It’s far short of a backlash to the legitimization of advocacy journalism, but at least some are beginning to question whether it’s a good idea for media that purports to be neutral to be flagrantly partisan. That people have lost faith in media may have something to do with it, although those people aren’t the people media cares about. They’re not their kind of people.

At Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander takes a long and prolix scalpel to Vox’s David Robert’s post, Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. Don’t blame me, I didn’t write the headline. But the subtitle says more:

Journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible.

When you start out with sophistry like that, where can you possibly go? Continue reading →

Despite what some might believe, it’s worth the effort to try to understand what people are talking about when they use words like “intersectional,” if for no other reason than to clean out those excess brain cells. Would it not be unfair to be judgmental without giving them a chance to make their case?

We use the term in many vague ways. “We really need to be sure our work is intersectional…We need to be more intersectional in how we talk about student identities…Our teaching strategies must be intersectional and culturally responsive.” I don’t use “we” in the royal sense. This is something I do all the time without thinking critically about my meaning.

But what the hell are we even saying when we use the term?

I ask that question a lot. But it appears that no matter what the answer may be, it may still not be good enough to avoid the rebuke, if you’re lucky, or the death penalty, if you’re not, of not being correct enough. Continue reading →

The headline was, at best, misleading.

Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms

Eric Loomis wasn’t sent to prison by a software program. And he wasn’t sent to prison by a program’s secret algorithms. He was sentenced to prison by a judge, just like anyone else sent to prison. Never forget that. But the length of time for which he was sent to prison was influenced by a program and its secret sauce.

The report in Mr. Loomis’s case was produced by a product called Compas, sold by Northpointe Inc. It included a series of bar charts that assessed the risk that Mr. Loomis would commit more crimes.

The Compas report, a prosecutor told the trial judge, showed “a high risk of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” The judge agreed, telling Mr. Loomis that “you’re identified, through the Compas assessment, as an individual who is a high risk to the community.”

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His family’s lawyer, Lee Merritt, summed it up.

They have a dead child, they have the identity of the shooter, and they have no explanation for the shooting.

A 15-year-old boy, leaving a party that had gotten out of hand, is dead. They couldn’t find a bad thing to say about him, an excuse, a story, a lie, to turn this great kid into someone less than worthy of our concern. By all accounts, he was just a great young man.

Jordan, a popular football player, was killed shortly after leaving a party with a group of friends on Saturday night.

The cops responded to a 911 call about drunken kids at a party, and the story is that they heard gunfire from an “unknown altercation.” That’s about as close as it will get to explaining why one officer was so filled with fear and loathing that it was more important that he fire blindly than risk any chance that a bullet might strike him.  Continue reading →

The Associated Press’ story is chilling and horrible.

Chaz Wing was 12 when they came after him. The classmates who tormented him were children, too, entering the age of pimples and cracking voices.

Eventually, he swore under oath, the boys raped him and left him bleeding, the culmination of a year of harassment. Though Chaz repeatedly told teachers and administrators about insults and physical attacks, he didn’t report being sexually assaulted until a year later, launching a long legal fight over whether his school had done enough to protect him.

That a 12-year-old could be anally raped three times in a public school, and nothing is done about it, is an outrage. According to the story, this is a huge problem.

Relying on state education records, supplemented by federal crime data, a yearlong investigation by The Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to spring 2015.

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One of the most difficult problems with any discussion of the shift in federal deportation priorities is that people have no idea how it works or who we’re talking about. This isn’t accidental, as it became politically incorrect to call a person an “illegal alien” (“no person is inherently illegal”) in favor of “undocumented immigrants.” Now, all are wrapped up under the word immigrants, regardless of status, as if noting that some are here lawfully and some are not is a racist slur.

To drag someone out of the life they have painstakingly created over many years, for something as petty as traffic violations or shoplifting, is a gross violation of the proportionality principle — that the punishment should fit the crime. To execute longtime residents of the United States for traffic violations would clearly be a violation of their human rights. Human rights by their nature apply to both citizens and noncitizens alike. It is difficult to see why deportation for such violations is not also a human rights violation. How, then, have so many of us accepted these policies so at odds with our American values?

In an op-ed which conflates every conceivable distinction into a blizzard of ignorance, one detail is omitted from this appeal to emotion: no one is being dragged from their life because of a traffic violation or shoplifting. They are being deported because they are here illegally, and came to the government’s attention because they committed a violation of law, petty though the violation may be.  Continue reading →

It’s true that the Antifa doesn’t represent all college students, a generation’s reaction to hate speech. But then, even if most students know better than to resort to violence to silence speakers who espouse ideas they deem reprehensible, it doesn’t mean they don’t agree that hate speech isn’t free speech. This, according to a white paper put out by Newseum President and CEO Jeffrey Herbst, is their “alternate understanding of the First Amendment.”

Systematic public opinion polling and anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that the real problem of free expression on college campuses is much deeper than episodic moments of censorship: With little comment, an alternate understanding of the First Amendment has emerged among young people that can be called “the right to non-offensive speech.”

This perspective essentially carves out an exception to the right of free speech by trying to prevent expression that is seen as particularly offensive to an identifiable group, especially if that collective is defined in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity. The crisis is not one of the very occasional speaker thrown off campus, however regrettable that is; rather, it is a generation that increasingly censors itself and others, largely silently but sometimes through active protest.

Of course, high-level observations about an entire age cohort are by definition difficult and care must be taken in making generalizations. However, to ignore the different view that many of today’s students have on free speech would be to doom any effort to promote intellectual exchange on campus.*

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Jordan Rushie tells of his travails as he left the big city of Fishtown behind to teach the bumpkins of bucolic Ridgway, situated in Elk County, Pennsylvania, how law is done.

As I arrived late on a Sunday night, the area had a certain charm to it. Surrounded by state game land and steel factories, I felt like I had traveled back in time about 100 years. Things seemed much simpler out here.

Starving after a long drive, I pulled up into a diner and sat down next to a heavy fellow. We began striking up a conversation.

“You look fancy in that suit and tie. Are you a lawyer or a banker or something?”
“Lawyer. I have a trial out here tomorrow.”
“Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia… Fishtown.”
“Ah, a city slicker…” he said with a bit of a twang.

There is a certain rush to hitting the road when you’re a young lawyer, finally having someone think well enough of your talents to want you to travel far away to represent them. A change of pace, a test of one’s mettle, the chance to imagine oneself as Paladin, Have Gun, Will Travel. But being a stranger in a strange land has its disadvantages. Every lawyer loves My Cousin Vinny, even if we forget that it’s just a movie. Continue reading →

That a man must break his back
To earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he’s dead

–John Lennon, Girl, 1965

Jill Filipovic was born in 1983. That was the year I was admitted to the New York bar, having passed the July, 1982 bar exam. She tells of her grandmother’s, her mother’s experience leading to hers. It’s assumed she’s telling the truth, though she hasn’t earned the right to be believed.

But there isn’t much question of her reliance on her own narrative from which we are to extrapolate that the significance of the female experience can be inferred from her story. Pundits like to do that, to assume that they are universal and their experience is a substitute for everyone else’s experience. It’s not like readers have their own families, mothers and grandmothers, from which to draw.

Her point was that women in the olden days were forced into “women’s work,” mostly motherhood and housewifery, and if not, teachers and nurses. As Filipovic speaks of my generation from her own distance, she’s not entirely wrong, but not entirely right either. Feminism in the 60s and 70s sought equality, and women were seeking out new territory, new occupations and professions. Continue reading →

Most of us never give much thought to the exclusion of deaf people. And deaf people don’t give a damn about the exclusion of blind people, because they’re deaf and not blind, and deaf is definitely worse based on a poll at Gallaudet University. This is why clapping is literally horrifying.

Britain’s largest national student union has told attendees of its annual conference they would face “consequences” for cheering and clapping because these forms of expression exclude deaf people.

What those consequences might be is unclear, though it clearly involved repeated warnings, public shaming, and the occasional burning of a witch. And like all truly exhausting problems, it required the institution of official rules to make it so.

In response to the complaints, the Durham University student union proposed a motion at the conference that would see clapping and whooping banned at all future NUS events. According to the motion, “access needs of disabled students are disregarded/overlooked in terms of conference member behaviour and NUS structures”. Continue reading →