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Randazza cites the Project Chanology incident in 2008 where a teenager was criminally summoned for holding a 'Scientology is a dangerous cult' sign, which sparked his focus on free speech.
Arthur Wood argues that insurers refusing to cover slave ships, not political debate, was a decisive factor in ending the slave trade.
Ada Palmer explains Italy’s instability during Machiavelli’s time stemmed from two factors: the fracturing of long-standing city-state governments, which created a domino effect of regime changes, and the papacy’s arbitrary military interventions.
The papacy’s non-hereditary succession and unpredictable papal elections, with an average reign of 10 years, meant each new pope could undo his predecessor’s work, creating unique instability within Italy.
Machiavelli’s personal admiration for Cesare Borgia is revealed when he breaks into first-person narration in The Prince, stating Borgia told him directly he had prepared for every contingency except his own incapacitation.
Machiavelli’s strategy for Florence against Borgia was to buy time through absolute loyalty and support, betraying allies like Bologna to convince Borgia to ‘eat Florence last.’
Palmer clarifies Machiavelli’s view on deception: lying is only viable if other conditions, like being terrifyingly effective like Borgia, are met. A charismatic but inconsistent figure like Savonarola lost power because his authority relied on perceived infallibility.
In Renaissance Italy, the Pope was both a distant spiritual authority and a proximate, corrupt temporal warlord. Factions like the Guelphs and Ghibellines had degenerated into hereditary feuds, sometimes leading cities to war against a pope from the opposing faction.
Renaissance justice aimed at the sinner’s spiritual correction through a process of fearing judgment and receiving mercy via a patron, mimicking divine judgment. Capital punishment was rare unless someone lacked patronage.
Cesare Borgia’s conquests were popular because his outsider regime implemented neutral justice, punishing crimes equally regardless of local factional allegiances, which citizens had never experienced.
Machiavelli defined liberty as living under a system with procedural justice, not under an arbitrary ruler who could order execution on a whim. This principle mattered deeply to Florentines.
Florence’s art and cultural spending served as a cheaper form of diplomacy than war, aiming to impress and pacify powerful neighbors like France, whom they could not militarily defeat.
The Renaissance view of progress was backward-looking; cutting-edge achievement meant imitating or surpassing classical Rome, not innovating toward an unknown future.
Renaissance Christianity accepted universal sinning followed by repentance, unlike later Puritan focus on purity. Saints like Julian the Hospitaller, patron of murderers, modeled redemption for grave crimes.
Machiavelli’s exile to a remote hamlet was a test of loyalty. He chose to stay and write The Prince as a proprietary job application for Florence, refusing lucrative offers from other courts due to extreme patriotism.
The Prince was intended as a bespoke manual for a single ruler, a common practice for scholars writing proprietary political technology. It was only published later by Machiavelli’s family to boost his and the Medici’s fame.
Machiavelli’s work gained relevance in the 17th century as a tool to refute Hobbes, and in the 19th century as a secular model for statecraft, aiding the development of separation of church and state.
Machiavelli saw religion’s psychological utility for state stability, as seen in Roman religion where honor from descendants sustained the soul. This utilitarian view parallels Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine.
Dowsing, using a forked stick to find water or minerals, has been practiced globally for millennia, with texts from 2000 BCE and cave paintings from 6000 BCE possibly depicting it.
Despite being debunked, dowsing maintained professional credibility; one in eight archaeology instructors in the 1980s were favorable to the practice.
French chemist Chevrouel conducted the first double-blind test on the ideomotor effect in 1808, proving pendulum analysis was unconscious movement, not a chemical property.
The spiritualism movement in the mid-19th century popularized table-turning and seances, which scientists like William Carpenter correctly attributed to the ideomotor effect.
Despite scientific debunking, loopholeism allowed brilliant minds like natural selection co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace to fall for spiritualist scams in 1865.
Robert Hare, a chemistry professor, was conned by fake mediums and built a 'spirit scope' device in 1855, believing he communicated with historical figures.
Clever Hans, a German horse in the early 1900s, appeared to solve math problems but was actually reading his owner's subtle cues, a phenomenon now called the Clever Hans effect.
Robert Evans links this history of gullibility to modern tech grifts, noting the defense industry later turned a fake golf ball finder, the Gopher, into a lethal bomb detector.
Annie Crabel details that Ronald Reagan's 1980s policies of free markets and boosted defense spending widened inequality and the budget deficit but rebounded economic growth, and his nuclear treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev hastened the Soviet Union's collapse.
Crabel notes the AIDS crisis beginning in 1981 was met with fear and misinformation; religious conservatives framed it as immoral, and Reagan only spoke out after his friend Rock Hudson's death, by which time tens of thousands had already died in America.
Bill Clinton's impeachment after lying about an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky marked a harsher political era, though The Economist's call for him to go was not fulfilled and he survived the trial.
Garage startups by Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin Larry Page in the 1970s-90s laid groundwork for the internet and tech boom, with Americans first realizing the web's business potential.