When law and philosophy prof Brian Leiter revealed academic and feminist superstar Judith Butler’s disgraceful and flagrantly hypocritical letter defending her sister superstar, NYU prof Avital Ronell, I was ready to pull the trigger. I have a post, dated June 13, 2018, fully written, but never published. I knew something Leiter didn’t.

At the time the Butler letter was sent around for signatures, threatening NYU with the wrath of scholars if Ronell wasn’t exonerated, the university had already found Ronell responsible. The only remaining question was what to do about it, one of the university’s brightest academic lights had sexually harassed a gay male student under her care.

This wasn’t one of the faux Title IX cases of post-hoc regret, but the real deal. Ronell was grad student Nimrod Reitman’s doctoral adviser. He came to NYU because of her, to study under her. And from the start of his graduate studies, she turned him into her boy toy upon the implicit threat of destroying his career. And it continued throughout his graduate studies, as proven by Ronell’s emails. Continue reading →

It was a year since the march of the Naxos, tiki torches in hand. The media geared up for it. The cops put on their finest riot gear. The Antifa wore their blackest blacks and the protesters were worked up into a lather.

And then . . .

It was supposed to be the start of another show of force by white nationalists: Unite the Right 2, the follow-up to last year’s disastrous and violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, which concluded with a Nazi sympathizer ramming his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing one.

But Dan, who said he was a supporter of “peaceful” ethnic cleansing, was the only white nationalist to be seen at the march’s starting point, the Foggy Bottom metro station. Continue reading →

Nebraska hasn’t executed anyone in 21 years, but the people of Nebraska are jonesing for a kill and Carey Dean Moore* looks to be the one to do it. Unlike the fiasco in Tennessee with Billy Ray Irick’s torture by midazolam, Nebraska will use the dreaded opioid, fentanyl.

A federal judge on Friday rejected a drug company’s request to block Nebraska from using what the company believes are its products in an execution next week, clearing the way for the state to carry out its first lethal injection and the country’s first execution using the powerful opioid fentanyl.

The German drug company, Fresenius Kabi, contends that it must have manufactured the fentanyl Nebraska intends to use, and that Nebraska must possess it unlawfully since it refuses to sell the drug for the purpose of executions and includes restrictions on the use of its drug when it’s sold. It doesn’t want the drug it manufactures to be used for that purpose. It doesn’t want to be known as the company that provides drugs to kill.  Continue reading →

A man named Billy Ray Irick died this week in Tennessee. Irick’s passing was no surprise to those familiar with him, as he’d been sentenced to die by a jury for the brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl back in 1986. What’s surprising is the blind eye turned to Irick’s execution method: a three drug lethal injection that potentially tortured Irick for up to 18 minutes.

Tennessee’s lethal injection procedure involves administration of three drugs: midazolam, which is supposed to act as a sedative rendering the subject unable to feel pain, vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer, and a final dose of compound potassium chloride which stops the heart. Adopted in January, the procedure sounds, in theory, as if it’s a humane way to end someone’s life.

But it’s only theoretically humane because there’s a chance midazolam doesn’t work as well as people expect. In fact, there’s enough of a concern over the efficacy of midazolam that several death row inmates are in a class action lawsuit claiming the midazolam lethal injection protocol constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Continue reading →

Yesterday, Chris Seaton sent me a link to a 1993 clip from the David Letterman show of a comedian, Bill Hicks, doing his shtick. It was shocking, to say the least, to see how much comedy has changed, how the range of acceptability has narrowed over the years. Then, Hicks’ comedy routine was suitable for television. Today, he would be drawn and quartered for it.

A few days ago, I wrote about a post that appeared in the renamed Harvard Fair Punishment Project blog, The Appeal. It was about a serious problem in criminal law, the use of the rap sheet, or if no sheet, whatever was available, to smear the victim of violence as being unworthy of concern. Except instead of focusing on the problem, it was a jargonized polemic about “white-approved notions of innocence and respectability.”

It didn’t just reduce a systemic problem to a racial problem, but pitted black against white, blaming the latter. Not only was this a grossly unproductive way to approach a very real problem, but it was irrational and false, with a heavy dose of “I dare you to disagree, since that makes you a racist, you racist.” Continue reading →

It hardly seemed like much of a stretch for some lunatic on the right to take Trump’s constant chant of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” to heart, and act upon it. It’s not just the believers gonna believe, but that it’s assumed that anyone tied to the alt-right was at an intellectual deficit to begin with, and would need only the tiniest of pushes to go over the edge.

Violence? Any moment now. Then boom, there is was.

Antifa Protesters Attack NBC Reporter @CalNBC & The Entire Camera Crew In Charlottesville, VA pic.twitter.com/LYgiCFm64o

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 12, 2018

Continue reading →

The old union song implores the workers to pick their side. The Bank of the West forced the same choice on the people of Moffat County, Colorado, except this time, the bank stood for social justice and played the role of J.H. Blair.

The reverberations arising from Bank of the West’s recent social media post are still echoing across Moffat County, and with each passing day, it appears more and more likely that the future may not be all that bright for the institution, at least not in Moffat County.

Readers will no doubt recall that, last week, Bank of the West proclaimed in a Facebook post it will no longer do business with industries that support tobacco, coal, fracking, or Arctic drilling.

The industries hated by the woke. Not without reason, necessarily, but from their comfortable distance close to oceans, left and right. And the Bank of the West, whether because banks have suddenly grown a conscious or came to realize that pandering to social justice mobs might be good PR and keep them from being hated. Continue reading →

The New York Times headline was surprisingly encouraging.

Speedy Trials Return to a Bronx Court Known for Delays and Dysfunction

To call it “delays and dysfunction” was to grossly understate the problem, which was revealed as a New York disgrace with the revelations following Kalief Browder’s suicide. In 2016, Bronx Defenders brought suit to deal with the problem. The suit was now settled.

The settlement of the case, Trowbridge et al v. DiFiore, was signed on Thursday afternoon by attorneys from the Bronx Defenders and the New York attorney general’s office. It mandates that the courts produce quarterly reports about how long cases are taking to resolve and establishes a formal process to request a speedy trial for defendants whose cases are languishing.

Continue reading →

There was a movie years ago* that included a joke about why we should have an “all-girl army.”

If you win, you can point at the other side and say, “Hah, you got beaten by a bunch of girls.” And if you lose, you can point at the other side and say, “Big deal, so you beat a bunch of girls.” Either way, you win.

At the time, this was hysterically funny. Today, it’s about as sexist as it gets. Worse still, women in the military have more than proven their mettle, and there’s just as good a chance some guy warrior will get his butt kicked by a woman warrior as not. There’s nothing that takes the laugh out of a joke faster than a good ass-whupping. Continue reading →

A theme here, and elsewhere, is that the unduly passionate, those who rationalize their views based upon emotions rather than reason, are merely self-indulgent. Their feelings become, at least in their minds and the minds of those who agree with them, an acceptable substitute for thought.

They need not explain their beliefs; that they believe is reason enough. And, indeed, they cannot explain because there is no explanation. Good is good. Right is right. If they believe it’s good and right, it’s justice.

The beauty of this perspective is that there’s no arguing against it. Feelings, you see, can’t be wrong. They are personal. They are theirs. They are, by definition, right. And challenging someone else’s feelings isn’t merely insensitive, but an effort to erase their humanity. It may be insipid and unpersuasive to those who don’t subscribe to feelz über alles, but since no amount of logic can alter the belief, challenges to feelings serve only to reinforce their validity and propriety in the hearts of the unduly passionate.

There is a name for this phenomenon: the “Affective Fallacy.” Continue reading →