It happened with a phrase, perhaps as clear a phrase as could be conceived at the time, when usurped from the vocabulary and untethered from its definition. The phrase was “sex discrimination,” and by concerted use, it’s claimed to be ambiguous.  All it required was for people to seize it and use it for their own purposes.

Now it’s Pepe the Frog.

This is Pepe the Frog. He’s a laid-back amphibious dude whose hobbies include hanging out with his roommates, getting stoned, drinking pop, eating pizza and watching TV. He doesn’t get out much and spends the majority of his time slinging outdated ‘90s clapbacks at his fellow dude-bros.

You might be surprised, then, to hear that Pepe was recently designated a “hate symbol” by the Anti-Defamation League. Talk about not chill.

You don’t care about Pepe? Frankly, neither do I. It’s not a meme of any significance in my world, and had this not happened, chances are slim that it would ever be mentioned here. But this isn’t about Pepe the Frog. Not really. Continue reading →

Having started more than a half dozen posts, each of which struck me as obvious and pointless, I decided not to post anything today. I’m disgusted with the level of discourse and refuse to spend the time and energy required to discuss what ought to be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person.

You want to talk about it? Be my guest. Today, I have nothing to say.

Via Awesomely Luvvie.

White people, I’m talking to you. THIS. IS. YOUR. PROBLEM. TO. FIX. Y’all got some work to do, because this system that y’all keep on privileging from, you’ve got to help us dismantle it. Because those of us who are Black and Brown. We have tried. You created this robot, and it is yours to deactivate. My skinfolk don’t have the passcode. This is your monster to slay.

Does this persuade you? Will you change your evil ways because Luvvie told you to?

Whether you love or hate Tennessee lawprof Glenn Reynolds, best known as Instapundit, who has been an unabashed conservative voice on the internets throughout a period when academia was gushing progressivism, there are a few things that can’t be denied. First, that he’s shown the fortitude of speaking against the tide. As a result, Glenn collected a huge following, because not everyone feels compelled to select their own personal pronouns.

Second, he knows social media. He knows its power. He knows its failings. He knows the pretense it instills in its shallow fans that they are passionate advocates when they’re doing nothing more than preaching to their choir or enjoying a cute little circle jerk. Spend enough time online, and establish enough credibility to have people hear what you have to say and you learn things. You can’t help it.

And boy, has Glenn learned things.

SO WHAT I’VE DONE WITH TWITTER is just to log out for now. The robo-tweets of InstaPundit content will continue, at least for a while. I may take down the widget on the sidebar, eventually. I haven’t moved to Gab, and I’m not sure whether I will or not. Basically, there are two problems with Twitter for me. One is that they don’t support their users — they pretty clearly suspend, ban, etc. using a political double standard even though they claim they don’t.

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In two apparently unintentionally competing op-eds, social science revealed some problems in dealing with the concepts of cause and effect in its effort to “explain” a rise in violent crime in a few cities. Neil Gross writes about the Ferguson Effect, noting two studies that show that it’s nonsense, except when it’s not.

One, there is now some evidence that when all eyes are on police misconduct, crime may edge up. Progressives should acknowledge that this idea isn’t far-fetched.

Far-fetched? Nobody said it was far-fetched, but correlation doesn’t prove causation.

Two, while it makes for a tidy political narrative to say “Ferguson effect,” researchers have not pinned down the underlying mechanisms. Against Ms. Mac Donald’s theory, the Baltimore study reveals that a decline in broken-windows policing alone does not elevate crime rates. And the study by Professors Rushin and Edwards tells us that crime can rise following the imposition of federal oversight even when stop-and-frisk reform isn’t necessarily the main goal.

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It’s really quite remarkable that Slate’s Leon Neyfakh gets it, because he wasn’t around the last time it happened. But he gets it.

The first wave of convictions stemming from Operation Headache came in March 1996. But the biggest, most symbolically meaningful blow to the Gangster Disciples was delivered in May 1997, when Hoover was convicted of 42 counts of conspiracy to distribute drugs, received a sentence of six life terms, and was transferred to a supermax prison in Colorado, where his cell was located several stories underground and his ability to communicate with the remnants of his gang were severely constrained. Soon, the GDs in Chicago had been all but neutralized, and the authorities shifted their attention to decapitating the city’s other major drug organizations, the Black Disciples and the Vice Lords.

To the uninitiated, this would appear to be a huge success in the eradication of drugs and violence, a great success for law enforcement. And, indeed, it was. They took down an enormous enterprise by cutting off its head. So what’s the problem?

“Every time they hit these large street gangs, they’d focus on the leadership,” said Lance Williams, an associate professor at Northeastern Illinois University, and the co-author of a book about the rise and fall of the Black P Stone Nation, a gang that was eradicated in the 1980s. “It’s like cutting the head off a snake—you leave the body in disarray and everyone begins to scramble for control over these small little areas. And that’s where you get a lot of the violence, because the order is no longer there.” Williams added: “When you lose the leadership, it turns into chaos… What we’re dealing with now is basically the fallout of gang disorganization.”

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No, you weren’t unsubscribed to your daily dose of SJ. The emails aren’t going out. Neither are the automatic twits when posts are published. I’m not often frustrated, but I am now. I apologize.

SJ is published on a platform called WordPress, which is where it ended up after my original platform from GoDaddy was “end of lifed.” For the uninitiated, there’s a dirty little secret about tech that the happy faces don’t talk about. The things upon which you rely, and for which you pay, magically disappear when the tech company that you’ve been paying either goes belly up, decides that they aren’t making enough money off a product to keep it supported or comes up with the next newest, coolest thing ever, so that they trash the old one that people were very happy using and create a new one that nobody wants and sucks.

Anywho, WordPress uses something called “plugins” to allow users to pick what the blog should do. One of the plugins used at SJ was WPTouch, which morphs the blog you see on your computer screen into the blog you see on your smartphone. The two are not the same, and while I don’t care for the smartphone version, some of you insist on reading SJ on your tiny screen, so I added WPTouch because I’m a swell guy. Continue reading →

Ian Millheiser dedicated a post at ThinkProgress to a single quip made during six hours of oral argument in West Virginia v. EPA, not to confront the substance of the issue at hand, but to raise a collateral attack on the institution that will make an en banc ruling. It came from the mouth of Judge Thomas Griffith on the D.C. Circuit, and it was described as “A powerful judge’s subtle, chilling attack on a free press.”

What was Judge Griffith’s “chilling attack on the free press”? That it “was on NPR this morning. It’s big news!”  Since punctuation doesn’t happen when someone says something aloud, Millheiser added the exclamation mark at the end.

The remark was uttered by Judge Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. And it reveals how a newly ascendant Supreme Court doctrine could have a chilling effect on journalists and other commentators who write about policy.

Beyond noting that Griffith was a Bush appointee, a slur of the worst order at ThinkProgress, Millheiser’s point was that if the media’s reporting could give rise to a ruling against his beliefs, because the doctrine at issue is Chevron deference, and if it is a matter of “economic and political significance,” then the court isn’t required to defer to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision on the future of the planet.   Continue reading →

It was late afternoon during a growhouse trial when the prosecution called an “expert” to the stand. The expert was a federal agent, whose testimony related to growing marijuana. He was a virgin, never before having been qualified to testify as an expert. It was my great fortune that he was called at the end of the day.

The agent’s foremost claim to expertise was that he was a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Agriculture, and he testified that his studies there enabled him to testify with sufficient authority about weed.  As it happened, I was good friends with a professor emeritus of the Ag School, one of the most highly regarded horticulturalists in the nation. So after trial broke for the day,* I gave him a ring and learned that there was no course, no class, at Cornell that dealt with pot. The Ag School was not in the business of teaching its students to prepare for the coming marijuana revolution. This may have changed since then.

As the agent had never been qualified as a weed expert before, he was ripe for attack. I voir dired the witness as to his qualifications, getting him to admit that he studied nothing about pot in any Ag School course (objection, sustained, as to “You learned nothing about marijuana in college?”), thus negating any claim of academic expertise in the demon weed. Of course, the judge subsequently admitted his testimony as an expert based upon his “training and experience” as a federal agent.  Continue reading →

Coercion is a curious concept in Providence, Rhode Island.  It involves the use of force or threats to overcome another person’s free will. Its definition relies on the nature of force or threats exerted, as any other definition would make it contingent on the fragility of the person allegedly coerced.

For example, “she looked at me funny” isn’t coercive, even though someone might engage in conduct they preferred not to perform to avoid the “funny” gaze. Or in Providence, “he made me” is sufficient, without regard to any force or threats. Why? Because Providence is where Brown University is situated, and Brown uses its own definition of coercion.

The issue came before District Court Chief Judge William E. Smith when John Doe sued Brown for breach of contract after he was held to have coerced another student to engage in sexual conduct.*  The specific issue before the court was whether Brown violated its policy in its adjudication by finding that he coerced the student when the policy, at the time of the conduct, made no mention of coercion. Instead, Brown used a subsequent policy which did. Judge Smith held that Brown was obliged to use the policy in effect at the time.

While the case was pending, students at Brown decided that it was a good idea to make their feelings about the case known to Judge Smith, and began a campaign to deluge the court with emails.   Continue reading →