Every once in a while, someone writes something that is far more worthy of your time than whatever I was going to write. This is one of those times.
In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift wrote.
Chimamanda Adichie lets it all out. Forget me. Read her today.
Maybe a decade ago, a guy with a significant following on the twitters complained that there was nobody in the Harry Potter series who “looked like him.” I replied, “So write some books as good as J.K. Rowling and make the characters look like you.”* Lin-Manuel Miranda did just that in his love letter to his neighborhood, Washington Heights.
It was the first movie I’ve seen in a theater in more than a year, and I thought it was great. I know Washington Heights very well, having spent a lot of time up there with clients. The scenery was the real deal, even if they managed to not include a bar, a money-exchange or the Local Motion cab driven by undercover detectives from the 34 Precinct that everybody knew were cops. Where were the guys selling dime bags on the corner? Where were the car stops to illegally search for clavos? Where were the kids smoking weed? Where was the bodega cat? But then, this was Miranda’s love story. isn’t he allowed to clean the streets up a bit? Continue reading
I remember reading the list of names proffered by Demand Justice as potential Supreme Court nominees, and thinking they were not just batshit crazy, but dangerously off the rails. Some of their choices weren’t there because they were smart, open-minded, and brought different experiences to the Court. Some were there because they swore fealty to being biased.
If confirmed, the corporation would always lose, the black guy would always win unless his adversary was a trans woman of color, in which case he was screwed. Forget law. Forget reason. Don’t even bother to argue. Their vote was in before the briefs were filed. And in the minds of the unduly passionate, this was good because outcome was all that mattered to groups like Demand Justice. Continue reading
One of the most persuasive arguments is that two things correlate. Crime went down significantly in New York City when the “stop & frisk” was a predominant police tactic, and cops took credit for the drop in crime. Makes sense, right? Except crime went down across the country, where other departments didn’t engage in stop & frisk. So it no longer makes sense. It’s the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation. They could be connected, but they also may not be. Correlation, alone, does not answer the question.
In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, whose parents were part of the Weather Underground crew who perpetrated the notorious Brinks Heist in 1981, was elected district attorney. Why he wanted to be DA is a curious question. I have no desire to be a district attorney and wouldn’t take the job if it were handed to me on a silver platter, but that’s me. He wanted the post, ran for it and won. Continue reading
Robert Jackson has a point. So what if he was a probationary employee at the time? So what if he thought it wise to take his superior to task for engaging in conduct that he and some of his similarly-situated colleagues found reprehensible? He worked for the organization that once stood for civil liberties, but is now supposed to stand for Robert Jackson.
Robert Jackson filed a lawsuit Tuesday in New York District Court accusing the ACLU of not treating its own Black employees with the kind of equity that one would expect from a bastion of American values, equality, and justice. He says he and his Black colleagues were told to “keep quiet” about their criticisms concerning the organization’s lack of leadership diversity, and he claims his bosses eventually tried to push him to quit his job. Continue reading
A foundational belief of liberalism is that no one in this wealthy and wonderful nation of ours should go to sleep (or school) hungry, die for lack of basic health care or lack a place to sleep at night with a roof over their head. This is the social safety net, the bare minimum we, as a society, must provide. We’ve done this poorly, partially because problems move faster than solutions and partially because our conflicted bureaucratic demands make delivery of these minimal fixes overly expensive, burdensome and ripe for abuse.
But even if we could do this well, it would not mean that poverty would be eradicated. Can it be? Should it be? Could we survive without it? Ezra Klein, late of Vox, can’t break the ‘splainer habit. Continue reading
In the scheme of syllogism, the bogeyman of critical race theory has become the latest moral panic for which something must be done. Florida did something. They passed a law
Florida’s amendment takes an existing rule saying instruction “may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holcaust” [sic] and adds “slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.” The new language continues: Continue reading
The superintendent of West Point schools had a math problem. The school policy, as set forth in its handbook and applied in the past, was that the valedictorian and salutatorian were determined by unweighted grade point average, meaning straight grades without any consideration of the difficulty of courses. It’s a dumb way to do things, but it was the method West Point used. Except for this year.
After talking with the white parents, Mr. McDonald, who is Black, concluded that the handbook and tradition backed them up: In the school system, class rank has been calculated by unweighted grade point average, not Q.P.A., which would have made the two white students the honorees.
Sheriff Roy Templeton instinctively reached for his sidearm when the power went out at the Mud Lick Sheriff’s Department. Stuff like this wasn’t supposed to happen when you had two running recursive generators for instances when Old Man Cocke tried to pick a fight with a transformer.
Someone did this on purpose, the Sheriff thought. Assuming a standing defensive position, the Sheriff began checking each room in the station for potential intruders. He’d made it to the front desk when power returned to the building. Continue reading
In its own jerky way, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights tried to put on a show this week by holding “hearings” over Microsoft Meetings about what changes should be made to the DeVos Title IX sex tribunal regulations, which became effective last August and have not as yet had much of an impact because of the pandemic.
Activists for changing the regs have argued that the number of women coming forward to complain has dropped precipitously because of the rigors of the regs, meaning that they can’t just grieve and win, but will have their accusation subject to scrutiny. Being scrutinized, they argue, is traumatic, and no doubt it’s true. It’s far less traumatic to just point, accuse and win. At least it’s far less traumatic for the accuser. The accused, not so much. Continue reading