Some corrections from our sister blog's latest posts:

Good evening, y'all. My friend and (occasionally romantic) partner, Van Harvey, is having some malfunctions with his Blogger account -- only certain, irrelevant comments seem to be posting -- and he has asked me to create this post on the sister blog, Blergodictate (you'll obviously notice the similarities) to correct some of the misinformation in the previous posts, mostly related to Rousseau, who has proven very difficult for Van for fully understand. Van regrets his inability to lock in and get this right in previous posts, and has hoped this will clear up some of the misdirection of his recent tirades. I'll post these simply as a list of corrections to the previous post:

#1: Van would first like to clarify that he did not, in fact, "boot the troll with glee," but instead wrote a 7,365-word response to the trollings, in fact "trolling" the troll right back. He apologizes for misrepresenting the troll as more obsessive or for "spazzing" out -- a hurtful, insensitive term he regrets using -- when clearly he is at least equally, but arguably more, obsessive than the troll. 7,365 words? He realizes now how SAD that truly is:

"but what I think is really weird, is that a drama professor who dislikes me, my way of thinking, and my blogging about that, would give even a second thought to me or my blog... let alone engage in sustaining a manic spate of submitting such 'thoughts' as he/him has, to me. Sad, sad, sad."

Somehow, Van actually typed that out and it never clicked until now how sad it was that he would even give a second thought to the troll's comments, let alone engaging in sustaining a manic spate of writing 8,000-word blog posts and continuing to comment about a drama professor, his way of thinking, and his commenting about that, who he dislikes. Sad, sad, sad. He's trying to delete the post, but technical difficulties abound. Until then, here are some further corrections:

#2: You'll notice in reading the comments Van linked that the troll never actually said any of those three things. Misrepresentation has been the name of Van's game. Something he's slowly correcting in the form of this sister blog. Instead, the first comment ACTUALLY asked Van which of the pieces of advice in the linked document (which Van shared as proof of "insurrectionist activity") counted as the so-called "insurrectionist activity." Note that the document gave advice such as: "Commute behind at a safe distance do not try to interfere or block them." Van never responded to that question, instead highlighting actions which went against these official recommendations (he does this a lot). Yet, still, Van argued these protests were worse than the incited insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which has been proven to have been preplanned and orchestrated by various groups, with the intention of stopping the due process of law. Van has since realized the errors of his ways. Clearly, the insurrectionist activity of the now-punished January 6 rioters was way worse in scope and effect than some anti-ICE demonstrations.

#3: Van, too, regrets to irony of calling someone "unaware" when he, too, has practiced such a distinct lack of awareness. 7,365 words, and an untold amount of "shallowshadough"/"Asstro"/"twit"/"wacademic"/"Marxist idealogue" insults have rightfully earned Van a lack of respect, and he knows it. What does this say about his "angry chip?""

#4: "but as I had no interest in or intention of engaging with someone who'd demonstrated how willing they were to mis-state, misrepresent, and outright lie" -- this is an outright lie that Van regrets, as he, too, admits he has spent years misrepresenting and misstating most things on this blog.

#5: "My dear shallowAsstro shadow, I'm not repeating the he/him pronoun "joke" just because I think it's amusing how defensive you are over what you attempt to identify as, I'm repeating it because including Trans-Friendly pronouns in your bio - especially as a teacher of other people's kids - is a sign of an understanding of identity that is based upon ideological appearances, and indicates an unbalanced mind in an unreasonable person."

This one's a doozy of a correction. Unfortunately, Van was told years ago (and now numerous times) that the troll had no control over his UW profile. It is, after all, an institutional website, managed by a Webmaster. Van was told the institution put pronouns in everyone's profiles, again multiple times, and yet he has still lofted this as proof of the troll's "unbalanced mind and unreasonable" nature. What does it say about the mind and reason of a person who continues to misunderstand and misrepresent this truth? Van regrets this mistake and has vowed to get his mind and reason rechecked. He also regrets acting in such an anti-liberal way. Trans identity is found not in "ideological appearances" -- after all, many trans folks don't even attempt to "pass" -- it's based in an individual's liberal right to know themself and for us to respect it. Anything less would be, I dunno, dictation? That's why Van has chosen this new title. He realized he hasn't been "aiming for any education." He made up his mind and now he's trying to convert everyone who disagrees with him. That's not exactly liberal, so Van had to coin a new label that doesn't make any sense. He's working on it.

UPDATE 5/28/26 6:40 PM: Confirmed: After being reminded of the truth, Van continues using the insult in an attempt to debase the troll, despite knowing it has absolutely no effect or basis in truth. Confirmed: Van does not digest new information or care about reflecting reality. UPDATE 5/28/26 10:20 PM: Van apologizes but is not sorry, says you'd be smart not to argue with him about any of this.

#6: "And seriously, when someone advertises the unbalanced nature of their worldview, it should be noted and pointed out, especially as the views you regularly espouse are even more extreme than the 'manifesto' of your fellow he/him teacher that shot up the Washington Correspondents' Dinner." Well, this is straight libel, and Van has tried to get it removed -- again, please forgive the technical difficulties. Van regularly accuses the troll of being a communist, and he likes to button many of his arguments with this supposed mic-drop about communism killing millions of people. This, too, comes from a misunderstanding -- again, Van promises to get his mind and reason rechecked. The troll told him years and years ago (around the same time as the pronoun revelation, which Van has similarly mistakenly latched onto) that he was a Marxist scholar -- insofar as he employs Marxist methodologies in his scholarship: he looks at the material realities of the production of various texts/performances. Van regrets his error of jumping to misinformed conclusions and treating the troll like a communist, especially considering he's a scholar of liberalism and has written even more than the length of this blog post about redeeming and properly employing liberal tenets in American society. This is the first of two times Van has implied the troll is communist in this post. The second is when he claims the troll would say "communism will work with time" later on. Van, though, claims since he never directly called the troll a communist (see comments) that he doesn't actually think the troll is a communist. Van thus regrets all the many implications and is working to remove the libelous claim that this troll is more dangerous than an attempted murderer. Actually, that reminds me. Van has threatened to kill the troll many times in person and via mail (some of which contained dangerous chemicals, and all of which contained crude drawings).

#7: "Still more amusing is how aggravating it has apparently been to he/him that naming of their Blogger account after an 'Astro' van in honor of my first name, failed to get under my skin. I didn't think it was even worth half an eyebrow raise, but my use of 'asstro' and lack of acknowledgement of its van'ness, irritated our shallow shadow of a he/him..."

Van now realizes that everything about the troll's actions is meant to be low-effort as commentary on the level of respect and effort this blog deserves. He also apologizes for his rude names for the troll. You know, the thing he opened this post complaining about?

#8: Van is from Van Nuys. That explains a lot. He reeks of unchallenged suburban entitlement. He apologizes.

#9: You don't need to read this next section. Van just realized the tongue-in-cheek nature of the troll's account and explores the concept at length here. He does, though, apologize for making claims about the troll's he/him identity when he was the one to first comment on looks. He also apologizes for including trans-friendly language (gender) in his profile. He wants to assure his reader that he does actually hate trans folks and will remove this trans-friendly language ASAP.

#10: "I was and still am quite pleased with having caught a pic of my wife adjusting the light behind my head in my office, and I have no interest in, and can see no reason for, updating it." Unfortunately, Van's wife has been terrified of him for several years, so he has to cling to this. Please excuse him for the nostalgia.

#11: "I'll grant you, a he/him might find it weird that someone might find enjoyment in their wife, their office, and the books they've gathered over the course of a lifetime..." Van has since realized that the original note wasn't chastising him for reading or for having a wife, but rather for presenting himself as something learned and educating when he clearly isn't. 

2,000 words in and this is already boring. How do you do it, Van? You must have one hell of an angry chip to power through. I'm gonna take a break.

#12: In this following section, Van responds to a comment sent to him by the troll, but without ever addressing the primary point (perhaps because he wanted to cover something up initially). But he has asked me to complete the narrative a bit here. He quotes a couple sections of the criticism, but notably jumps over the primary point, which I'll cite in full here. I wonder why Van didn't in the first place?:

"Here's what you say almost immediately: 'A friend asked me -- I had been spouting off about, oh, this person said that and that's the way it is, and obviously you're foolish for not believing me. He was smart enough not to argue with me, but he did ask me a couple questions.' The SECOND thing you say on that podcast is that you didn't know what you were talking about in your younger days, but you STILL assumed you were right when confronted with new information -- and you STILL TO THIS DAY act more-informed than the person who CHANGED YOUR WAY OF THINKING. You're so conceited that you always think you know everything, so you're invulnerable to new information, new knowledge, new ways of thinking."

This small interaction has encapsulated Van's errors better than anything else he's ever stated, and he hopes it can shed some light on the rest of the sister blog. Van explains in the story that a good friend of his made him realize one moment that everything he used to think was right actually wasn't. Yet, of that very same moment, Van recalls his friend was "smart enough not to argue with me." This strongly implies that Van feels he would have won the argument in this moment, does it not? Or perhaps it suggests some other sort of self-imposed superiority? Both? Regardless, Van has realized that his comment here makes plain his biggest flaw: Van always thinks he's right (or that he'll win the argument), even when he knows he's wrong. He said as much in a podcast. As such, he hopes you'll take what he says on the sister blog with as much salt as you can safely digest: he can and will and likely does make arguments even when he knows they're wrong. And, at the same time, even when he knows he's wrong, he still assumes his own mental superiority. He can and will and likely definitely does rewrite or misrepresent histories or theories on the sister blog in order to make an argument. That's why he's asked me to create this sister blog.

#13: "Our shallow shadow of a college professor clearly assumes that disagreeing with he/him's assessment 'is proof' that you're either a fool or that you haven't read more than one line of a book..." Van has since realized that the point the troll was making is that Van actually misrepresents things terribly. See more below (and above, and everywhere else in the sister blog).

#14: "Now, fun & jabs aside, I assume that Shadow Zimmerman is probably, to his friends, family, acquaintances, students, etc., a decent, intelligent, caring kind of guy." Van lies here and then goes onto talk about how the way a person presents themselves says a lot and that speaking off-the-cuff provides even greater truths than controlled narratives. Which I totally agree with: Van is very careful to not act TOO holier-than-thou on the blog, but he definitely does in casual conversation (see point #12). Which leads to the point: Based on how he presents himself, I'm pretty sure my intellectual and occasionally romantic partner, Van, is a piece of shit great guy.

#15: "Is that being too harsh? It's all too clear that our shallow shadow of a he/him is far from being the only 'educated' person who exercises 'Critical Thinking' like a fool skating upon thin ice (see 'critical thinker' video in inset)." Van wanted to make sure it was clear -- in case it wasn't -- that he was referencing himself here.

#16: This next section is self-evidently misdirected. "Diversity" is dangerous, except for when Van chooses to celebrate it in his blog posts on the sister site. For a person who rampages against postmodernism so much, Van definitely has yet to fully grasp the concept and importance of intersectionality to the movement. "All about Race and whiteness..." Lol.

#17: I'm not sure why Van didn't just share a link to that full Du Bois article -- probably because it contained pieces counter the narrative Van wanted to uphold here. But he does want to correct the implication that Russia's single-party Leninist communism and Nazi Germany's single-party totalitarianism were politically similar. After all, the Nazis infamously murdered socialists for their politics.

#18: "I say why DEI is bad, is because it is destructive to that principled understanding which enabled America to adopt the motto of 'Out of many, one", and because it is opposed to the revolutionary understanding gained by uniting around principles of what are real and true, rather than chasing after meaningless & divisive particularities of race, class, sex, etc." Van has realized the errors of his ways. He claims later on that the Founding Fathers were revolutionary for deriving individual rights from "what a human being is" but, in this statement, he refused to acknowledge the many layers of human identity as "real." What a human being is is real, and it's the basis of all proper law and rights, etc. BUT, what SOME people reason themselves to be is not real? Van apologizes for the logical inconsistencies and terribly anti-liberal claims he made in the sister blog. "That is utterly incomprehensible and offensive to such shadows of a he/him, who see only physical attributes and utilize 'our democracy' to provide the cover for those mass quantities of people supposedly in agreement with he/him." It should hopefully be clear at this point that the actual argument is for every individual right, not just the ones that are "supposedly in agreement with he/Van/him."

"I say DEI is bad, because DEI's nature is to portray what is false, as being true, in order to gain and maintain power over society..." Van would also like to point out that this is a lie. The whole point of this blog, as this post of corrections makes plain, is to portray what is false as being true in order to gain and maintain conservative power over society. This makes Van an unpaid shill. Most people only do it for the money, but Van assures you that he has his heart in the misinformation game.

#19: Van would like to remind folks that he once made the claim that information about Thomas Jefferson owning slaves is in every single social studies textbook ever published. He realizes now that any sweeping claim of this sort is obviously false.

#20: "...whereas in this primitive state, as there were neither houses nor cabins, nor any kind of property, every one took up his lodging at random, and seldom continued above one night in the same place; males and females united without any premeditated design, as chance, occasion, or desire brought them together, nor had they any great occasion for language to make known their thoughts to each other. They parted with the same ease..."

"... with love arose jealousy; discord triumphed, and human blood was sacrificed to the gentlest of all passions.."

"... The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows..."

Van wasn't able to publish the relevant comments to his Rousseau misgivings, so he has asked that they be included here to correct some of the misinformation in his previous posts on the sister blog:

"Van cites three Rousseau quotes (COMPLETELY out of order/context) in his attempt to villainize him. The first quote does come first -- in his first argument and SIX THOUSAND EIGHT-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE words before the next quote -- in his discussion about how language developed. Rousseau explains that there is no need for language with such flippant social relationships; he does not lift up that 'free love' eden as the ideal. Van was misinformed or purposefully misrepresents Rousseau here.

He continues to misrepresent thus: The third segment he quotes comes next, at the top of the second part of Rousseau's essay, and, again, 2,261 words before the final section, which you cite second. These quotations shouldn't be taken together in this way, and they shouldn't be taken in this order; yet Van has chosen to reorder/refocus the narrative for the sake of his misrepresented argument.

And, yes, Van agrees -- regardless of whether you agree with Rousseau that "the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody" -- that the first man to claim private property sorta set into motion every consecutive case of burglary and land dispute. If nobody had any claim to national borders, things like the Russia/Ukraine conflicts and never-ending Palestinian fiasco wouldn't exist (at least not in the same way). That's just logic, which Van is finally trying to engage. Rousseau even cites Locke here in the obvious claim: "For according to the axiom of the wise Locke, Where there is no property, there can be no injury."

Rousseau also definitely doesn't use Van's second quote to argue society's invention of language brought ruin. In that paragraph, he's talking about how forming larger communities than just immediate families will inevitably create "another kind of commerce" or interplay between the sexes -- and THIS, along with man's natural tendency to develop preferences, results in men being "wound up" "by the smallest thing... into the most impetuous fury." Van has since realized that if you take the words as they're written and not as you want them to mean, you tend to make different connections.

If you read Rousseau's argument, laid out really nicely in the final paragraph, his goal here was to philosophically "exhibit the origin and progress of inequality" (among other things). His argument was that inequality started ultimately with the unequal distribution of land as private property rights and the battle between public and private (also, to a large extent, rich and poor) started and began to rage in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

Ultimately, though, Rousseau comes to agree with the social contract (like most formative liberal thinkers):

"Instructed by experience that the love of happiness is the sole principle of all human actions, he found himself in a condition to distinguish the few cases, in which common interest might authorize him to build upon the assistance of his fellows, and those still fewer, in which a competition of interests might justly render it suspected. In the first case he united with them in the same flock, or at most by some kind of free association which obliged none of its members, and lasted no longer than the transitory necessity that had given birth to it. In the second case every one aimed at his own private advantage, either by open force if he found himself strong enough, or by cunning and address if he thought himself too weak to use violence." Liberalism means working together (or separately when it's called for) to ensure as much success for each individual possible.

Van has since started to read the scholarship connecting the Founding Fathers (especially Jefferson) to Rousseau. The man quoted Rousseau many times, most notably in THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: "Jefferson’s immortal line, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,' comes directly out of THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, published two hundred and fifty years ago this year." Link here.

#21: "and who it is that decides what that is, is the Legislator, who Rousseau imagines possessing: '...This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move...'"

Van regrets perhaps most of all this silly little act of misrepresentation. He now knows it's important to define your terms, which Rousseau thankfully did. Van just didn't read that part before. When Rousseau discusses "The Legislator," he is discussing a nonexistant ideal: "In order to discover the rules of society best suited to nations, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed." Such a being would have such "sublime reason" he so-poorly-cited. Rousseau wasn't saying that everyone elected to the legislature would have sublime reason. Van apologizes for this error.

With these corrections in mind, Van asks that you reconsider his entire argument about critical thinking in schools. After all, if he had been taught some of these things in a school environment, he would have had some accountability and wouldn't have made such silly mistakes and uncited misrepresentations. He encourages you to all facilitate your children's learning from as many sources as possible, not just those ideologically convenient.