particularly interesting in the last item are links to the US Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army’s Center for Military History, whose studies support the effectiveness of the militia. (This is all the more impressive because for over a century professional military men had a policy of deriding the effectiveness of the militia, and of citizen-soldiers generally). Academic historians — like academics specializing in international law — often forget that they do not have a monopoly on the field, and that an awful lot of expertise resides elsewhere. I suspect that there are more accomplished scholars of military history, and working lawyers in the field of international law, than there are academic experts at the top 50 research universities. I’ve met some of these people, and they’re pretty damned smart.

Most university people are smart, but most smart people aren’t at universities.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Andrew Sullivan has something nice to say about John Derbyshire!

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN PROUD OF OUR ARMED FORCES, but this article shows their superlative performance in a whole new light.

MORE BAD NEWS FROM ALGERIA:

“From boxes to boxes” is the chilling slogan of a fundamentalist Algerian underground organization known as the Armed Islamic Group that has stepped up its attacks against civilians recently to discourage people from voting in the May 30 general elections.

Their graphically conveyed message is: Anyone who is tempted to drop a vote in the electoral boxes is likely to end up in another kind of box — a coffin.

GOD HAS A MIDDLE EAST PEACE PLAN of his own.

OKAY, nobody from the Pink Pistols who was at the NRA conference has answered my call. I’m still trying to scare someone up and get their version, since the PlanetOut piece I referenced earlier seemed to be trying pretty hard to gin up a scandal. I did get this email, though, from a reader who asks to remain anonymous but who I know and regard as entirely credible:

A few months ago I founded a chapter of Pink Pistols in San Francisco, of all places. This led to an appearance on the BBC tv show “That Gay Show” (we taught their spokesguy how to shoot – and here’s a direct quote when he fired my Taurus PT145 for the first time [into the ten ring, I might add]: “Cut! (stop cameras) Holy…fucking…shit!!!” I think we made a convert…) as well as a meeting with Carol Migden, the local (lesbian) state rep for SF district, and other interesting conflations – including a *lot* of interaction with the local NRA chapter.

I must confess to initial trepidation. I mean, the NRA? But I was wrong. What a great bunch of people. They were far, *far* more interested in how people felt about RKBA than what they did with each other in bed. Several of the local officers told me how glad they were to see PP get started, because they’d been trying gay outreach for years with no luck.

Even the (extremely) straight guys who own and run our only local urban shooting range not only were tolerant, they were positively welcoming, and even offered us a place to hold our meeting before our monthly shoots, rent free.

As things stand now, I’d quicker turn to the NRA for help in a pinch than I would to the local gay establishment here. Yes, I imagine there are troglodytes here and there in the NRA (as anywhere) but I can’t stand Rosie either, the fat freakazoid. So does that make me anti-gay too?

I think after decades in the wilderness, the NRA people may have more sympathy for “outsiders” than most people realize. Their issue is guns — and that is going to have more to do with how they view people than almost anything else. Or so it seems to me.

Well, that doesn’t specifically answer the question of what Debbie Schlussel, etc., said at the NRA Convention, but I suspect that it’s at least as representative.

THE MIDDLE EAST: More like Monty Python every day.

REASON HAS POSTED THIS “PARODY” OF THE CORNER by Tim Cavanaugh. I don’t think it’s funny — just kind of mean and lame. It’s not Mad Magazine-level parody, which is what it’s shooting for. I don’t think it’s even Cracked-level parody. Cavanaugh wrote a pretty good piece on “message” pictures in this month’s Reason, but I find that his efforts to be humorous just come across as , well, mean and lame. I’m kind of surprised that Reason went with this.

UPDATE: But The American Prospect’s “Tapped” likes it.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY — AND YOUR ALLY: Reader Gloria Chase writes:

This is a page of pictures from the lame UC Berkeley pro-Palestine rally. If you go down to the bottom you’ll see a group called QUIT: Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism. Then check below in the comments area. A fellow named Sallah has written: “As a Palestinian, I must protest the inclusion of a homosexual group in this afternoon’s rally. Gay people have no place in society, whether in Palestine or in the US.”

The Left sure is mixed up these days.

Isn’t it, though? Salah’s response to some critical comments is this: “We are fighting for self-determination. That means that we wish to live according to our own societal values, not your Western ones. You are a cultural imperialist. I appreciate your concern for our struggle, but WE will decide for ourselves.” That reminds me of this quote, from some French Communist or other (this is from memory): “When you are in power, you give me freedom because that is according to your principles. When I am in power, I will take away your freedom, because that is according to my principles.”

CLONING, DRUGS, LIBERTARIANS, AND FOXY BROWN: All on Stephen Green’s page this morning.