Thought Outlaws

When thoughts are outlawed, only outlaws will have thoughts.

–Abraham Lincoln

The bad girl woman of the New York Times, Bari Weiss, did a meet and greet of the “renegades of the intellectual dark web.” They ranged from the thoughtful to the banal, and even those too far toward the edge for Weiss to include in the intellectual club, and she let it be known that they were unworthy of membership. What they had in common was ideas that were unacceptable to . . . someone.

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

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Short Take: Bail Out Your Dead

Bail has become a controversial subject, much like weather. Everybody talks about it but few do anything. Google has decided that the woke thing to do is ban bail bond ads from its service, as bondsmen have been vilified as profiteers in the contoversy. And former Department of Justice icons of wokeness think that’s groovy.

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Don’t Make Them Kill The Weed Doggies

Hey, if you’re going to believe anything anyone says when it tugs on your heartstrings, why not the cops? After all, who doesn’t love the cute, adorable drug-sniffing dogs?

The training director of a police K-9 academy in Illinois claims that if the state legalizes recreational marijuana, it will likely have to euthanize “a number” of its pot-sniffing dogs, The Pantagraph reports.

There are approximately 275 trained narcotic K-9s in Illinois, with each costing the department thousands of dollars. Replacing the dogs would cost millions, and Chad Larner, the director of Maron County’s K-9 Training Academy, said “retraining” the dogs would be “extreme abuse.”

Not just abuse, which would be horrifying and exhausting, but “extreme abuse.” Would you want a dog to suffer extreme abuse? What kind of a human being are you? Continue reading →

Tuesday Talk*: The Bullshitization** of Real Work

Is your work about performing your job, or is half your time, maybe more, about filling out the paperwork that administrators require of you? Or dealing with the concerns of support staff, for whom you are now their support staff? Has real work become secondary?

For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either make no difference or make the world a better place.

Kinda makes me proud not to practice corporate law.  Continue reading →

Schneiderman’s Fall

New York’s now-ex-Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman fell from grace in the course of half a news cycle. He denies wrongdoing, but that’s no longer relevant.

Until Monday evening New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was a public champion of the #MeToo movement. Now he appears to be the latest sickening example of the scale and insidiousness of the cruelty that movement is confronting. He resigned late Monday after The New Yorker magazine published an article in which four women accused him of abusing them physically and emotionally.

Ronan Farrow ruled. Can there be any doubt after judgment has been handed down?  Continue reading →

Short Take: The Nipple of What’s Easy

Ed Mullins has a way with words. A really bad way with words.

Mullins is the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the second-string bargaining unit in the NYPD. And it’s his job to say whatever he must to defend the honor of his union members or get ousted and be required to work for a living. Continue reading →

Cuomo’s Bludgeon and the NRA

Nice business you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. Whether the threat comes from the mob or the governor, it’s not a threat one takes lightly in New York. This time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has ordered it be used against the National Rifle Association.

“I am directing the Department of Financial Services to urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with the NRA or similar organizations sends the wrong message to their clients and their communities who often look to them for guidance and support,” the governor wrote in a statement.

Whether anyone looks to bankers and insurers for “guidance and support” is a question few consider, probably because no one has ever done so, but what other words could Andy use to explain why he was using his authority over regulatory agencies to deny basic availability of private services to an organization that supported a cause he didn’t? He has to say something, and “because they’re awful and we need to destroy them” sounds a little negative. Nobody likes a governor who is negative. Continue reading →

Short Take: Skakel Reversed And Why Mickey Never Got His TV Show

The Connecticut Supreme Court reversed Michael Skakel’s murder conviction. Years ago, this would have been huge, but memories fade. The murder occurred in 1975. Skakel was convicted in 2002. His conviction was vacated in 2013, and reinstated in 2016. Now it’s been reversed again and remanded for a new trial. The basis was ineffective assistance of counsel.

Almost no one gets a reversal based on Strickland, as the test is essentially impossible to meet. Skakel did.

Mickey Sherman is a handsome guy with one of the most magnificent smiles ever. For a while, his smiling face was everywhere. He was a media darling, available on a moment’s notice for every cable new show. He knew which green rooms had the good food and which served tap water. He was, for a brief and shining moment, the media’s “It” lawyer. Heady times to be Mickey Sherman. Continue reading →

Seis de Mayo

Trump says they’re all rapists. Some people in Arizona applauded Crazy Joe’s roundups of everybody with an accent, darkish skin or a vowel on the end of their name. But yesterday, on the fifth, people held parties, drank Coronas with a wedge of lime, ate guac without peas and maybe wore a sombrero.

It’s absurd enough that a once-honorable group has allowed itself to become a parody in search of a mission, but what could be gained by shifting from condemning lynchings and unmasking the Klan to scolding party-goers for enjoying a taco? Continue reading →

Short Take: A Faustian Whitewashing

The first thrust was to include more writers of color, but once Reedies Against Racism tasted blood, they went for it all. And they got it.

Reedies Against Racism, a student group at Reed College, is demanding that the school’s Humanities 110 course remove all European texts and replace them with non-European reading materials as “reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people.”

Those classics that every moderately well-educated person reads in college? Racist. All white men, Europeans. And they even came up with a cool name for it. Continue reading →