Back when the practical blawgosphere took Joseph Rakofsky to task, a charge was leveled that he was the victim of “internet mobbing,” the mob consisting of lawyers who piled on to ridicule and abuse him for being worthy of ridicule and abuse. Was that what was happening? Were we, lawyers ripping a kid to shreds, just a mob?

At the time, the accusation seemed ludicrous. His conduct was facially reprehensible on many levels, and the fact that a few dozen blawging lawyers all reached the same conclusion, and thought it proper to condemn him for it, was hardly surprising. No doubt it felt to him like a mob, but then, how else would being universally condemned by others in one’s profession feel?

The question recently arose again on the twitters, since cries of mobbing have become somewhat ubiquitous as tribal condemnation of the hour’s latest word that cannot be uttered or idea that’s definitely hurtful came under scrutiny by a few million of your closest friends. This time, it was broken down into two questions, the first being whether there can be such a thing as a “virtual mob” at all, as opposed to a physical mob. The second is how one distinguishes a mob from a million independently sentient voices all reaching the same conclusion simultaneously. Continue reading →

David Brooks uses numbers to make the point:

The generation gap is even more powerful when it comes to Republicans. To put it bluntly, young adults hate them.

In 2018, voters under 30 supported Democratic House candidates over Republican ones by an astounding 67 percent to 32 percent. A 2018 Pew survey found that 59 percent of millennial voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while only 32 percent identify as Republicans or lean Republican.

The difference is ideological. According to Pew, 57 percent of millennials call themselves consistently liberal or mostly liberal. Only 12 percent call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.

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The editorial board of the New York Post occasionally has a point.

One of the top goals of today’s criminal-justice-reform movement is to undo excesses of the past — heavy-handed laws that required long prison stretches for relatively minor offenses, by robbing judges of the discretion they traditionally had when it came to sentencing. But some reformers are now making exactly the same mistake.

Mind you, the Post wasn’t exactly reluctant to enthusiastically endorse the “heavy-handed laws.” There have been far too many tough-on-crime initiatives piled atop and beside each other over the past 40 years, from the inane “Three Strikes” laws to mandatory minimums, from the excessive sentences for drugs crafted in hysterical reaction to the overdose of Len Bias to the excessive sentences for corporate crime in the aftermath of Enron. Continue reading →

The story of how Houston Texans wide receiver Keith Mumphery was ousted from his job upon an old story being dredged up, and the story itself being a classic example of the failure of due process on multiple levels, was bad. Very bad.

Mumphery graduated in 2014 and was going for his masters as he played for the Houston Texans. Until the Detroit Free Press learned of the matter and asked the Texans how it missed this when drafting Mumphery. He was then unceremoniously cut from the team. It’s #MeToo time.

Mumphery did the best thing he could do, retain Andrew Miltenberg to sue the notorious Michigan State, long-time home of sexual abuser Larry Nasser whose decades of abuse were ignored. The college had to get out from under its reputation of protecting Nasser, and Mumphery was an excellent person to sacrifice. Miltenberg was not going to let that happen. Continue reading →

A baseball bat is a wonderful and extremely useful sporting good item. It’s also a vicious weapon, if swung at one’s head. It’s not the fault of the bat that it can be both, but the nature of its use. Knives work in a similar way, great for cutting one’s food, opening boxes, cutting rope and threatening to gut someone if they fail to hand over their money.

But then, New York’s gravity knife law wasn’t directed at the possession of all knives, because everyone understood that knives, per se, weren’t objects of evil. Instead, it was a reaction to a quirk in time, a moment’s hysteria. GIs returning from WWII brought back Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger-Messers, German paratrooper knives, which were without question gravity knives. They scared people, because the knives came out of nowhere and who, but for someone evil, would carry such evil knives? Continue reading →

On top of the world, the view is spectacular.

Looked around, but didn’t find David here. I’ll keep looking.

Out of here for a bit. I won’t have much internet access, so I’ve sent David the keys to the joint while I’m away. Please don’t let him crash the Healey.

Have fun and be well.

What if you took a bunch of ideas that all your most passionate pals agreed were either cool, edgy, just or moral, and mixed them together in a big pot? You would end up with San Francisco.

The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

The problem with reducing problems to the “basic problem” is why Farhad Manjoo, and those who view their world with the facile simplicity that created this American Experiment in progress can stare their failure in the face and still fail to understand how everything went awry. Continue reading →

Doug Glanville got video bombed while doing a Cubs game. He didn’t know it at the time, but found it soon enough.

Ambiguity has always been a friend to racism.

On May 7, during a television broadcast of a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field, I was on camera doing in-game commentary for NBC Sports Chicago when, unbeknown to me, a fan behind me wearing a Cubs sweatshirt made an upside-down “O.K.” sign with his hand.

He’s right that ambiguity has always been a friend to racism, but the problem is that ambiguity is a friend to everything, because it’s ambiguous, and thus susceptible to many interpretations, all of which are similarly valid and invalid because that’s the nature of ambiguity. Continue reading →

With the attention given the Ron Sullivan debacle at being punished by the unduly passionate children of Harvard, former OJ prosecutor Chris Darden’s dilemma has largely gone unnoticed. It’s surprising, since it carries all the usual sexy indicators: a murdered celebrity, a well-known lawyer and death threats. Yet, it has remained largely in the shadows. And it shouldn’t.

The threatening phone calls to Chris Darden’s law office began almost immediately. The messages on Instagram and Facebook trickled in soon after, some from anonymous accounts.

One caller left a voicemail, Darden recalled, saying he hoped someone would walk up behind the attorney and shoot him in the head.

“And I’m a shooter,” the voice said.

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