234,341. What kind of number is that?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not how many days it feels like Trump’s been in office. Nor is it how many brain cells you lose when you watch an episode of Bill Nye Saves the World. It’s actually how many criminal insult investigations the German police conducted last year.

“Now David,“ I hear you say, quizzically, “I’m an American. Why do I give a fuck, as you appear to do, about what those demiliterate Teutons get up to in the wilderness of Central Europe? Hell, I’m apathetic about things that happen right here in our very own backyard. Why should I waste five minutes of my time reading your drivel?“

Well, consider this. That First Amendment of yours? Just as those who neglect to study history are condemned to repeat it, so too are you at risk of losing your free-speech rights unless you understand what goes on in places that never benefited politically from the Enlightenment. If that sounds a little hyperbolic, you’d do well to remember that the barbarians – who, in classic barbarian fashion, have chosen to invade the warm places first – are already at the gate.

At Berkeley and across the nation, there’s a large and growing group of people whose contempt for America’s liberties is matched only by their ignorance of its heritage. Each day, a new unprincipled, poorly written op-ed pops up in which they call for the U.S. to adopt a European-style censorship scheme, one that would allow them to bar speech they deem hurtful or hateful. Continue reading →

The case of Justin Thompson, who died following his assault by guards at the Washoe County Jail in Reno, is only the latest episode of scandalous brutality coming out of America’s jails/prisons. Thompson, a 35-year-old who suffered from mental illness, tried in vain to draw his last breath after being crushed, beaten, and taunted by guards. The Reno Gazette-Journal reports:

Videos released by the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office show in gut-wrenching detail the final hours of a Reno man with a mental illness who died after struggling against deputies who kept him pinned to the floor — his face covered with a spit hood — for more than 30 minutes.

Justin Thompson, 35, was booked into the Washoe County Jail on Aug. 3 and spent 24 hours pacing an empty holding cell in growing distress, curling in the fetal position while clutching his head, stuffing toilet paper in his ears, drawing on the walls with his own blood and climbing the metal sink to talk into the ceiling vent.

It took more than a day for jail personnel to decide Thompson needed to go to the emergency room. When he returned to the jail, the violent struggle that ultimately killed him occurred. The video shows Thompson wriggling under a crowd of deputies who kicked him, kneeled heavily on his back and applied painful arm-bar holds. Continue reading →

The New York State Senate, remiss in not using street gang hysteria to prove how tough on crime it can be in an age of incredibly low crime, is on the cusp of enacting Article 495 to the Penal Law, a new series of “Criminal Street Gang” crimes. Its opening salvo of definitions is a textbook example of how hard it is to write law.

S 495.05 DEFINITIONS. AS USED IN THIS ARTICLE, THE FOLLOWING TERMS SHALL MEAN AND INCLUDE:

1. “CRIMINAL STREET GANG” MEANS A STREET GANG THAT ENGAGES IN A PATTERN OF CRIMINAL STREET GANG ACTIVITY FOR ITS BENEFIT OR FOR THE BENEFIT OF ONE OR MORE MEMBERS. AS USED IN THIS ARTICLE, THE TERM “STREET GANG” MEANS AND INCLUDES ANY FORMAL OR INFORMAL ASSOCIATION IN FACT OF TWO OR MORE INDIVIDUALS IDENTIFIED BY A COMMON NAME, SIGN, DRESS, SYMBOLS, TATTOOS, OR OTHER MARK OR MARKINGS.

The definition is really two definitions lumped together. The first part defines “criminal street gang” as “a street gang that engages in a pattern of criminal street gang activity.” When a definition uses the word or phrase being defined to define it, it’s utterly worthless. For those who say, well, it says “criminal street gang,” and everybody knows what that means, you’re required to listen to Dylan all day today.  Continue reading →

Let’s get a few things straight off the top. It’s not unconstitutional for the president to fire the Director of the FBI. It’s not at all the same as firing Sally Yates and Preet Bharara. There are parallels to the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon caused the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, but there are significant differences as well.

While Jim Comey allowed, if not caused, himself to be thrust into a politically untenable position, no one who knows him thinks he was anything other than a stand-up guy. While he may have done wrong, it was not with malevolent intent.

But these things provide no cover for Trump’s firing of Jim Comey, a project in the works awaiting the confirmation of deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to lend a veneer of respectability. The letters sought to rationalize it on two levels, that it was due to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and that Comey had thrice informed the president that he was not under investigation for any connection to Russia. Continue reading →

Having worn out so many adjectives, the latest and greatest word in the lexicon of social justice is “condescending.” The dictionary definition is both clear and vague:

con·de·scend·ing
kändəˈsendiNG/
adjective

having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority.

What constitutes “patronizing superiority” is a matter of feeling, making it easy to level and hard to refute. If the definition is based on what someone feels about what someone else says, then who can question whether they feel that way? That’s the problem with feelz, they’re personal and each of us is allowed to feel whatever we want. Our feelz are ours. You can’t touch them.

When Steve Silberman leveled the charge of condescension at the New York Times, together with a couple other vagaries, it piqued my curiosity. What would make him feel this way?

Continue reading →

After the revelation that “Jackie” was a liar and the horrific tale of rape at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia published in Rolling Stone was false, a great many anti-rape advocates argued that it didn’t matter. Truth and fiction wasn’t relevant, as the issue mattered, and even a lie that promoted public awareness of the issue had value. Times have changed.

Two young men were arrested for the rape of a 14-year-old girl, and Tucker Carlson grabbed it and ran.

Tucker Carlson doesn’t run a courtroom. He runs an opinion program on Fox News, a place where the fundamentals of American justice sometimes fall prey to ideological froth. And he doesn’t appreciate getting asked about it.

“He did not seem to presume that my client was innocent,” said defense attorney David Moyse in an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog.

Not to be unduly picky, but Erik Wemple doesn’t run a courtroom either. Media reports and commentary are replete with writing that makes people stupider about law because it furthers an agenda or the writers just don’t have a clue what they’re writing about. Or both. Continue reading →

Cobb County, Georgia, Police Officer T.T. Carroll isn’t just a special cop. He’s an expert. It’s not just him saying so, but he’s got a piece of paper from the International Association of Police Chiefs that says so.

Pretty darn cool, right? And 160 hours is a lot of hours. Maybe not 10,000 hours, but still. What that course means, teaches, does, isn’t at all clear, but if you happen to be a cop on the road, and you say someone is on drugs, then you must know what you’re talking about, because you’re an expert. Continue reading →

War broke out at Duke Divinity School. Rod Dreher wrote of a Catholic professor, Paul Griffiths, who took umbrage at being informed that he was required to take “racial sensitivity training,” for which he claimed that he was being illiberally and anti-intellectually attacked and punished.

Griffiths wrote an excoriating reply, saying something to the effect that the program was intellectually vapid and beneath the level of discourse an elite theological school should be having.

Dreher, noting in his initial post that he had only one side of the story, called this a travesty if true. In a followup, he posts a missive from another professor at DDS, Valerie Cooper, who proudly wears the title SJW: Continue reading →

Brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown did 30 years for a crime they didn’t commit. They never stood a chance.

McCollum and Brown’s limitations have been central to their story since their arrest in 1983 for the brutal rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.

Agents for the State Bureau of Investigation and officers from the Town of Red Springs elicited detailed confessions from the brothers after hours of interrogation. They were teenagers at the time, living in a small town in Robeson County.

In 2014, a judge freed McCollum and Brown after DNA evidence led investigators to the real killer, a man police had originally considered a suspect in 1984.

It wasn’t just that the crime was horrific, or that they were black. They lacked the capacity to put up a fight. Continue reading →

Philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel was all social justice-y, through and through, but she still wasn’t pious enough to survive being devoured by her own.

She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia.”

What was she thinking? After the townsfolk, armed with their torches and pitchforks, marched on feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, which collapsed like a cheap pantsuit, a bold voice come forward in Tuvel’s defense. Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, took to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Explain this:

We are in the midst of the Trumpian apocalypse. Actual bigoted provocateurs like Charles Murray and Ann Coulter throw flames in the academy. Hate crimes against trans people and people of color and Muslims are on the rise; women’s reproductive rights are on the line, as are just about every other aspect of bodily autonomy and gender justice. So what’s making scholars hyperventilate in outrage? A feminist academic whose body of work is clearly on the side of progressive social justice.

Continue reading →