Mark Lilla took his career, if not his life, into his hands by writing an op-ed that he knew would make people’s heads explode. Even worse, his break from the progressive orthodoxy would mean that he was now a shitlord, racist, sexist, neo-Nazi, dog-killer and glutton-eater. Come up with a name that would make a progressive ball up in the corner and cry, and that would be LIlla.

For those of us who, like Lilla, realized that the politics of identity would never succeed, dooming us to the rule of Darth Cheeto, he looked a little too much like Gertrude. But then, he was trying to make a point, and a point is of little use if the people who need to get it won’t consider it.

But instead of crying about all the really mean names he was called, he wrote a book. Because they love us, the New York Times had Yale history prof Beverly Gage review it.

Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda “emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.”

Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly meanspirited sneer for today’s campus left. “Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” he instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

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Say a husband and wife want to engage in conjugal relations. They’re both into it. They’re married. What’s the problem? The well-intended protectors of the faith say “nope, no can do,” and warn the wife that if she has sex with her husband, she’ll be in big trouble.

The couple, who married in 2010, were ordered to abstain from sex until the man had completed a sex education course.

His wife moved into a spare bedroom after being told she would be committing a serious criminal offence if she had sex with her husband.

She also “significantly reduced any physical expressions of affection” so she would not “lead him on,” the Court of Protection heard.

Phew. Crisis averted, all because of the timely intervention of the Court of Protection. No, this is not a made up court, but one that was established in the United Kingdom to save people whom the government deemed unworthy of their own agency from themselves. Continue reading →

About ten days ago, SJ hit a landmark, the 100,000 thousandth comment by the commenter who had gone by the handle “El Professor Presente” until he got tired of typing all those letters shortened it to the erudite “el pee pee” (let that be a lesson). And as promised, a copy of Nathan Burney’s Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law went out in the post.

I asked only one thing in return, that EPP send back a pic of him upon receipt, because (you know) without pics, it didn’t happen.

It happened. He’s cuter than I imagined.

Tina Fey was beloved for her comedic ridicule of the right until she wasn’t. Over a sheet cake and not wanting to violently attack people when the mob demanded violence. Oh, to be adored on the pedestal of social justice one minute and a she-devil the next. So exhausting.

But if you think that’s exhausting, it’s nothing compared to the heavy lifting demanded of the New York Times editorial board, faced with the impossible task of explaining away the “armed militias” of the right. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of what happened in Charlottesville was that no one fired a bullet. But no one did.

Even before violence erupted in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, city residents and the police anxiously watched the arrival of self-styled militias — swaggering gangs of armed civilians in combat fatigues — standing guard over the protest by white supremacists and other racist agitators against the removal of a Confederate statue.

Armed swaggering gangs sounds ominous, indeed. Of course, the marching protesters for bad purposes were forewarned that they would be met by counter-protesters bent on violence. Arms can be used to attack or to defend. No bullets were fired. If someone swung a bat at your head, there could well be legal justification to use deadly force to defend oneself, swagger or not. But no bullets were fired. Continue reading →

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

–Oscar Wilde

What distinguishes a cynic from a skeptic is the former impugns the motives of others, while the latter is inclined to require evidence before believing. Usage over time has conflated the words, which is unfortunate. Maybe the liquid is the cure for what ails ya. Maybe it’s snake oil. Until you know, you don’t know, and believing the person selling it isn’t a particularly effective way to find out.

At the Puddle, it was noted that there was one (count them, one) practicing lawyer in attendance at the International Legal Technology Association 2017 conference. For about a decade, we’ve been informed by the unduly passionate that tech would change everything. To say that it hasn’t is an understatement. Remember how the futurists were going to Reinvent Law? Except it never happened.

When I attended the last Reinvent Law, I enjoyed the presentations greatly, but fully realized that wrapping cool gadgets and apps in glowing adjectives to the thrill of the tech-loving audience wasn’t going to cut it. There was one thing missing, that none of this had anything to do with what lawyers actually did. The truth was that they wanted nothing to do with lawyers, who wouldn’t clap enthusiastically at the way Google Glass would change trial forever. Continue reading →

Not being a libertarian, it’s quite possible that there’s a nuance here that eludes me. But it sure seems as if this is a contradiction in terms.

It is not enough to be passively “not racist.” We must be actively anti-racism.

A call to arms, certainly, but what does it mean? Cato’s Jonathan Blanks offers a beautifully written post:

Many of the oppressions America has foisted upon its citizens, particularly its black citizens, indeed came from government actors and agents. But a large number of offenses, from petty indignities to incidents of unspeakable violence, have been perpetrated by private individuals, or by government with full approval of its white citizens. I would venture that many, if not most libertarians—like the general American public—haven’t come to terms with the widespread, systemic subversion of markets and democracy American racism wreaked on its most marginalized citizens. Consequently, libertarians have concentrated rather myopically on government reform as the sole function of libertarian social critique without taking full reckoning of what markets have failed to correct throughout American history.

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Ron Coleman, of the Slants fame, tried. He was all ready to take the plunge, after the American Civil Liberties Union found its groove again.

So I went to the @aclu website.

To join.

And here’s what happened. >

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) August 14, 2017

But there, popped up on his screen, was the real message.

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It’s really quite a brilliant gambit. After all, it worked for the Southern Povery Law Center when they became the media’s go-to site to find out which groups were “hate groups.” That it was often disingenuously based solely on who didn’t share their dogma didn’t seem to bother the media. The SPLC became the trusted experts, though they were anything but trustworthy.

So now, the American Bar Association, desperate to bolster its membership rolls which are comprised of law students with freebie memberships, lawyers sucked in with a free year who drop out when the bill arrives, and otherwise held captive by progressive academics and lawyers of the left, has come up with its own stroke of genius to return itself to a place of relevance in the legal world.

ABA rolls out new fact check website to help separate legal fact from fiction

Fact check? Like does the sun really rise in the east and set in the west? Is the earth really round? Is a bird in the hand worth two in the bush? That they would try to sneak it in under the guise of “facts” is the first giveaway that it’s pandering to the ignorant, as law is many things, but not fact. And it perpetuates its fallacious premise in its opening salvo. Continue reading →

Andrew Miltenberg’s complaint on behalf of a pseudonymous black male student against Texas A&M University is by no means brief.  And yet, after reading it, I was forced to ask Andrew the obvious question: Do you have any idea what “Jane Doe” alleged your client did? Even now, the answer was no, not a clue. Not only does the plaintiff not know what the allegations against him are, but no clue why his one-time dear friend and occasional hook-up over a period of years decided to destroy his life.

And make no mistake, she did some serious damage. And then TAMU heaped on a bunch more.

After receiving a report from a female student, Jane Doe, concerning sexual contact she had with John Doe approximately one year earlier, TAMU failed to conduct an adequate, reliable, and impartial investigation and hearing.

Upon being notified of John Doe’s hospitalization and subsequent admittance to a mental health treatment facility, TAMU proceeded with the investigation and adjudication process without John Doe’s participation altogether, depriving John Doe of his right to defend himself against false allegations. TAMU reached the erroneous conclusion that John Doe had engaged in misconduct, despite a lack of evidence or witness testimony to support Jane Doe’s claims.

John was a smart, hard-working student. A member of the Corps of Cadets and the marching band at TAMU, he was the guy everyone knew would make something of himself. Continue reading →

There’s great power in the name Nazi and Nazi imagery. That’s why losers want to claim the identity. Through this new identity they feel powerful and meaningful. It’s not all that different from losers who join ISIS or declare themselves a martyr for a man pretending to be emperor without any of the humor of the Marx Brothers.

Through the magic of our brains, the Tiki Troopers can become feared as Storm Troopers. Though I am sure my grandfather would have no problem distinguishing between the men of the Wehrmacht, SS, the U-Boats, and the Luftwaffe and these wannabe losers. But nowadays ignorance abounds and any asshole can call themselves a Nazi, get attention, and cause fear. And our primitive need to smash a squawking irritant with a rock becomes rationalized and verbalized as the “right to punch a Nazi.”

But there’s a problem with justifying violence against people who say and think things we don’t like. It seems like an obvious problem, but Ken White was forced to state it:

This is the final hypothetical come to pass: if the state asked you to give up freedoms in exchange for a dubious promise it would make you safer, would you do it? Would you convince yourself that the state would only use the power against Them, and not you?

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