For people born yesterday, the fury was about New York Times’ editorial writer Bari Weiss’ “racist” twit.
Mirai Nagasu was not an immigrant, though her parents were. So Weiss’ twit, a reference to the play Hamilton, was technically inaccurate. What it was not was mean or hateful. She lauded Nagasu’s achievement. It was positive toward immigrants. It checked a few boxes, but that wasn’t good enough. Continue reading →
A decade ago, I learned that lawprofs didn’t care much for practicing lawyers. We were vulgar, harsh and intemperate (that’s a word used in moderated speech to mean we said nasty things). We had two unpleasant tendencies: we said what we meant and when we disagreed, we made our position clear.
Some academics don’t like this at all. Or to be more precise, they hate it when it’s done to them. They give themselves greater latitude when they do it to others, because they’re right so it’s justifiable. They make up rules (there seems to be a huge affinity for rules) that explain all this, inconsistent though they usually are, and only tell us after we’ve violated them.
When mediator Lucy Moore saw pony-tail man’s BMW idling longer than she felt was appropriate, she indulged in “revenge” fantasies of sticking a potato in the exhaust. Fortunately, unenvironmental car idling has yet to be made a killable offense, so there was no option of calling the cops on the miscreant.
Not that Lucy would have done so. It was just a fantasy. Enough of a fantasy that she felt the need to write about it and tell people of her secret desire to do harm. But she says should would never actually do harm. I have no reason to dispute her.
When the “victim” of the person doing something you feel is wrong is a child, however, there is not only a basis to invoke the wrath of government, but a moral imperative. At least, that’s the justification proffered by the well-intended. Continue reading →
It was eleven years ago today that Dr. SJ told me she was busy, to stop pestering her and find something else to do.
Like what?
“Start a blog,” she replied. And so SJ was born. I had no particular purpose at the time. I knew nothing about blogging, but I liked to write. So I did.
Over the years, SJ has gone through a great many permutations, issues that struck my fancy, points I felt like making, occasional personal stories and commentary on the law. There’s a quite a bit packed into the archives, and chances are good that whatever you wish I would write about is already there. I don’t look back at it, and many links from years past are now dead, as other bloggers have come and gone. Continue reading →
He was called a coward by his fellow cops. He was fired for putting their lives at risk. And he settled his claim for wrongful termination for $175,000. It’s not an insignificant amount of money by any stretch, but it pales in comparison to the cost of the message.
That night, Stephen Mader, then an officer with the Weirton Police Department in West Virginia, responded to a domestic-dispute call. Once at the scene, he encountered a “visibly distraught” man named Ronald J. Williams, court documents said.
Mader was a white probationary cop. Williams was a black man trying to commit suicide by cop. This isn’t surmise, but shown by the fact that the gun he was holding, that he refused to drop, was unloaded.
“I can’t do that,” Williams responded, according to court documents. “Just shoot me.”
Not being a gamer, the name Nolan Bushnell meant nothing to me. But what he created did, as I, like most young people in the ’70s, spent many hours with Atari’s magical game, Pong. And it seems right that the Game Developer’s Conference would choose to honor Atari’s co-founder with its Pioneer Award. Until it changed its mind.
Brianna Wu took to Twitter to disagree.
Note: Bushnell was at Atari in the 1970s, not the 80s.
What followed was the #NotNolan campaign and a quick article in The Verge that would result in the GDC rescinding the award the very next day, instead choosing to honor “the pioneering and unheard voices of the past.”
Why? Wu didn’t work for Atari. Wu made no claim of being subjected to any impropriety by Bushnell. Wu wasn’t there, and couldn’t have been there. She wasn’t yet alive. So why? Continue reading →
A foundational myth in the myriad considerations when a defendant “chooses” to cop a plea is that it’s consensual. That means, knowing, intelligent and voluntary. And that’s a dubious proposition at best, relying on two primary things: First, that defense counsel adequately and well advises his client. Second, that both lawyer and client possess sufficient information to make a “knowing, intelligent and voluntary” decision.
Taking a page from the U.S. Supreme Court’s heinous playbook, a panel of the Fifth Circuit in June of 2017 reversed a $2 million judgment a jury awarded George Alvarez. In 2006, Mr. Alvarez pled* guilty to assaulting a public servant—a charge levied against him by a detention officer at the Brownsville Police Department (BPD) who claimed that Alvarez attacked him in the jail. Years into his prison sentence, Mr. Alvarez learned of a BPD videotape which proved that the officer lied when he claimed Alvarez assaulted him.
Maybe it’s not entirely about porn, but Ross Douthat says it doesn’t help.
For anyone who grew up with the ideals of post-sexual revolution liberalism, there is a striking pathos to these educators’ efforts. The sex education programs in my mostly liberal schools featured a touching faith from the adults in charge that they were engaged in a great work of enlightenment, that with the right curricula they could roll back the forces of repression and make sexuality a place of egalitarian pleasure and safety for us all.
All that sexual enlightenment gone to pot. Why? Porn.
Compared to those idealists, the people teaching “porn literacy” have accepted a sweeping pedagogical defeat. They take for granted that the most important sex education may take place on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work is essentially remedial, and that there is no escape from the world that porn has made.
District of Nebraska Senior Judge Richard Kopf called it his ““terrible sentencing instinct,” when he banged a bank robber with a long sentence. That bank robber was Shon Hopwood, who is now a law professor at Georgetown.
Judge Rosemarie Aquilina was lauded for her intemperate words when sentencing Larry Nassar, from wishing him prison rape to condemning him to life in prison, even though that particular sentence was not within her authority. This was a show of “empathy” for Nassar’s victims, and a reflection of societal outrage. Judge Aquilina’s words conveyed the blood lust that many felt. Sure, her words were harsh, but isn’t that what a judge should do when that’s what people want?
Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Turner to six months incarceration, leading to national cries of outrage and a campaign by a Stanford law prof, Michele Dauber, to have him recalled as a judge so that all judges learn that they either be as harsh as Dauber and her mob demand or suffer the consequences.
In December 2015, I wrote a story about the potential uses of the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. That piece, based on a conference that I attended in Washington, D.C., quoted six men and one woman. The six men included five scientists and one historian, all quoted for their professional expertise. The one woman was a communications director at a tissue bank organization, and her quote was about her experience as the mother of a child with a genetic disease.
Was his story about CRISPR accurate? Factual? Correct? Bah. The real question was whether he included enough women. Continue reading →
