Damn video.  Without it, they would be building a statue on the campus of the State University of Albany for the three black women who would be victims of a horrible racist attack. A presidential candidate twitted her support. A college president rushed back to campus after sending a note to his community to express his outrage. Hundreds of students rallied to the cause.

The incident occurred on January 30, 2016, and one of the students, Asha Burwell, spread the word:

I just got jumped on a bus while people hit us and called us the “n” word and NO ONE helped us.

— Asha Burwell (@AshaBurwell) January 30, 2016

And on board everyone jumped. Continue reading →

It’s hard enough to communicate when many believe with the utmost sincerity that words mean whatever they feel they mean, dictionaries be damned.  But then, the right to individual pronouns is just the beginning of communication insanity. It’s damn near illuminating compared to the bottom of the communication pit, emojis.

And yet, we’ve reached the point where prosecution for threat by emoji is now seen as a viable, indeed, necessary course.

The smiley face, heart, praying hands and other “emoji” have become the way millions of Internet users playfully punctuate their texts, posts and messages, but for one middle schooler the icons brought the police to her door. Continue reading →

Some young people go out and find jobs, and are appreciative of the opportunity. But most don’t, never having the experience of what it means to work, to work for someone, to take orders, to do things they find “unpleasant,” to earn money that fails to meet their expectations of self-worth.

When they finally enter the workforce, they are shocked to find that they aren’t appreciated in the ways they were told they deserve. Their boss doesn’t respect them like their mommies, or their professors. Their opinions, so valid and respected before, are now worthless and unappreciated.  Their superiors are stupid because they don’t do or think as they feel they should.  They are not merely disappointed, but crushed by the failure of employment to meet their great expectations.

The New York Times, as so many others, sees a connection between the misery of young people entering the workplace with the lack of work experience growing up.  It decries the demise of the summer job. Continue reading →

I first heard of Talia Jane’s tale of woe from Keith Lee, who later wrote about it.  My sense was that it would be wrong to kick her when she was down. Sure, it was a product of poor choices, and she was certainly the poster girl for entitlement, but still. She was sad and pathetic, and being misguided and entitled isn’t a crime.

Coming out of college without much more than freelancing and tutoring under my belt, I felt it was fair that I start out working in the customer support section of Yelp/Eat24 before I’d be qualified to transfer to media. Then, after I had moved and got firmly stuck in this apartment with this debt, I was told I’d have to work in support for an entire year before I would be able to move to a different department. A whole year answering calls and talking to customers just for the hope that someday I’d be able to make memes and twitter jokes about food. If you follow me on twitter, which you don’t, you’d know that these are things I already do. But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s get back to the situation at hand, shall we?

So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week.

Keith explained it thus:

Every stereotypical thing wrong with Millennials you’ve ever read. The writer:

• Moves from modest area of the country, to the most expensive.
• Has useless degree, surprised it only qualified her for entry level job.
• Whines about entry level job, not being paid 6 figures to make meme jokes.
• Claims she can’t afford food, her Insta is filled with big meals.
• Complains work-provided snacks are not refilled on the weekends.
• Writes open letter to CEO full of her “amazing ideas,” surprised she is fired.
• Works at low-level job for less than a year, is complaining on Twitter about getting her “severance.”
• Signs off with e-begging.

I can’t even.

The problem isn’t so much with her choices, but her complaining about the natural consequences of her choices.  Some of these may have valid reasons, such as food pics on “Insta,” which may contradict her claims or may have a perfectly valid explanation. No matter. Keith “can’t even.” I can “even” a little more, largely because Talia Jane isn’t much different than many young people I’ve met. Perfectly nice young people. Well educated young people. Passionate young people. And sad and pathetic young people when life didn’t work out the way they were certain it would. Certain, because, well they were entitled to it.

Then another young woman, Stefanie Williams, replied to Talia Jane. Unkindly, perhaps, but not without reason and some advice. Like Talia, things didn’t work out well at first, so she worked hard and, eventually, did better.

Six months later, I was offered the weekend bartending shifts for the month of December. Long hours, lots of stress, I smelled like bad citrus and stale beer most of the time, I had to miss Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Years Eve with my family and friends, but I jumped at the opportunity. And all of a sudden, after about a year, I was making enough money to live. And after several years, I was making enough money to live well.

Hard work, sacrifice and it turned out okay. That’s nice for you.  But yet another woman, Sara Lynn Michener, decided to make it a trilogy on Medium.

After reading your bizarre excuse for a mini autobiography detailing the privileged yet banal struggle you dealt with in your early 20s, which was apparently supposed to be a response to a younger woman’s perfectly reasonable request for a larger hourly rate, I felt it imperative to give you a taste of your own medicine and above all, your painfully deep need to acknowledge your own privilege, so maybe some advice will help while you piss all over what — to me — sounds an awful lot like a less fortunate (and far kinder) version of your younger self. If nothing else, I hope you might learn the meaning of the “grace and humility.” you’ve anointed yourself with.

Spoiler: kicking a younger sister when she’s down in self-congratulatory snark is neither gracious nor humble.

While I was a bit put off by the “kicking a younger sister” bit, as if women should be kinder to their own gender, what I found most disturbing was Michener’s title:

36 year-old DESTROYS 29-year-old millennial who “ripped” 25-year-old Yelp employee who got fired after complaining about her salary

Apparently, Michener thought rather well of her effort. But she called Williams “privileged,” and that’s what prompted me to write about this.

Some of us don’t have mothers at all. But not you. Only privileged people are embarrassed to be working as a waitress because their very present mothers are waiting there, full of love, for you to blossom (in your case into a snarky self-satisfied prat).

And:

I can’t even imagine what life must be like for people that privileged. Perhaps you are one of those people, Stefanie. It would explain a lot about how you OWN every single one of your blessings and label it as “having a work ethic” But I don’t see any more of a work ethic than what Talia has. You were willing to work a shitty job; You want a medal for it. Talia just wants to eat.

What to make of all this? The word “privilege” has been used as an attack and excuse. It seems to be what some have and others want, and still others demand it be given up, though it makes little sense, as if making one’s life harder is a wise, or even a realistic, choice. Especially at a time when things are hard for everyone.

There’s room for empathy. There’s also room for a reminder about the value of hard work, smart choices, realistic thinking and recognition that you’re promised the opportunity to pursue happiness, not a right to obtain it.

Don’t kick Talia Jane when she’s down. Don’t rub her tummy as if she had no hand in creating her circumstances either. And if you want to help Talia Jane, help her to see the error of her misguided sense of entitlement rather than make excuses for her victimhood.  Talia Jane needs to eat. She can’t eat excuses. I wish her the best of luck in her quest to find a fulfilling life.  And if she has some “privilege” upon which to draw, I hope she does so successfully.

On one side of the ledger, there are young black men gunned down in the street. On the other side, there are old white men in positions of power. Is there a connection? Of course there is. Once the black faces aren’t presumptively more likely to be thought of as criminals, as worthless, throw-away lives, cops won’t be as quick to kill. But that doesn’t answer the question raised by the New York Times’ pictorial on the faces of power.

The Times runs through various palaces of power, from Congress to the cabinet, Ivy League universities to Hollywood execs, music producers to big city mayors, publishing houses to, well, you get the point. And what cannot be missed is that the people who control power in America are overwhelmingly white.

In a world where race, ethnicity, national origin was ignored, one would expect to see faces in relative proportion to people’s representation in the population.  If the United States population was 13% black, then so too would be the members of the Senate, the heads of newspapers, the owners of basketball teams. But they’re not. Not even close.

This makes a point, premised on the presumption that there is no intrinsic basis for racial proportionality not to exist, that we remain a highly segregated society, despite all we do to end discrimination.  But it’s an inflammatory point that offers no solution. While the Times’ images will get people worked up, outraged, about discrimination, it fails to raise, no less address, some hard, cold realities. Continue reading →

The fact pattern was one of those that makes your head hurt.  Radley Balko explains:

Cass and Charles Camp were owners of the Abilene Gold Exchange, a business that bought jewelry and other precious gems and metals and paid the owners in cash. Like pawn shops, these are businesses where thieves often try to unload stolen merchandise, but the opinion itself points out that the two men had cooperated with police investigations in the past. Neither man had much of a criminal past. The only charge between them was a 30-year-old felony conviction against Camp for possession of marijuana.

Very long story short (and you should read Radley’s full post, as the facts are far too long to repeat in full here), the two were deemed “anti-cop” by the cops, failed to upload new buys to a website for cops to check out for stolen goods, and a new cop to the unit decided they needed some investigation, so he got a warrant.

[I]nstead of walking in, in uniform, and giving the two men the opportunity to peacefully comply with a search warrant, “a team in body armor led by a uniformed officer would enter the business quickly with guns drawn to secure the premises and execute the warrant” — for “the safety of the officers.”

Continue reading →

The game of pointing to hypocrisy must be great fun, as it’s being played everywhere you look. Why is it cool for the Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans to refuse to consider a Supreme Court nominee?  Because Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Vice President Joe Biden played the same game years ago. Gotcha!!!

Except it’s a false argument. Two wrongs don’t make a right. That the other team is full of shit doesn’t make you any less full of shit. You’re all full of shit. Just because you’re not the only one covered in shit doesn’t mean you smell any better.  Yet, people seem to adore this argument as it makes them feel as if they aren’t nearly as full of shit as they are. Or perhaps it’s just people full of shit love company. Either way, it’s unavailing.

At Volokh Conspiracy, government apologist Stewart Baker tries to play this game as well. He’s not very good at it, and apparently, isn’t much of a lawyer either, as reflected in his peculiar vision of how real lawyers ask questions. But he tries despite his challenges.

To avoid helping the FBI search the San Bernardino terrorist’s phone, Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, are going to spend weeks in court, and probably on Capitol Hill.  That means that for the first time the government will have a chance to use subpoenas and discovery to judge the truth of the claims that the famously secretive Silicon Valley company and its allies have been making.  This should be fun.

Continue reading →

For reasons that are unclear, I get an invitation every year to attend the Loyola “Journalist Law School.”  No, not to teach, but to learn. Because it’s not like I’m, you know, a lawyer or anything.

The challenge of reporting on the legal system without a law degree is daunting. To help support journalists who cover the courts on national, regional or local levels, the Civil Justice Program at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has developed the journalist law program consisting of a four-day intensive seminar on the legal system. 

Putting aside the fact that whoever sends out the emails promoting this seminar isn’t paying a lot of attention, the concept is great.  Journalists, with certain exceptions, absolutely suck at understanding law. This isn’t to say that they should have the depth of understanding that a practicing lawyer would have, or that they should stop focusing on salacious detail in favor of boring legalistic stuff. If it bleeds, it leads. We know you have papers to sell.

But the constant incorrect use of words, concepts you don’t understand, huge gaps in legal reasoning and flagrant misstatement of law isn’t just bad writing. It makes people stupider. It does harm.  If this program is any good, it has the potential to teach journalists how to do less harm, how to make people less stupider.  Continue reading →

Many people laughed at the absurdity of the government’s pandering to the clueless, the appeal to emotion of the poor victims, the desire for safety über alles. Oh no, let’s argue about the nuances of technology, the ability of Apple, or perhaps its employees, to refuse to write code, the levels of harm that creating a backdoor will cause, both here and abroad, and how it will be used over and over, despite government hacks’ protests to the contrary.

When the response was that all of this missed the point, missed the mark of what the decision-makers would focus on, the reply was “no way.”  Meet the nice folks at Pew.

The folks over at Pew Research usually do pretty good work, but they decided to weigh in on the Apple / FBI backdoor debate by asking a really dumb poll question — the results of which are now being used to argue that the public supports the FBI over Apple by a pretty wide margin.

As Radley Balko frequently points out when a cop shoots someone, the story includes a vague, passive phrase, like “officer-involved shooting,” or my favorite, “the gun discharged,” as if it went off by itself, magically causing a bullet to emit from a barrel at great velocity into the body of a human being. Because that way, it conveys the impression that a person did nothing wrong, but, well, things just happen.

And the New York Times has embraced the idea that when it comes to reforming the travesty of pre-trial detention, the problem is an Island.  The name of the island now is Rikers. The Times proposes that it be renamed Browder Island, but what it really wants is to call it Fantasy Island.

Any serious effort to repair criminal justice in New York City must do something about Rikers Island, the jail complex in the East River where justice goes to die, or at least be severely beaten.

The Times has reported for years on the savagery there. The Justice Department has investigated its corrupted, poisoned culture. The department’s report on the abuse of teenage inmates is horrific reading. In a long history of often-fatal violence, incompetence and neglect, one tragic case stands out: that of Kalief Browder, who was 16 when he was taken to Rikers, accused of stealing a backpack.

Continue reading →