The right to contract is fundamental, but one can only contract for things that are lawful. You can include a provision for no brown M&Ms, but not for an ample supply of heroin. In concluding her speech at the Academy Awards, Frances McDormand offered this tip:

I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider.

As a general idea, that Oscar winning celebrities use their good offices to push producers to be more inclusive in their casting, this may be excellent advice, although some might counter that casting be done based on the characters needed for the story rather than diversity. Still, there’s much to be said about crowd scenes in New York City that appear as if they were cast in Scandinavia.

People rushed to Google after hearing those two words to find out what she was talking about, because inclusion riders aren’t yet a serious thing. Continue reading →

If it’s her, and it certainly appears to be her, one has to wonder how it could be that nobody at Crystal River Middle School saw a problem.

Dayanna Volitich, a 25-year-old social studies teacher at Crystal River Middle School in Florida, has been secretly hosting the white nationalist podcast “Unapologetic” under the pseudonym “Tiana Dalichov” and bragging about teaching her views in a public school, HuffPost has discovered.

A HuffPo investigation determined that Volitich was Dlichov, resulting in the school district removing her from her classroom.

HuffPost found a website promoting the writing of “Tiana Dalichov” that had a bio section listing the author’s home as Crystal City, Florida. Volitich is listed in public records as residing in Crystal City. She is also listed as being 25 years old. This year, when a fan tweeted at “Tiana Dalichov” asking how old she is, she responded that she was 25. Continue reading →

It’s neither new nor a big deal that Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, is anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic. Not in the fashionable social justice way, but the old school way.

“Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out, turning men into women and women into men,” Farrakhan said in his keynote speech.

“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled a cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” Farrakhan said towards the end of his speech.

In fairness, he’s a religious leader and these are his beliefs. Nobody said religion had to be woke, and, indeed, most religion isn’t. And what of his flock, his friends, his admirers? Continue reading →

The Oscar watching at SJ World Headquarters is usually limited to the opening, often a hilariously funny affair with some film montage and a comic monologue to set the tone of the evening. The awards don’t particularly interest me, and if anything crazy happens, the next day is soon enough for me to find out.

Jimmy Kimmel’s 2018 Academy Awards opening broke the mold.

As virtuous as it gets, amirite? One can only hope that the movies to come will similarly reflect the brave new world of correctness. Continue reading →

Helen Pluckrose was an excellent addition to the panel at Portland State University on the subject of diversity of thought. But as she explains, she wasn’t asked to be on the panel at first. Or at second. Or because she was an excellent choice at all, really.

At first it was to be a frank discussion between Damore and Boghossian but the immediate criticism — mostly from students and on social media — was that diversity could not be discussed by two white men. It mattered not at all that one was the author of the memo at the center of the debate and the other a Socratic philosopher who focuses on epistemology and liberal ethics and is therefore well-qualified to probe both motivation and empirical justification.

The problem was that both of the people had penises, those penises were white and, as far as anyone knows, responsive to those of the opposite gender. They were hegemonic penises and this was problematic.

Not that all people with penises are men, but these two were. Continue reading →

Cornell lawprof Sherry Colb sought to make her point about the movie Submission, which she had not yet seen, by introducing an analogy.

[I]magine going to see a popular movie and finding out that the story of the movie is all about how a rich, Jewish moneylender exploits the poor Christians who live in his neighborhood. In the course of the story, the moneylender collects usurious interest rates for his loans, and various Christian borrowers descend into terrible poverty, unable to feed their children, some driven to suicide. At the end, the moneylender sits at the table celebrating the Jewish Sabbath with his family, singing songs and beaming at the heavy gold jewelry around his wife’s neck that he was able to give to her after appropriating what rightfully belonged to his clients.

Such a story would be anti-semitic propaganda, and we would all recognize it as such. Does that mean that a Jew has never leant [sic] people money? Of course not. Does it even mean that a Jew has never charged excessive interest on a loan or that borrowers never suffered as a result? No again. And still, releasing a film that tells the story of one Jew who does these terrible things is hate propaganda, because the film implicitly says not only that this thing happened one time or may happen sometimes. It says that this is what people can expect from a Jew, that the Jew is a greedy villain. And even as this is obvious to most of us, a Nazi might reply with outrage, “It’s just a movie!” or “This does happen sometimes,” even as he would enjoy the effect of propaganda that conforms so well to what he thinks about Jews.

Continue reading →

A statewide strike by teachers in West Virginia may well be justified by the failure of their salaries to keep pace with the cost of living, not that the same can’t be said about the salaries of many others. But the strike is unlawful. Teachers’ strikes are an old joke, where the penalty for engaging in an unlawful work stoppage is negotiated away with the settlement.

Of course, the week plus (thus far) of the strike means that students lose a week of education, and working parents are forced to find some way to deal with their children at home rather than school. That makes it hard for the teachers to fall back on their usual claim, “we’re doing it for the children,” when the kids suffer and, well, they’re doing it for the money.

The conflict arises from the niggardly raises offered teachers, and they were, indeed, pretty darn low. Continue reading →

Retired Harvard criminal law prof, Alan Dershowitz, has become a pariah in polite academic society, which wouldn’t be a bad thing but for the reason.

It’s rather striking that Dersh and Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host, are sitting in the same room, talking calmly to each other, agreeing. A mere decade ago, this would have been more likely to be a naked mud-wrestling match.  Continue reading →

David Brooks took a road trip to find out what Millennials in America’s best colleges* are thinking. It isn’t good.

It’s not that the students are hopeless. They are dedicating their lives to social change. It’s just that they have trouble naming institutions that work. A number said they used to have a lot of faith in the tech industry, but they have lost much of it. “The Occupy strategy was such a visible failure, it left everyone else feeling disillusioned,” one lamented. “We don’t even have a common truth. A common set of facts,” added another.

The second large theme was the loss of faith in the American idea. I told them that when I went to public school the American history curriculum was certainly liberal, but the primary emotion was gratitude. We were the lucky inheritors of Jefferson and Madison, Whitman and Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy and King. Our ancestors left oppression, crossed a wilderness and are trying to build a promised land.

The kids weren’t buying. Continue reading →

Whether Sarah Katherine Campbell committed the crime of which she stands accused has yet to be determined. She is due the process, the fairness, that the law provides anyone accused of a crime, even if those who would have shrieked that she must be believed would have denied that to those she accused.

Deputies said 18-year-old Sarah Katherine Campbell was charged with filing a false police report of a felony.

According to deputies, the charges stemmed from a false report of a sexual assault. Clemson University Police responded to a report of a sexual assault at the Delta Chi Fraternity house on January 27, deputies said.

The sheriff’s office said an investigation into the incident was launched and as evidence was gathered in the case, it was determined that the sexual encounter between Campbell and the male at the fraternity house was consensual.

Continue reading →