Just maybe, the problem isn’t men and the New York Times isn’t the right place to go to fix what ails you?

Dear Sugars,

How do I deal with my anger toward men? I go to therapy, I’m on anti-depressants and I’m trying to practice self-care. But I’m still angry. I don’t think it’s unwarranted. I’ve been sexually assaulted at least twice. We live in a time where women have more rights than ever, but our president is an alleged sexual predator. Men are socialized to be condescending toward women, and even the few who check themselves often fail. Continue reading →

Wesley Lowery asks a question that has been at the forefront of my concerns about reform for years.

Police are still killing black people. Why isn’t it news anymore?

His subtitle provides a hint as to the answer.

The activism never stopped. But the attention to it vanished.

He assumes, wrongly, that the “activism” was the reason people cared, people paid attention. For a brief, shining moment, following a list of names of unarmed/innocent black people being killed by police for no cognizable reason, people gave a damn. Not just activists, but people. White people. black people, green people. People.  Continue reading →

When Sex Offender Registries were all the rage, despite their fundamentally false premise that people needed to know where sex offenders lived to protect the children from this uncontrollable animals, they were an easy sell to an angry public. But after they were created, after the rules were formed, the shame was established, where else would they go?

In Kansas, drugs seemed like a good idea.

[U]nder Kansas law, having a drug conviction means that her photograph and other identifying details are displayed in the same public registry that includes more than 10,000 convicted sex offenders. Many registrants also appear on third-party websites like “Offender Radar” and “Sex Offender Spy,” and it’s easy for a visitor to miss the single word—“drug”—that differentiates Byers’s crime from those the public judges much more harshly. “People who don’t know me are going to look at me like I’m a horrible person for being on that list,” she said.

Continue reading →

The unholy relationship between media and police is nothing new. The former relies on the latter feeding it stories, press releases, details of crimes and emergencies, and when the cops don’t feed them the story, they have no story to tell. The upshot is that newspapers can’t afford to piss off the cops or they could end up with empty pages.

An email from Shane Jacobs of the Kentucky State Police made this abundantly clear.

Good afternoon, I would like to start out by saying that I feel I have a great working relationship with the media in our area. I work many hours and sometimes on my days off to relay information to the media outlets.  I want you guys to know I do have a personal life and sometimes I can’t respond to your emails as quick as you would like. I am out of town at times spending it with my family. I have trainings, State Fair, Trooper Island, and other events I have to attend, which  causes me to be out of town also.

Continue reading →

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 →