There aren’t many avenues available for those falsely accused of sexual misconduct, and since the glory days of #MeToo when a mere accusation was more than enough to destroy a person’s career, and possibly his life, even the limited options have been fraught with the potential to be ruinous. But California legislators have decided that one option, not great but at least available, should be taken off the table.

California lawmakers voted Thursday to protect sexual assault survivors from retaliatory lawsuits, years after a former state lawmaker sued a woman over her sexual misconduct allegations against him. Continue reading →

It was true of the dangerously wrongheaded excuse that black men are justified in resisting, fleeing and fighting with police because of a “reasonable” fear that the cops might kill them. And they end up being beaten, shot, maybe even killed, not for whatever the cause of the interaction was, but because of how they responded to the cops’ commands or efforts to take the person into custody.  It’s not that outrageously wrong police conduct doesn’t occur, but it remains an extreme outlier, happening in an infinitesimal percentage of cases. Unless the guy resists.

This is a panic. A fear born of hyping the extreme cases such that people internalize the false believe that the one in a million case is the norm. Continue reading →

Hey everybody! Did you miss your humble humorist over our little break? I sure missed all of you. I’m currently slammed with work this week, but I couldn’t let an opportunity by to tell y’all a couple of jokes that haven’t caused Dr. S to roll her eyes clean out of her head.

A nun gets into a cab.

The driver says “Sister, I want to ask you a question, but I’m afraid I might offend you.” Continue reading →

Granted, it’s hardly the core problem of dealing with discrimination against transgender people, but it is one of the great many collateral issues that would obviously arise from the dogmatic assertion that transgender women were women, end of discussion.

The lawsuit against the national Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, its national council president and Smith claims national sorority officials pressured the local chapter to violate sorority rules, including those for voting to induct new members. Continue reading →

Not only is Berny Belvedere a great editor, as I learned when I wrote a few posts for his budding site Arc Digital that made me look far smarter than I am, but he is an honest man and is willing to pay the price for it, even if it costs him followers and readers born of tribal allegiance.

Embodying measuredness or thoughtfulness doesn’t necessarily mean taking a middle position between opposing views, or disarming yourself of rhetorical verve.

Rather, it means that both your epistemic processes (belief-formation) and discourse posture (belief-expression) are characterized by intellectual virtues like reasonableness, openness to evidence, and an uncompromising commitment to the truth.

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No matter how many times Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell proclaimed they had overwhelming evidence, the failure to produce it made flagrant from the outset that they were full of shit. They raised, at best, questions. Any fool can raise questions, possibilities of what could have been, or could not have been. The distinction was evidence of what was, and the louder they cried they had it but failed to produce it, the more full of shit they came off. At least to some of us. Yet to others, the belief was unshakable because they didn’t want to shake it.

Will they shake it now? Continue reading →

Clarence Thomas. But to be fair, free trips and payments have been a problem for a very long time for the justices sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States. To no one’s surprise, Sheldon Whitehouse, who has made no secret of his deep desire to exert control over the co-equal branch of government now that it’s not his friend, seized the moment.

The revelations rankled some Democrats. On April 7, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee, tweeted, “As long as 9 justices are exempt from any process for enforcing basic ethics, public faith in SCOTUS  will continue to decline.”

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The law is bad, as in unconstitutionally bad. It’s vague and overbroad, and flagrantly conflicts with the First Amendment and academic freedom. And to add insult to injury, it invites students to rat out their profs who raise “divisive issues” in college courses. For those concerned about intellectual diversity in higher education depriving students of learning less progressive thought, this is pretty much the antithesis of what they claim to want. But that didn’t stop Tennessee from passing the law.

The bill, HB 1376, was introduced by Representative John Ragan (R – Oak Ridge). He previously said that the new bill was meant to strengthen the law passed in 2022 by “promoting freedom of expression,” and keep “colleges about advancing knowledge, not about advancing political or social agendas.”

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After the podcast Serial became a hit, the phone started ringing. The calls were from journalists, producers, wannabe podcasters, asking whether I had any cases involving a clearly innocent defendant who was abused by the system and ended up convicted and serving a lengthy sentence. Well, of course I did. We all do. But as it turned out, that really wasn’t the story they were interested in.

What they really wanted was a sympathetic defendant, the sort of innocent person people could love, and a simple, clear story of misconduct and abuse that ended with imprisonment. This was where I made the mistake. I had no stories like that, as few defendants were up for beatification before being charged with murder, and while there were arguments for the defense, and complex, messy problems along the way, it wasn’t as if the prosecution didn’t have a case to show they committed the murder. Continue reading →

Dr. SJ and I will be leaving this evening to take a cruise along the Danube from Budapest to Regensburg, so there will be no posts for a bit. Enjoy and be kind to humans and other living things.

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