How hard is it to say he resisted? Not too hard.
Pele Smith is suing the Lorain, Ohio, police. It was a he said/she said case until the release of the video.
The arrest took place while police were investigating drug complaints in Smith’s neighborhood. Continue reading
The myth was that Henry Ford decided to pay his workers $5 a day when he realized that if they couldn’t afford to buy the cars he was building, he wouldn’t be able to sell cars. It’s not true, but the allure of the myth was undeniable. Without a sufficient population of buyers, sellers can’t sell. The shine of technology has blinded its sycophants to this concept.
At Room for Debate, the New York Times (in its Trump-obsessed way) sought to disprove the claim that the suffering of the middle class had to do with jobs and companies fleeing the nation by noting that the greater threat to middle-class existence was automation.
Globalization and trade agreements have been blamed for costing millions of Americans well-paying jobs. But a far greater force in the gutting of middle-class life in the United States has been automation, which has replaced well-paid workers with robots and digital platforms. The greater efficiency fuels economic growth, produces cheaper products and makes life’s task easier. But in the process, many are left poorer and less secure.
It was an extremely ambitious effort by FIRE’s executive director, Robert Shibley. Not only is the current state of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a total fiasco, but it’s replete with a mythology deliberately spread by a rogue Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, and adopted by zealous advocates who make up in passion what they lack in integrity and knowledge, so that it’s nearly impossible to discuss intelligently.
Shibley tries to explain this morass in the modern version of a broadside. To provide a full and adequate explanation would require at least a book, if not a few volumes, but then no one would take the time to read it. And that’s the point, that this needs to be read to have any impact and, for those against whom this law and its mythology are used, they be given access to accurate information in contrast with the spin.
It’s a quick read. For anyone who has paid attention here, the stories and concepts will be familiar, though the choice of anecdotes might seem peculiar. The tale of feminist prof Laura Kipnis, for example, figures prominently, likely because it’s less subject to controversy than some far worse stories. For those who need concrete anecdotes to make sense of concepts, Shibley does his best to provide context to the law surrounding Title IX and its misuse and abuse. Continue reading
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.
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.
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.”
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