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From Bauer v. Brinkman, decided Monday by the Iowa Court of Appeals (in an opinion by Judge Paul Ahlers, joined by Chief Judge Thomas Bower and Judge David May):

The Kendall R. Bauer Trust owns an apartment building in Sloan, Iowa, known as the Bauer Apartments. The trustee of the trust, Richard Bauer, … manages the apartment building. K.L. … owns and operates a dog grooming and boarding business. As part of that business, she began construction on a dog care facility in a lot adjacent to the Bauer Apartments.

During the course of the construction of the dog care facility, Bauer contacted K.L. to express concerns that the outdoor “dog run” may become a nuisance issue and could be in violation of Sloan’s zoning ordinance. Bauer also contacted the Sloan city council about his concerns. When his concerns were not addressed to his satisfaction, Bauer filed suit against the city, alleging the city failed to enforce its zoning ordinances.

During the pendency of Bauer’s lawsuit against the city, K.L. took to airing her disgruntlement with the situation on Facebook, posting comments about Bauer, Bauer Apartments, and the dispute regarding construction of the dog care facility. K.L.’s adult daughter joined the Facebook fray, as did the defendant, Bradley Brinkman. It was Brinkman’s commentary that resulted in this lawsuit, as Brinkman posted the following comment:

It is because of shit like this that I need to run for mayor! Mr. Bauer, you sir are a PIECE OF SHIT!!! Let’s not sugar coat things here people, [K.L.] runs a respectable business in this town! You sir are nothing more than a Slum Lord! Period. I would love for you to walk across the street to the east of your ooh so precious property and discuss this with me!

Bauer filed suit against Brinkman alleging Brinkman’s statement that Bauer is a “slum lord” constituted libel….

Drawing the line between opinion and fact … is important because opinions are “absolutely protected under the first amendment.” Because drawing this line involves important first amendment issues, its determination is one for the court rather than the fact finder…. To make this determination, courts look to four factors: (1) whether the “statement ‘has a precise core of meaning for which a consensus of understanding exists or, conversely, whether the statement is indefinite and ambiguous'”; (2) the degree to which the statement is “objectively capable of proof or disproof”; (3) “the context in which the” statement occurs; and (4) “the broader social context into which” the statement fits.

We begin our analysis of the first two factors by noting that the term “slum lord” is not defined in Brinkman’s Facebook post. Nevertheless, a legal dictionary defines the term to mean, “A real-property owner who rents substandard housing units in a crowded, economically depressed area and allows the units to fall into further disrepair, esp. while charging unfairly high rents,” or simply “the owner of any run-down rental property.” …

While slum lord is capable of a definite meaning, its appearance in Brinkman’s comment is vague enough that a reader of the post would be left to use his or her own definition, which would result in the term meaning different things to different people. This indefiniteness as to the meaning of the term cuts against a conclusion that it was a statement of fact. Further, the above definitions are not particularly capable of objective proof or disproof ….

Additionally, Brinkman’s comment that Bauer is a “slum lord” followed on the heels of calling Bauer a “piece of shit.” While understandably offensive and insulting, this type of name calling is generally not actionable….

“The common law has always differentiated sharply between genuinely defamatory communications as opposed to obscenities, vulgarities, insults, epithets, name-calling, and other verbal abuse. It has thus been held that a libel does not occur simply because the subject of the publication finds the publication annoying, offensive, or embarrassing. …

“No matter how mean or vulgar, such language is not defamatory. It is not defamatory, for example, to call someone a ‘bastard,’ or a ‘son of a bitch,’ or an ‘idiot.’ No matter how obnoxious, insulting, or tasteless such name-calling, it is regarded as a part of life for which the law of defamation affords no remedy.”

Given the nebulous nature of the term “slum lord,” standing alone as it was in this case, the first two factors cut in favor of the statement being that of opinion rather than fact.

Having determined the first two factors cut in favor of finding Brinkman’s words to constitute nonactionable opinion rather than fact, we turn to the last two factors. These factors cause us to consider the fact that Brinkman’s statement was made on Facebook and the context within which it was made on that social media platform in determining whether the statement was opinion protected by the first amendment….

The statements were made by adding to a chain of comments started between private individuals expressing disgruntlement over Bauer’s dispute with the city regarding K.L.’s dog care facility. The message chain was not related to a news account or any other form of communication that purported to be fact based. Instead, it was clearly an exchange of opinions about the topic at hand. Brinkman’s comments did not purport to interject facts to the discussion, but, instead, merely added to the string of expressed opinions. The comments focused on the dispute over K.L.’s dog care facility and not on Bauer’s rental property.

We conclude that anyone viewing Brinkman’s comments would have viewed them as nothing more than expressions of Brinkman’s opinions, rather than a declaration of facts. Viewed in this context, the last two factors of the analysis join the first two factors in cutting in favor of a finding that Brinkman’s statements were opinions rather than facts.

To be clear, we are not saying that statements made on Facebook or other social media forums cannot be defamatory as a categorical rule. Rather, we are acknowledging that, when alleged defamatory statements are made on a social media platform, the forum in which the statements were made is a contextual factor to consider in determining whether the statements are an expression of opinion or fact. In this case, we find the context of the postings on Facebook contribute to the conclusion Brinkman’s statements were those of opinion and are thus protected by the first amendment….

Quite right, I think.

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Here in the opening half of Reason‘s annual Webathon, in which we ask you, dear readers and listeners and viewers, to consider making a tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit foundation that makes all of our work possible (and does other great stuff besides), I thought it might be fun to take a trip down memory lane and appreciate together how far you’ve helped us come since our first modest little cup-rattle back in 2008. But first….

WON’T YOU PRETTY PLEASE DONATE TO REASON RIGHT THE HELL NOW??

How far have we come in 12 years? Well, see that orange box in the upper right of this page, with its 355 donors and $61,000 in donations after 48 hours? That’s already more Webathon loot than we raised in each of 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. But wait, there’s more!

In that first year, our bell-ringing produced a grand total of $13,000. On this very day in 2020, by contrast, we are announcing a special challenge grant of nearly double that!

That’s right, there is a married couple dear to our hearts, with a last name bearing a familial resemblance to my own, who today are announcing a $25,000 challenge grant. That means: If you donate $10, we magically get $20. If you stroke us a check for $24,999, then (beep-boop, beep-boop)…damn near 50 large! Lookit all that math!

Please double the impact of your money by donating to Reason today!

This money does something far more important even than nurturing Peter Suderman’s cocktail habit, Katherine Mangu-Ward’s pot brownie recipes, or granting C.J. Ciaramella extra license to write about Dungeons & Dragons. This allows …(inhales deeply)…Reason to stay Reason.

Here’s what I mean by that. On a purely functional level, your generosity—1,300 of you gave us $370,000 during our Webathon last year!—allows us to stay in business, which is no small thing in the world of opinion magazines. We no longer count among our publishing brethren The Weekly Standard (shuttered in 2018), Governing (2019), or, uh, the International Socialist Review (2019). Take that, commies!

But just as importantly, having a diversity and depth of funding sources make us almost unnaturally resilient and consistent over time. No head-snapping editorial zig-zags for us.

Consider this: Just 16 days ago on The Reason Roundtable podcast, the magazine’s editors in chief of the past two decades spent some quality time talking about the newest book from a Reason editor in chief from the decade before that. That’s 30 years of a magazine’s leadership happily exchanging ideas based on the same broad frames of reference.

Now let’s compare that continuity to the tumult at, say, The New Republic, the progressive warhorse that when we began doing these Webathons was still run by lefty-tweaking hawk Marty Peretz and edited by Franklin Foer. Peretz replaced Foer with Richard Just in 2010, then sold the magazine in 2012 to babyfaced Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes, who re-hired Foer, then so quickly purged the mag of its contrarian past that Peretz soon lamented in The Wall Street Journal that “I don’t recognize the magazine I used to own.” By the end of 2014 there were so many editorial changes and publishing pivots and staff revolts that I headlined one Webathon post that year, “Donate to Reason! Because Jesus Christ, We Sure Aren’t The New Republic!” The Hughes era ended in 2016, and TNR is now on its seventh editor change over a span that Reason has had all of two.

I do not for one moment mean to pick on our journalistic frenemies, but rather to use their turmoil as an object lesson in the advantages of our funding model, and its dependence especially on you. As I wrote back when TNR staffers were still hi-fiving about all the new money, and media columnists were gushing over the exciting fate of the onetime “in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” I made this point about publications in our category:

Political magazines, which as a rule do not cover expenses through subscriptions and advertising, have two basic ownership models: Get an ideologically and/or culturally sympatico rich person (or “vanity mogul,” in Jack Shafer’s memorable phrasing) to subsidize the losses, or just organize as a nonprofit (Reason chose the latter road decades ago).

There are plusses and minuses to both–as Shafer points out, “Hughes should be able to sustain the magazine’s annual losses—which Anne Peretz, the ex-wife of former owner Martin Peretz put at $3 million a year—for a couple of hundred years after his death”—but one aspect I certainly enjoy about the Reason way is that it is literally impossible for a single person (let alone a single person with deep political connections to the sitting U.S. president) to impose his or her will on the editorial decisions of a normally configured nonprofit publication. The basic editorial thrust is therefore much more resilient and consistent in the long term, much less subject to the temporal whims and temper tantrums of a lone deep-pocketed journalistic novice.

Your donations, and the sheer number of you donating, amounts to force protection against this editorial enterprise suddenly rendering itself unrecognizable based on the direction of the wind—of anybody‘s wind.

Do you derive value and perhaps even occasional pleasure at having a consistent (if consistently weird) libertarian voice working in the fields of journalism and commentary, while constantly expanding its reach and impact? Do you enjoy doubling the impact of your dollar? If so, please consider DONATING TO REASON RIGHT THE HELL NOW!

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In 1479, a few months shy of his eleventh birthday, Niccolò Machiavelli left the school where he’d learned to read and write and went to study with a teacher named Piero Maria. The future author of The Prince spent the next twenty-two months mastering Hindu-Arabic numerals, arithmetical techniques, and a dizzying assortment of currency and measurement conversions. Mostly he did word problems like these:

If 8 braccia of cloth are worth 11 florins, what are 97 braccia worth?

20 braccia of cloth are worth 3 lire and 42 pounds of pepper are worth 5 lire. How much pepper is equal to 50 braccia of cloth?

One type of problem reflected the era’s shortage of currency. Goods that would sell for one price in coins cost a premium if the buyer paid with other goods. (These problems assume familiarity with trading conventions and therefore present ambiguities to the modern reader.)

Two men want to barter wool for cloth, that is, one has wool and the other has cloth. A canna of cloth is worth 5 lire and in barter it is offered at 6 lire. A hundredweight of wool is worth 32 lire. For what should it be offered in barter?

Two men want to barter wool and cloth. A canna of cloth is worth 6 lire and in barter it is valued at 8 lire. The hundredweight of wool is worth 25 lire and in barter it is offered at such a price that the man with the cloth finds he has earned 10 percent. At what price was the hundredweight of wool offered in barter?

Others were brain teasers dressed up in ostensibly realistic detail.

A merchant was across the sea with his companion and wanted to journey by sea. He came to the port in order to depart and found a ship on which he placed a load of 20 sacks of wool and the other brought a load of 24 sacks. The ship began its voyage and put to sea.

The master of the ship then said: “You must pay me the freight charge for this wool.” And the merchants said: “We don’t have any money, but take a sack of wool from each of us and sell it and pay yourself and give us back the surplus.” The master sold the sacks and paid himself and returned to the merchant who had 20 sacks 8 lire and to the merchant who had 24 sacks 6 lire. Tell me how much each sack sold for and how much freightage was charged to each of the two merchants?

Along with their famed humanist arts and letters, the mercantile cities of early modern Italy fostered a new form of education: schools known as botteghe d’abaco. The phrase literally means “abacus workshops,” but the instruction had nothing to do with counting beads or reckoning boards. To the contrary, a maestro d’abaco, also known as an abacist or abbachista, taught students to calculate with a pen and paper instead of moving counters on a board.

The schools took their misleading name from the Liber Abbaci, or Book of Calculation, published in 1202 by the great mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci. Brought up in North Africa by his father, who represented Pisan merchants in the customs house at Bugia (now Béjaïa, Algeria), the young Leonardo learned how to calculate using the nine Hindu digits and the Arabic zero. He was hooked.

After honing his mathematical skill as he traveled throughout the Mediterranean, Fibonacci eventually returned to Pisa. There he published the book that enthusiastically introduced the number system we use today.

Fibonacci’s novel methods of pen-and-paper reckoning were ideal for Italian textile merchants, who wrote lots of letters and needed permanent account records. Beginning in Florence in the early fourteenth century, specialized teachers began teaching the new system and producing handbooks in the vernacular. Consistent sellers, the books served simultaneously as children’s textbooks, merchants’ reference tools, and, with their brain-teasing puzzles, recreational materials.

From the abacists’ classrooms, future merchants and artisans typically graduated to apprenticeships and work. But a grounding in commercial math was also common for those like Machiavelli, who were destined for higher education and a career of statesmanship and letters. In a society based on trade, cultural literacy included calculation.

As they drilled generations of children on how to convert hundredweights of wool into braccia of cloth or to allocate the profits from a business venture to its unequal investors, the abacists invented the multiplication and division techniques we still use today. They made small but important advances in algebra, a subject universities scorned as too mercantile, and devised solutions to common practical problems. On the side, they did consulting, mostly for construction projects. They were the first Europeans to make a living entirely from math.

In his seminal 1976 study of nearly 200 abacus manuscripts and books, historian of mathematics Warren Van Egmond emphasizes their practicality—a significant departure from the classical view of mathematics, inherited from the Greeks, as the study of abstract logic and ideal forms. The abacus books treat math as useful.

“When they study arith­metic,” he writes, “it is to learn how to figure prices, compute interest, and calculate profits; when they study geometry it is to learn how to measure buildings and calculate areas and distances; when they study astronomy it is to learn how to make a calendar or determine holidays.” Most of the price problems, he observes, concern textiles.

Compared to scholastic geometry, the abacus manuscripts, with their problems about trading cloth for pepper, are indeed down to earth. But they don’t scorn abstraction. Rather, they wed abstract expression to the physical world. The transition from physical counters to pen-and-ink numerals is in fact a movement toward abstraction. Symbols on a page represent bags of silver or bolts of cloth and the relationships between them.

Students learn to ask the question, How do I express this practical problem in numbers and unknowns? How do I better identify the world’s patterns—the flow of money in and out of a business, the relative values of cloth, fiber, and dyes, the advantages and disadvantages of barter over cash—by turning them into math? Mathematics, the abacists taught their pupils, can model the real world. It does not exist in a separate realm. It is useful knowledge.

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