All those icky old cellphones, slow computers, nasty laptops, have to end up somewhere. You don’t mind the planned obsolescence of buying a new one every couple years, even if it means you piss away a good deal of money, because you get the newest, shiniest iToy available, the old one, with its heavy metals and not-even-remotely biodegradable contents gets dumped somewhere. Mostly, where other people live.

Eric Lundgren wanted to do something to end this massive waste, and the harm it did to the environment. Just because it was out of your sight, replaced by something new and shiny, didn’t mean it wasn’t a problem. And Lundgren was the guy who was willing to do something about it. Continue reading →

Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have been an important positive and stabilizing force in the black community. He says some pretty awful things about Jews, women, gays and transgender people, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made a significant contribution as well. And therein lies the dilemma, or to be more precise, reveals the fallacy of the social justice movement’s effort to reconcile the zero sum game of self-interest.*

The national co-chair of the Women’s March, Tamika Mallory, was present at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviour’s Day event in late February, where Farrakhan railed against Jews for being “the mother and father of apartheid,” declared that “the Jews have control over those agencies of government,” and surmised that Jews have chemically induced homosexuality in black men through marijuana.

Mallory, Shaun King, and others find themselves caught in the middle of their claim to prominence by supporting Farrakhan while denying Farrakhan’s very clear, very explicit, very discriminatory words. You can be for equality or you can be for Farrakhan. You can’t be for both. Continue reading →

Students plan to descend on Washington, D.C, on March 24th to participate in the “March For Our Lives.” And the mayor of Baltimore wants to help.

Mayor Catherine Pugh’s announcement this week that Baltimore will pay as much as $100,000 to hire a fleet of buses to help transport city school students to a planned “March For Our Lives” national gun control protest in Washington, D.C., on March 24. In a different school district or a different time, it might be regarded as an inappropriate use of tax dollars to support what is essentially a political protest. Certainly, it’s not difficult to find $100,000 in unmet needs in city schools, from malfunctioning furnaces to undrinkable water.

It’s political protest. It’s a gift of tax dollars, levied for other purposes and repurposed to pursue a political goal. So it’s an improper use of funds? Continue reading →

A commenter responded, “It’s a photo, sweetie. It can’t hurt you.” But it wasn’t just a photo, but a photo of Charles Murray.

I wish to explain the photograph on page A1 to the readers. I recognize that it may be especially jarring, particularly for students of color who feel that Charles Murray’s rhetoric poses a threat to their very humanity.

The mere exposure of students to a pic of Charles Murray demanded an editorial explanation by Ethan Brady at Middlebury College. He doesn’t mention what rhetoric poses a “threat to their very humanity,” but that’s likely because few, apparently including Brady, have bothered to read Murray’s Bell Curve and are instead working with some vague notion that he’s a known facscist and white supremacist. Reading is a lot of work. Believing the outrage on Facebook is much easier. And good enough when it comes to identifying evil people. Continue reading →

It was 12 years ago that Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire. The idea of Social Justice Warriors wasn’t yet a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It was then a matter of neocons versus everyone else. In an New York Times op-ed, entitled When Smug Liberals Met Conservative Trolls, Katherine Mangu-Ward relates this television appearance as the beginning.

The explosion of the smugs-versus-trolls phase of our political discourse is traceable to a 2004 confrontation between Jon Stewart and the political commentator Tucker Carlson in the waning days of “Crossfire,” in which Mr. Stewart dropped his comedian persona and accused Mr. Carlson and his ilk of undermining serious discourse with their partisan feuding and made-for-TV talking points. “Stop hurting America,” was his specific request. Mr. Carlson sputtered and fumed; it was generally agreed that Mr. Stewart won the day.

At the time, it didn’t look this way at all. Sure, Stewart beat Carlson to a pulp, and Stewart was, without a doubt, smug and self-righteous. But what didn’t yet exist was a mirror image of the neocons, with their simplistic mean solutions to challenges to their Utopia. Continue reading →

It’s not that I disagree with Scott Lemieux’s arguments. I do, but that alone means nothing. People can disagree. But his post at Lawyers, Guns and Money ends with three points that are, well, (how would I say this if I was David French?) stupid.

And even stupid is perfectly acceptable, as this is America and people are entitled to be stupid and still express themselves, even if they’ve usurped a great song title to which they have no right. But Lemieux is a lecturer at the University of Washington, and he teaches impressionable students about law-type stuff. And yet, he can’t seem to muster the ability to see that his three points are fucking idiotic unsmart.

There is indeed an enormous amount of sloppy thinking and bad faith involved in these discussions. I’ll hopefully return to this issue at greater length, but we can use the Lewis and Clark controversy to make some critical distinctions:

Continue reading →

At the National Review, David French responds to a criticism by Milo that he doesn’t have the guts for the fight.

Maintaining an even temperament and avoiding overstatement and invective can improve our political discourse. America’s two great ideological tribes are in the midst of a similar conflict. It’s the battle over civility, and all too often reason, compassion, and grace are on the losing side. On the left, aggressive social-justice activists scorn engagement and dialogue as “respectability politics” and instead favor the shout-down, the boycott, and the online shame campaign.

I often find myself disagreeing with French, even though I admire his intellect, and I do so again right out of the box. What’s an “even temperament”? Who decides? The answer is somewhat obvious. We all use the words with which we’re comfortable, that apply our own sensibilities. But different people have different comfort levels. Continue reading →

As far as I know, I’m not blocked by @RealDonaldTrump on twitter. But then, I don’t follow him because his twits aren’t of any real interest to me, and I find his communications painful to read. If there’s anything I should know about, it will be strewn across the media, and I will regret reading them.

Others, apparently, desperately want to see Trump’s twits but they can’t because they’ve been blocked. They could always see them in incognito mode, but that’s not good enough and they don’t believe they should have to right click to see what the president twits. I suspect they always demand the right to “seek redress” by responding with their own special expression of vitriol.

Can a president block people on the twitters? When Jameel Jaffer’s first suit from the newly-founded Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University was filed, it was disappointing. With so many First Amendment problems swirling around, being blocked from the president’s twits was unserious. Continue reading →

At The Atlantic, the ever-thought-provoking Conor Friedersdorf ponders whether the dreaded notion of intersectionality can be a force for good as well as the scoring system for the oppression Olympics.

Here is intersectionality as David French understands it:

While there’s not yet an Apostle’s Creed of intersectionality, it can roughly be defined as the belief that oppression operates in complicated, “interlocking” ways. So the experience of, say, a white trans woman is different in important ways from the experience of a black lesbian. A white trans woman will experience the privilege of her skin but also oppression due to her gender identity. A black lesbian may experience the privilege of “cis” gender identity but also oppression due to race and sexuality.

So far, so good. He continues: Continue reading →

Following the letter issued by the Lewis & Clark law school’s chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, et al., proclaiming Christina Hoff Sommers a “known fascist,” Bari Weiss took to the New York Times to say “we’re all fascists now.”

The letter added that her invitation amounted to an “act of aggression and violence” and went on to offer a curious definition of free speech: “Freedom of speech is certainly an important tenet to a free, healthy society, but that freedom stops when it has a negative and violent impact on other individuals.”

Yes, these future lawyers believe that free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them. Which is to say, they don’t believe in it at all.

In fairness, the NLG was radically incoherent back when I went to law school as well, but Weiss took a huge chance in stating the obvious,* as it was an invitation for others to prove that she, together with Sommers, deserved the epithet.  Continue reading →