Back in my youth, Dick Nixon claimed the support of the “Silent Majority,” one of whose slogans was “America, love it or leave it.” This was, of course, bullshit. We could both love it and want to fix what was wrong with it.
We still can. Continue reading
Berny Belvedere created this site, this place, to publish differing views of a wide variety of subjects and issues. It’s called Arc Digital. There are some wonderful writers, wonderful posts there. There are also some truly stupid posts, not so much because Berny says to himself, “hey, let’s post something dumb today,” but because he tries to include such varying points of view that some putative recognized proponents of a particular view can’t muster a cogent argument.
I mean, it may well reflect the best possible argument for a position, but the position is irrational and hence the effort to argue is incomprehensible. You either feel it or not, but you can’t explain it because it makes no sense. Continue reading
It has come to your humble humorist’s attention people are charging obscene hourly fees to lecture wokescolds everywhere on “white privilege.”
This is absolute bullshit. Charging someone $12,000 for two hours of white guilt absolution is highway robbery. I’ll do it for eight grand.
After all, if that money’s hypothetically going to a white woman as per the link, who better to lead the teeming masses towards enlightenment than I, a privileged white male oppressor who literally represents the patriarchy? By virtue of my birth and lot in life, I figure I’ve got the inside track on what White Privilege is really like. Continue reading
One of the least understood concepts in law is disparate impact, and Dahlia Lithwick understands it no better than your average sophomore.
It is high time now for “too much justice.” Overturning Washington v. Davis would move the country significantly closer to racial equality. Such a reevaluation need not topple the entire legal system overnight.
High time, indeed. Washington v. Davis was a very curious decision, seeking to invalidate “Test 21” to become a District of Columbia police officer because black test takers disproportionately failed the test because it was “culturally slanted to favor whites.” At the time of the case, one of the core attacks was the validity of tests as a gauge of performance, and there was significant reason to believe that Test 21, although not created for any invidious purpose, had no particular validity in determining who would make a good cop. Continue reading
Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert George does a thought experiment with his students. It’s a good one, and he posted it on the twitters.
1/ I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.
2/ Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it. Continue reading
If there was one thing, one solid-as-a-rock thing, that the New York Times could be counted on, it was that guns were bad. Guns killed. Screw the Second Amendment, which was a bad one and consequently could be rightly ignored, and eliminate guns. Then came the first crack in the rock.
Emily Bazelon’s homage to illegal guns in the hands of black kids was, to be blunt, simultaneously bizarre and unsurprising. It was less about the virtue of guns than an apologia for illegal guns, but only when held by young men who swore that they were only carrying them in self defense and would never use a gun offensively. It wasn’t their fault. They said so. She believed them.
But the New York Times has had its Doctor Strangelove moment. Continue reading
Will your kids return to college in the fall? They’ve got plans to protect them, you know, from COVID-19. There isn’t a chance in hell it’s going to work, as everyone who isn’t suffering from delusion or selling a delusion realizes. It’s not that they aren’t interested, although many aren’t all that interested, but kids are remarkably good at doing stupid things and coming up with excuses for them. And they’re invincible, every one of them, right up until they feel the pain.
In any ordinary semester, some students fall apart. They overextend themselves with extracurricular activities, fall into depressions, drink to excess, weather their parents’ divorces or their own wrenching breakups. Their performance in class suffers as a result, and we often find ourselves listening to their tales of woe. We can’t hug them, as my colleague Jessica McCaughey observes, so we make do with listening sympathetically, granting extensions, helping them figure out what they can do to catch up in our class, connecting them with resources such as the university counseling service.
Each individual in the crowd of protesters, or mob of rioters as the case may be, sees himself as an individual actor, responsible only for what he does and not for anyone else in the crowd. Should he choose, for reasons that are exceptionally unclear and moronic, to stand before an SUV, he certainly isn’t the person who made the choice to bring a gun to the protest, to pull it out, to aim the gun and fire it at the person in the SUV.
He’s just a nice guy trying to protest police brutality, or a statue of U.S. Grant, or whatever pops into his mind at the moment he decided that whoever is inside the SUV somehow deserves to be stopped, swarmed by the mob, for the offense to race of driving home for work, or maybe driving to the market to buy a quart of milk. What did he do to deserve getting run down? Continue reading
Charles Blow has a point.
On the issue of American slavery, I am an absolutist: enslavers were amoral monsters.
People often try to explain this away by saying that the people who enslaved Africans in this country were simply men and women of their age, abiding by the mores of the time.
But, that explanation falters. There were also men and women of the time who found slavery morally reprehensible. The enslavers ignored all this and used anti-black dehumanization to justify the holding of slaves and the profiting from slave labor.
A few weeks ago, one of my “reply guys” on twitter pointed out to me that my damnable reliance on facts and reason, on “hard” fixes to actual problems rather than empty platitudes and my moderated refusal to indulge in simplistic hatred of tribal enemies, missed the boat.
He told me, “You’re wrong. We’ve moved the Overton Window* so far left that defunding the police is taken seriously.”
At the time, I didn’t appreciate his message. But after due deliberation, I’ve come to realize he’s got a point. A very good point. It’s no longer limited to a small group of nutjobs screaming for inane radical solutions that no one, no elected official, no business leader, no academic, no one of modest intelligence and a limited capacity for reason, would take seriously. Continue reading