Is Trump Laying The Groundwork For A Saturday Night Massacre?

My inclination is that people should prepare themselves now to get out in the streets and stay there, should this happen. I don't say that lightly. I'm not wild about that sort of thing. But if it were to happen, you don't want to have to think clearly and deliberate effectively. And you don't want to give yourself an opportunity to worm out of it. Think through it now. Make your decision.

   And I say this despite having certain doubts about the investigation--e.g. I don't see why Mueller should be able to investigate Trump's finances. (Not that my doubts about this matter, as I barely understand what's going on.) 

Trigger

A Thriller parody at Reason.
   Pretty amusing, actually.

Mueller Drops Some Bombs

Holy freaking crap.
   I don't really know what else to say. I've been too busy to do more than scan stories about this. I would never have guessed that it would happen so soon. There's an air of unreality about all of it--or so it seems to me. It's all so far above my pay grade that all I can really do is gawk. My mind just doesn't grasp all this very well.

Helen Pluckrose: The Problem With Intersectional Feminism

link

The Great Eugene Volokh Summarizes Recent (Alarming) Data About Attitudes About Freedom Of Speech

link

   More broadly, two key takeaways are as follows: First, in my view it belies logic to assert, as some do, that all is well with respect to freedom of expression on campus, and that any suggestion to the contrary is an attempt to manufacture a concern where none exists. In light of the data above and the growing list of examples in which on-campus audiences were denied the opportunity to hear from invited speakers, it is certainly reasonable to debate the extent of the problem, but I don’t believe it is reasonable to deny the existence of the problem.
   Second, this is an issue that spans the political spectrum. The surveys discussed above found significant levels of intolerance to on-campus speech among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. This underscores the fact that we all have an interest, regardless of our personal political views, in an improved climate for free expression at U.S. colleges and universities. [my emphasis]

White Supremacists Pick Fight With Interracial Couple After Tennessee Rally

#%&$ @#$&%$ing @#$#$*s
   Those sonsabitches have a Constitutional right to say their peace, @#$%ing grotesquely idiotic and repulsive as it might be. And I'm willing to defend their right. But let's don't forget who it is we're dealing with, either. Goddamn no-account jackass racist peckerwood SOBs. Waste of good carbon.

Megan McArdle: Be Careful Who You Call A White Supremacist

Not new points, not all true, but worth a read.

      During the 2016 presidential campaign, I found myself confronted by a curious problem: Many of my readers simply didn’t take it seriously when I pointed out that Donald Trump was, if not an outright racist himself, at least happily pandering to people who were.
   “The media calls every Republican racist,” my conservative readers replied. “They said it about Mitt Romney, they said it about George Bush, so what’s different about Tru
mp?”
   They were right. Other columnists had accused Romney and Bush of being racist and pandering to racists. I pointed out that Trump's racist appeals were different, and much worse, than anything that earlier Republican presidential candidates had been accused of. But it didn’t do any good. The media had cried wolf to condemn garden-variety Republicans; labels like “racist” had been rendered useless when a true threat emerged. We shouted to no avail as Trump coyly flirted with hardcore white supremacists, something no mainstream party had done for decades.
   Indeed, it seems to me that critical race theorists have gone to “white supremacy” precisely because the increasingly broad uses of the word “racism” have made it less effective than it used to be at rallying moral outrage. The term still packs some wallop, but less than it once did, because it is now defined so broadly that a Broadway musical could sing “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” White supremacy, on the other hand, is still clearly understood as beyond the pale.

   More important than the crying wolf point: false accusations are wrong.

'MARIJUANA' IS TEH RAZIZT

facepalm
Seriously, what is wrong with the PC left that makes them so eager to stretch so far to find some interpretation that gives them some excuse to cry 'racism'? It's as if it were their telos or something. It's a #$%&ing sickness. They're deranged. You'd think they'd at least care that every case like this makes sane people take them yea much less seriously...I mean...wouldn't you?

UK Wants UN To Replace 'Pregnant Women' In Treaty With 'Pregnant People' Because...

...well...you can see where this is going..
Fun fact: actual number of pregnant men in all of world history: 0.00.
   I'm tired of complaining about this lunacy...but I'm tireder of the lunacy being tolerated.

All The Women Accusing Trump Of Sexually Assaulting Them Are Lying...

...says the White House.
   False sexual assault accusations seem fairly common now that victimhood is not only chic, but also a powerful weapon.
   So if there weren't sixteen accusers, and Trump hadn't basically admitted on tape that he does this sort of thing...I'd be skeptical. When it was just the tape, I dismissed it as inadequate evidence. It was entirely possible that he was just bullshitting. Now...not so much, really.
   It also just seems like the kind of thing he'd do, to be honest.

"When A Student Says 'I'm Not A Boy Or A Girl'"

So apparently some schools are now openly brainwashing children--even those in kindergarten--with "trans" ideology. It's astonishing that a theory can go, basically, from being made-up to being imposed upon kindergarteners in about a decade. Even if you're not properly terrified of this particular flavor of insanity, you should be terrified because you don't know what flavor of insanity will come after it. As I've said many times, I personally am of the entirely unremarkable opinion that we ought to push gender on kids less. Some boys aren't going to be particularly masculine, and some girls aren't going to be particularly feminine, and that's just fine. But we basically hopped right over the sane position and went right for the equal and opposite kind of madness. Well...it's not actually equal to and opposite of traditional views about gender...it's much, much crazier than them.

  And, look: I'm getting really fed up with hearing people describe themselves as "non-binary." That's not a gender, and it's not a property of people. Gender itself could (annoyingly) be described as "non-binary," given that androgynous could count as a third gender. And people can certainly be androgynous. But people can't be non-binary. Calling a person non-binary is like calling a person a false dichotomy. It's roughly a category mistake.

Halifax Pop Music Festival Apologize For "Overt Racism" Of White People Refusing To Move To The Back Of The Room

We really are dealing with a kind of religion here. Anyone who would actually believe these sorts of things probably can't be reasoned with:

   The Halifax Pop Explosion music festival is apologizing for the actions of a volunteer who interrupted a performance by Polaris Prize-winning singer Lido Pimienta with "overt racism."
   A statement on behalf of the festival's board of directors addresses the singer directly and promises to make changes to improve "anti-oppression and anti-racism training" over the next year.
   "We are sorry that one of our volunteers interrupted your art, your show, and your audience by being aggressive and racist," reads a Facebook post signed by vice-chairman Georgie Dudka.

   The aggressive racism was refusing to move to comply with the demand that she move to the back of the room because she is white. That monster! Obviously "anti-oppression and anti-racism training" are required!

   "Finally after saying it about 10 times — and the woman refused to move — (Pimienta) said, 'You're cutting into my set time and you're disrespecting these women, and I don't have time for this."'
   Event organizers say the volunteer was removed from the show and ultimately chose to sever ties with the festival.

... 

   The clash was emblematic of the opinion that prioritizing people of colour — particularly women — is "reverse racist," says Rutgers.
   "It's those mindsets that create that sort of pushback at the shows," she says.
   "I don't know if I would say it can be attributed to the crowd Pop Explosion gets, or more so just the sort of people that exist in Halifax and the mindsets that prevail here."

   Yeah...wow...we really are dealing with cultish derangement here. I mean, the defending the racist demand is crazy...but much crazier, to my mind, is the seemingly (or at least possibly) real conviction than there's something crazy about the "mindset" that sees reverse racism as reverse racism. Gosh, I mean...it's just the people you get there, I guess. Deplorables and the like, I mean. I never know what to make of such crazy talk. Does Ms. Rutgers genuinely believe what she's saying? Or is this doublethink combined with a pose that aims at simulating certainty--as if questioning the performer's crackpot demand were so obviously wrong that it's not even on her conceptual radar. I often just can't tell which kind of crazy it is with these people.

   Another thing about the left that's totally cracked is that their racist motives are unquestionable--they're basically right up front with them. I'm fairly hesitant to level accusations of racism...many cases in which the left cries racism! are actually unclear (of course in many cases it's clear...in the other direction...). Racism is typically a hypothesis, not something directly observed. But the PC/progressive fringe...they just put those racial prejudices right out there in front of God and everybody--relying, I suppose, on their redefinitions of the term or a thin cover-story about redressing past wrongs to give them plausible deniability.

Did Anybody NOT Fund The Steele Dossier?

link
I still have no earthly clue what to think about any of this.

The Strange Case Of The Racially Insensitive Corn Pops

So it turns out that some Corn Pops boxes were "racially insensitive"...
   No, really...the really weird thing about this is that, unlike the vast majority of such claims anymore...this one was pretty right. The only brownish corn pop on the box was a janitor. Seriously? It...doesn't take a degree in feminist mime theory to sniff that one out. It's not exactly Jim Crow II: The Poppening...but it's not really nothing at all, either.
   But also it's all weird because this guy points out that it's not cool, and Kelloggs is all like: our bad. And then he's all like cool thanks bye. A...weirdly reasonable little bit of public discussion about a representation of race...and on Twitter...  Ehhh...Kelloggs makes some silly pro forma obeisances to "diversity and inclusion"...which...have nothing to do with any of this...it's just the current catch-all jargon...but whatevs. Any reasonableness at all in this kind of discussion, even with respect to such a minor matter, is too welcome for me to get too picky about it.
(Via...Instapundit...  So sue me.)

Seth Barron, "What's In A Pronoun?"

link
   Don't forget: both NYC and CA have laws that force you to use made-up pronouns on demand, on pain of massive fines and/or jail time... (I read somewhere that DC has one, too.)

It seems fair and just to refer to people as they present themselves and wish to be addressed. It would be rude to call a transman “Miss” just to make a point, and within reason, going along with whatever benign fiction people might have cooked up about themselves is simply good manners. “Preferred-pronoun” usage, however, is a bridge too far, and not just because it’s impossible to expect everyone to memorize lists of declensions of made-up words. The pronoun debate is also an effort to force us to change the way we talk about people who are not actually present: when we speak of “he” or “she,” we are almost always talking about someone who is not there. When speaking face-to-face, the only pronoun we commonly use is “you.” It’s considered improper to use third-person pronouns in the presence of their subjects; hence the old saying, “‘She’ is the cat’s mother,” meant to admonish against using the pronominal form instead of the individual’s proper name, if he or she is present. Insisting that we refer to absent people according to made-up vocabulary words upon threat of punishment is to interpose political ideology into conversation under force of law. It deputizes all listeners or interlocutors as surveillance agents in the name of gender equality.

   I guess the first sentence is a sop to Cerberus...but it isn't true...or isn't very true. You don't have to pretend that I'm six-foot-five just because I want you to--and it's not "fair and just" of me to ask you to do so. It would be messed up to, say, spend great time and energy to puzzle out someone's sex--probably don't do that. But I'm not all that interested in figuring out all the niceties of this ridiculousness. Anyway, the rest of that paragraph, and the rest of the post, is good. (And I've said much of this stuff before myself.) 

   Much of this isn't even about transgenderism per se, it's about left's totalitarianism, its love of controlling others, and, in particular, its penchant for controlling language and (it hopes), consequently, thought. It discovered 30 years ago that, if it screams prejudice loudly and shrilly enough, people will acquiesce to changing the way they speak. And its basically never looked back. The pronoun nonsense is a gold mine, because it also forces people to pay lip service (and, hence, endorse) its social constructionist metaphysics.

   Bah...I've said that all before. Nothing's changed.

Bush '41, Groper

Is his age a defense? I mean, is he losing his faculties? 

I mean, that must be it, right? 

There's simply nothing else that could excuse this sort of behavior. It's particularly loathsome given that, basically, he knows he won't get the shit slapped out of him because of his age, and his ex-President-ness.

But, anyway: if he is losing it, that makes this more sad than infuriating. Imagine degenerating to the point that this seemed ok... What a nightmare...

Is Evergreen A Cult?

Kinda worth watching if just for the creepy, totalitarian clips from Evergreen...see e.g.the "playing the believing game" bit. Also the bit about "training" faculty into rightthink, and sanctioning them if they don't "get it." Then, of course, there's the obligatory invective directed at "whiteness."
   Once you really bring some bit of insanity into focus, it's hard not to obsess about it. I've tried to adopt a more stoic attitude about all this...but it really is so very insane. The white girl tearfully expressing her contempt for her own "whiteness"...Jesus. This cult is so influential in academia...and it's not going away. I expect it'll be just like last time: they get so crazy that liberals will sort of back off of defending them...they might seem defeated...but they'll just ensconce themselves in women's studies departments etc., and in the para-faculty....and they'll continue to work quietly for their nefarious ends...until we suffer another eruption in ten or fifteen years, and they'll seize more territory, destroy more of what makes universities worthwhile... If they're never completely pushed back/defeated, universities--or at least the humanities and social sciences--could be, in effect destroyed. (I suppose that the sciences and engineering will be largely immune, since they have to actually get things done...)

The Baffling Steele Dossier and Dueling Certainty

This semester is, I have no doubt, actually taking time off my life. I'm so over-worked and stressed-out that I honestly kinda don't know what to do. Really. It's very, very bad. Like, honestly, the only reason I can even write this post is that I'm too overfreakingwhelmed to do anything productive right now. It's bad. Bad, I say. Bad.
   But this wasn't supposed to be a post about me whining. I was going to say that I haven't had the time, nor the energy, to dig into the Trump-Clinton dossier story. For months now I've seen dueling stories...on the left, the Steele dossier has been largely confirmed...on the right, it's been basically proven to be bullshit. Now comes the latest twist...which the left is dismissing as utterly irrelevant...and the right is proclaiming to be a game-changer...or game-inverter. Now it's Clinton, not Trump, who should be under investigation, I read. I know it's no insight to say that the ends of the political spectrum are drowning in dogmatism...but Jesus...I thought I could at least get a sense what's going on by trying to just take the pulse of the respective sides... But that is just not going to happen.
   I've heard people who spent time in Iraq talk about the people there basically swimming in a sea of rumor. I kind of feel the same way here anymore. I just don't have the time or energy--and it's not worth it anyway--to dig down to the bottom of every goddamn disagreement. Reflecting on this has driven home the point that you don't have to be right. If you can just obfuscate a couple of moves deep, you can prevent the average person from figuring out that you're full of shit. And also that partisan zealots are just a different kind of person than I'm used to dealing with. God, what a repulsive bunch.
   Anyway. I have no point.
   But if you know anything non-insane to read about this, by all means, link me, baby.

Missouri vs. Celia, A Slave

We all had to take a Missouri history class in junior high...I don't remember this being covered...

   I'm gonna go ahead and let you know that reading that story is not going to make you any happier.

'Denali' > 'McKinley'

"The big mountain in Alaska"

Why Mount Washington Kills

It's the weather, stupid.
Also: it's the stupid, stupid.

TDS Watch: Progressives To Shriek Inarticulately At Sky On Anniversary Of Trump's Election

facepalm

Andrew Sullivan on (a) Illegal Immigration and (b) Free Speech

He calls illegal immigration "the issue that could lose the next election for Democrats"...and says a lot of the same things I've been saying for six or seven years:

This is, to be blunt, political suicide. The Democrats’ current position seems to be that the Dreamer parents who broke the law are near heroes, indistinguishable from the children they brought with them; and their rhetoric is very hard to distinguish, certainly for most swing voters, from a belief in open borders. In fact, the Democrats increasingly seem to suggest that any kind of distinction between citizens and noncitizens is somehow racist. You could see this at the last convention, when an entire evening was dedicated to Latinos, illegal and legal, as if the rule of law were largely irrelevant. Hence the euphemism “undocumented” rather than “illegal.” So the stage was built, lit, and set for Trump.

I think it's now undeniable that the left's lines of argument converge on open borders--and I got a fair bit of grief for saying this when I first started saying it.
   Sullivan's also right (as usual) about free speech:

   For me, as regular readers know, few things seem as ominous as the fate of free speech in the West. In democratic countries without a First Amendment, writers and speakers are now routinely hauled into court for hurting someone’s feelings or violating some new PC edict. In Canada, it is now a crime to use pronouns that have served the English language well enough for centuries, if you are not careful. You are compelled by law to say “ze” or “xe” or “ve” or an endlessly proliferating litany of gobbledygook— “(f)aer,” “e/ey,” “perself” — invented out of thin air by postmodern transgenderists. Justin Trudeau doesn’t just want you to be criminalized for saying things he regards as “hate,” he wants to use the criminal law to force you to say things you don’t believe in and can’t even remember.
   In Britain, meanwhile, it is now a criminal offense to post something on social media that “is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice.” “Hostility” is defined thus: “ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.” In other words, if you “dislike” some idea, and someone else asserts your view is driven by “unfriendliness” to a member of a minority, you are breaking the law. There is effectively no free speech left in the U.K. that isn’t subject to a criminal veto by someone seeking to make trouble or permanently primed to take offense. And that is not to speak of the chilling effect such laws have on others too intimidated to open their mouths at all.

Please Forgive Me For Being Male: Tom Pessah Edition

This is pure-D cringe.

   Pessah's problem isn't that he wasn't a feminist early enough...it was that he was apparently a rather creepy kid. Now he's apparently a differently creepy adult. 

   Though, tbh, it seems a bit crazy to me to expect kids to behave perfectly in any way. People make mistakes, kids especially. I never did any stuff like that--but it doesn't exactly surprise me that some boys do. And I mean: some normal boys--not just the psychotic ones. Hormones at that age are basically blotting out your rational faculties. I pretty much thought about nothing but sex from age thirteen to...well...let's just say: for quite awhile. Is the idea supposed to be that we need to have a world in which no hormone-addled thirteen-year-old ever does something both stupid and sexual? Because that seems nutty to me--even as a guy who would honestly never have dreamed of "accidentally" groping girls. I mean...by all means, make sure boys are raised right...I mean....my parents never said "don't grope girls"...they didn't have to say that. It would have been like saying don't burn down buildings. Why would they think I needed to be told such a thing? (This is why the teach men not to rape stuff is irksome; like so much of feminism, it's meant to indicate that we're all evil, and that, if not for training, we'd just be groping and raping right and left...)

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Kelly vs. Wilson

So did Kelly lie about Wilson? Or did he just make an error? Because Wilson certainly lied about Kelly--blatantly, and about a more serious matter. Wilson just flat-out lied about Kelly's "empty barrel" metaphor being racist...and to call someone a racist today is, as others have pointed out, about one degree shy of calling them a pedophile.

Flaming LIps Seven Nation Army

Steve 'n' Seagulls Thunderstruck

The Dead South In Hell I'll Be In Good Company

Alabama Shakes Hold On

Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats: Howling at Nothing

How You Like Me Now?

Yeah So What?

Yeah I'm just posting stuff I like. So it's mainstream. So f*cking sue me.

Loser

Planetary

Intergalactic

In The City It's A Pity 'Cause We Just Can't Hide

RFDMC:

Penn Grad Student Calls On Students In Class In An Order Determined By The Students' Race And Sex

You really can't make up this kind of crackpottery.

   Or...well...somebody made it up, obviously...but...you know what I mean.

   Stephanie McKellop openly admits that, when multiple students raise their hands, she calls on them in an order determined by their relative status on the PC left--blacks before whites, women before men (gays before straights? Gays then bisexuals then straights? How does she know? Made-up gender-whatsises and toaster-kin before ordinary folks? God knows.)
   She apparently thinks that black men come before white women in the hierarchy. I've never been clear who won that particular heat in the oppression Olympics...so it's good to at least have that cleared up, I suppose.

   In case you haven't noticed, these people can never, ever, ever be allowed to get anywhere near real power. Last time they did, it was the Gulag for people like you and me, fellow thoughtcriminal.

   The real low point of the article isn't even really what's-her-name the grad student, though. It gets worse. [sigh]  Of course it does:

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Jan Boxill, Cleared In UNC AFAM Scandal

link
As I've said here before, Jan's a good person. I'm glad to see that this train wreck is over for her.

The Count Is Back, Skewering The Carolina-Bashers

...and Dan Kane's journmamalism in particular.

CA Recognizes Third "Gender"

facepalm

Male and female are sexes, not genders.

"Non-binary" is neither a sex nor a gender..

To say that you have three options, (a) male, (b) female, and (c) "non-binary" is rather like saying that you have three options: (a) under 6' tall, (b) over 6' tall, and (c) height not divided into two categories.

LSU's New $85 million Recreation Complex With "Lazy River" Water Maze Thing / LSU's Crumbling Library

At Instapundit

Raqqa Falls To U.S.-Backed Forces

Not seeing as much about this as I'd have thought.

Who The Hell Is Harvey Weinstein? Also, As Goes Without Saying: F*ck Guys Like That

I don't know who that guy is, and the few things I've tried to read were so boring I couldn't get more than a few sentences in. I don't know what a "producer" does. I don't care. I literally could not care any less than I care. Anyway: I don't know anything about this guy. I don't know whether he's guilty. Though I'm under the impression that there are a lot of accusations against him. And as the number of accusations goes up, the less likely it seems that they're false. Anyway, ignore that specific question. Just in general: f*ck guys who do that kind of stuff. They need their asses kicked. I routinely flip out about the prevailing feminist hysteria about this sort of thing...but that in no way means that I think it's even vaguely permissible. Guys who actually do that stuff seriously need an ass-kicking of biblical proportions. Oh, but if you went to his room and held him off the balcony by his ankles while making him promise to never do it again, you'd be the bad guy. That's the kind of crazy, mixed-up world we live in.

Don't Trust Men Who Say They're Feminists!

Because, you see, it is both obligatory and impermissible for men to say they're feminists.
   What happened to you feminism? You used to be cool.

Jerry Brown Vetoes Anti-Due Process Title IX Bill

I'm...pleased and surprised.

If There Is Any Fixed Star...

... in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Friedersdorf: "Who Is Competent To Decide What Offends?"

This is the sort of thing that's irked me for a long time: what's declared offensive by the PCs is usually determined by activists steeped in all sorts of postpostmodern PC nuttiness rather than average people of the allegedly offended group:

    But a flawed approach leaves students less culturally competent than when they began. Consider a widely circulated educational sheet, derived from an academic text, that seems to have originated in the UC system before being circulated at UC Santa Cruz, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, the court system of Philadelphia, and beyond. It lists what it calls examples of “racial microaggressions” that “communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons.”
     The following statements are included:
     “You speak good English.”
     “When I look at you I don’t see color.”
     “America is a melting pot.”
     “America is the land of opportunity.”
     “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”
   The UCLA professor Eugene Volokh once criticized this microaggressions sheet for going beyond “evenhandedly trying to prevent insult” to actively stigmatizing contested viewpoints, an inappropriate measure for administrators at a public university. I shared that objection at the time, but recently came upon another as powerful.
   The Cato/YouGov survey on free speech and tolerance that I reported on last week included questions about whether folks find the same sentiments expressed above offensive.
   Among the results?
   Telling a recent immigrant, “you speak good English” was deemed “not offensive” by 77 percent of Latinos; saying “I don’t notice people’s race” was deemed “not offensive” by 71 percent of African Americans and 80 percent of Latinos; saying “America is a melting pot” was deemed not offensive by 77 percent of African Americans and 70 percent of Latinos; saying “America is the land of opportunity” was deemed “not offensive” by 93 percent of African Americans and 89 percent of Latinos; and saying “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” was deemed “not offensive” by 89 percent of Latinos and 77 percent of African Americans.

The Boneyard

A cool little video on the Davis-Monthan AFB AMARG facility, the aircraft "boneyard." I did not realize that they routinely restore planes to usable condition.

Chicago's Soda Tax Fizzles

B...but...won't someone think of the children?!?!?!

Ilya Somin: "Can We Trust Government To Correct Our Cognitive Biases?"

Whadda you think?

Heather Heying: "First, They Came For The Biologists..."

"...The postmodernist left on campus is intolerant not only of opposing views, but of science itself." They didn't actually come for the biologists first...but they've been coming for them for awhile. They particularly hate the fact that there are real natural kinds, and, in particular, that sexes and races are real kinds. That doesn't fit so well with social constructionist mumbo-jumbo (though it's all so confused that it's probably not outright inconsistent with anything...).
   Anyway, I'm inclined to agree with Heying, of course: the left is currently more anti-science than the right. The right's anti-science tendencies are pretty mundane and common: like everybody else, they tend to reject scientific conclusions that they don't like. The left's anti-science tendencies are deep and theoretical: influential sectors of the left reject the very idea of of truth--and the ideas of objectivity, reason and knowledge. Or, worse, they "relativize" them to e.g. culture. Give me skepticism any day over that sort of nonsense. Maybe even worse is the mumbo-jumbo-ness of it all. The left doesn't state its (erroneous) positions clearly--it spews out a familiar fog of nonsense terms that's utterly baffling to almost everyone. Clearly stating clear errors is one thing; undermining the very possibility of clear, rational discussion is much, much worse.

Joe Kolman: "Class Struggle: How Identity Politics Divided A Campus

Some glimmer of hope for Reed described at the end of this piece.

... 

   Hunter Dillman agreed to meet me on campus before we went to lunch in a barbeque joint a few blocks away. He was 6’2”, drove a beat-up black pickup and had pale blue eyes and blond hair parted in the centre. He was eager to talk to somebody who wanted to hear his story in detail, somebody who didn’t believe he had simply fucked up his freshman year. He told me his father was a construction worker who owned a farm and raised cows and chickens on the side. Hunter had taken four advanced placement (AP) science courses his senior year, getting all fives, and planned to get a degree in chemistry.
   At the beginning of the first semester, as he was going to dinner with a friend, he read a Facebook post from the leader of a Latina group who wrote that her group planned to ‘Stop Trump’ and asked fellow students for support in a school funding survey. He was curious and considered getting involved. After he asked her a couple of times to be more specific about how the group planned to stop Trump, she accused him of being a racist for challenging a Latina student support group. He responded that if her group called people racist just for asking questions, he had no intention of voting to fund it.
   A few minutes later, when the Latina activist happened to meet him waiting in line at the dining hall, she continued her accusations and called him a ‘little white boy’. Shaken, he took his food back to his room and tried to eat as he watched in horror as comment after comment about him appeared on Facebook, denouncing him as a bigot.
   The next day, as he was walking across campus, a student screamed ‘Racist!’ at him. The accusers never came up to talk to him, but the online abuse kept coming. Many of the people he thought were friends dropped him. And although a few said they sympathised, no one was willing to stand up for him. The fact that he was 25 per cent Native American only made things worse. ‘How dare you use your Native American identity to justify your racism?’, his Native American peer counsellor asked him.
   When Bruce Smith, the dean of students, called him into his office to get his side of the story, Dillman assumed the Latina student had filed a formal complaint against him under the school’s Honor Principle. Later, when the head of the peer-mentoring programme suggested he face his accusers in a meeting of fellow minority students, he declined. ‘It would have been me versus everybody else in the same room. Hell no!’
   While Dillman managed to do well the first semester, the second semester, he said, he went into ‘a dark place’. He slept all day. His grades slipped. He wanted students to see him as a human being, a student just like them, but ‘People wouldn’t let me. I knew what happened to me wasn’t justified. I thought, “How shameful”.’ But in the end the shame was too great.
   After he filled out the forms to drop out mid-semester, the dean of students met with him again. At the end of the hour-long meeting, when the dean failed to mention the outcome of the Honor Principle case, Dillman finally inquired about the outcome. Only then did the dean tell him that nothing had come of it. (Reed College officials declined to be interviewed.)
   Hunter went back home to Oregon City and moved into a trailer on the edge of his parents’ farm. Gradually, he got back on his feet. Today he’s making $20 an hour as a carpenter, framing houses. ‘I was the first person in my family to go to college’, he said. ‘My father told me that when I got accepted to Reed, it was the proudest moment in his life. That was my best shot. I could have been someone who got an awesome education. Now I’m a construction worker.’

According to GQ, Is Life In The Handmaid's Tale Better Than Life In Trump's America?"

Spoiler alert: yes
I'm not even making that up.

Anti-Trump Bias: An Exchange Between Kelly And A Reporter

The media's anti-Trump bias is just awful. Trump himself is awful--but that's a different subject. As I've insisted before: he's bad enough that even those dedicated to making him look terrible shouldn't have to make things up or spin things. But they do...they really, really do.
   Here's just one thing.

"MAGA Hats Are Newest Sign Of Pre-Teen Rebellion"

link

I've suggested this before: when one side becomes intolerably, intolerantly, dogmatically moralistic, independent thinkers and those inclined to yank the chain of the man are going to be driven to, well, yank their chains. I say that the progressive/PC/SJ left is the Moral Majority of our time...in case anybody remembers the Moral Majority...

   But here's another thought: when everybody and his brother was running around in Obamaesque hopey-changey wear...was that identified as a "sign of pre-teen rebellion"? Or bullying? Is there a double standard in play? Or no?

Is The Administrative State The Major Threat to Civil Liberties Of Our Era?

plausibly

Centrist Dems And Big Ideas

I think they should avoid this urge and stick with their instincts: smaller, more conservative ideas.

Thomas B. Edsall: "Democrats Are Playing Checkers While Trump Is Playing Chess"

I'm not so sure about that... I'd say it's more like: Dems have let the nutty PC left become influential in their party. So now, rather than the sane party vs. the Trump party, it's crazy party 1 vs. crazy party 2.

   Says one Arthur Lupia:

Many liberal elites, who see right-leaning voters as blindly following the edicts of an unbending dogma on many issues, have little to no awareness of their own blind allegiance to an unbending dogma on many issues. This blind spot, which has only grown in recent years, makes the left exceptionally easy to troll. In other words, the left’s lack of awareness of the excesses of their own evolving dogma makes it increasingly easy for Breitbart, Fox News, and similar-minded others to portray liberals as hypocritical and out of touch with the day-to-day lives of many Americans.

I'd say that this quote shows part of what's wrong with the Dems. It's largely right...but it soft-pedals the problem. The left is easy to troll, but that's merely a consequence of the bigger problem, which is the blind spot. But the bigger problem is the unbending dogma. And the even bigger problem is that the dogma is insane. I mean, by all means, worry about how easy you-all are to troll...but don't pretend that's the real problem. 

  Well...on second thought...the dogmatism is such an integral component of PC crazy...that I'm not so sure it really is less important than the content of the dogma.

Teenagers Allegedly "Tossing A Coin" To Determine Which "Gender" To Put On College Applications

Um, the applications mentioned here ask about the applicant's sex. Nobody gives a rat's ass about your "gender"...well...except insofar as that actually means sex...

Performance And Morale Problems On U.S. Guided Missile Cruisers

Not good

No NCAA Sanctions Against Carolina

It only took seven years for the NCAA to admit the obvious.

DPRK Air Force Is Still Flying MiG-15s

The NKAF's got a few MiG-29s and suchlike...but apparently they're mostly flying Chinese MiG-17 knock-offs, if you can believe that.

Sad!

NCAA To Release UNC Infractions Report Same Day As 2017 Championship Banner Is Unfurled...

...at Late Night With Roy.
Per Bilas, you just can't make this shit up.
   Well, I guess we'll find out in about 12 hours whether the NCAA is finally going to admit it's wrong...or, instead, is going to get its ass kicked in court.
   Those AFAM classes sucked. The whole thing was appalling. But it was an academic/SACS matter. Carolina was assessed a punishment--probation by SACS--and that was finished years ago. It conducted multiple investigations and paid tens of millions of dollars for an independent investigation. But the NCAA won't take innocent for an answer. It's way, way, way out of line. At this point, Sankey is just making up rules in order to try to drag down hoops. Carolina would probably accept a token punishment just to get this over with...but any attempt to, say, issue a post-season ban will just end up in court--and Carolina will win.

Is Your Plumber A Nazi?

facepalm

"I Don't Need No Facts!": Kmele Foster Gets Shouted Down By BLM Activists...

Riiight when he's explaining how free speech protections helped MLK.
I find myself reflecting fairly often on how appalled the good reverend would be by all this sort of BS.

Ezra Klein: "Ta-Nahisi Coates Is Not Here To Comfort You"

I liked TNC more before he became a progressive hero. I still admire the guy for calling it like he sees it...but I can't overlook the fact that he writes things like this:

   "We have a 20-to-1 wealth gap," Coates replied. "Every nickel of wealth the average black family has, the average white family has a dollar. What is the world in which that wealth gap is closed? What happens? What makes that possible? What does that look like? What is the process?"
   Even imagining that world, Coates makes ample space for tragedy. When he tries to describe the events that would erase America's wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. "It's very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don't tend to happen peacefully."

If a white person said something analogous, he'd be vilified by the left. Rightly so, in fact. It'd be patent racis...whoops...I mean white supremacy! Actually, I'm less annoyed by the pro-racial-violence slant than I am by that BS about race being a "construct"...which is, well, BS... (Also, last I checked, the wealth gap was more like 14:1. Still appalling...but...well...better than 20:1, at least. Not to quibble.)
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Heather MacDonald: "Are We All Unconscious Racists?"

Nope.
   "Implicit bias" is BS (or, at least, the IAT is):

The implicit-bias crusade is agenda-driven social science. Banaji seems to see herself on a crusade. In an e-mail to New York’s Jesse Singal, she attacked both the credentials and the motives of the academics who have subjected the IAT narrative to critical scrutiny: “I don’t read commentaries from non-experts,” she wrote (those “non-experts” are overwhelmingly credentialed psychologists, like herself). “It scares people (fortunately, a negligible minority) that learning about our minds may lead people to change their behavior so that their behavior may be more in line with their ideals and aspirations.” The critics should explore with their “psychotherapists or church leaders” their alleged obsession with the race IAT, she suggested. Kang has accused critics of holding a “tournament of merit” vision of society and of having financial reasons for IAT skepticism. (Of course, the fact that Banaji and Kang hire themselves out as IB trainers, for “non-trivial . . . fees,” as Kang puts it about himself, and that Greenwald serves as a paid expert witness in discrimination lawsuits, does not lead Kang to impute financial reasons for such pro-IAT advocacy.)

FIRE: Majority Of College Students Self-Censor, Support Disinvitations, Don't Know Hate Speech Is Protected By First Amendment

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 11, 2017 — A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education finds a majority of students on college campuses self-censor in class, support disinviting some guest speakers with whom they disagree, and don’t know that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. The study also finds that Republican and Democratic students have different opinions on campus protests, disinvitations, and hate speech protections.
In the most comprehensive survey on students’ attitudes about free speech to date, FIRE measured student responses to questions about self expression, reactions to expression of other students, guest speakers, and hate speech. Some key findings include:
46 percent of students recognize that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and 48 percent of students think the First Amendment should not protect hate speech.

Most students (56 percent) support disinviting some guest speakers. Democratic students are 19 percentage points more likely than their Republican peers to agree that there are times a speaker should be disinvited.

58 percent of college students think it’s important to be part of a campus community where they are not exposed to intolerant or offensive ideas.

Very few students report that they would participate in actions that would prevent a guest speaker event from taking place (2 percent). Even fewer said they would use violence to disrupt an event (1 percent).

In open-ended questions, almost half of students (45 percent) identify speech with a racist component as hate speech, and 13 percent of students associate hate speech with violence.

In class, 30 percent of students have self-censored because they thought their words would be offensive to others. A majority of students (54 percent) report self-censoring in the classroom at some point since the beginning of college.
FIRE’s survey also found ideological differences in how students feel about free expression, both inside and outside the classroom. Very liberal students are 14 percentage points more likely than their very conservative peers to feel comfortable expressing their opinions in the classroom. Additionally, 60 percent of Republican students think they should not have to walk past a protest on campus, while only 28 percent of Democratic students think the same.

Trump vs. Freedom Of The Press

Our on-going national embarrassment

NYT Hires "Gender Editor"

That's ridiculous enough...but, given the "intersectionality" nonsense, it really means they hired a social "justice" editor:

   "To me, what gender issues means is not simply coverage of feminism or issues related to women's rights. Though of course that is important, and we're committed to approaching those issues and approaching them from an intersectional lens. But I think for a place like the Times, this type of content needs to exist throughout every section of the paper," Bennett writes.
   "So whether that means stories about gender identity, or sexuality, or masculinity, or race and class and how that plays into gender identity, or simply the subjects that the Times already covers — politics, international affairs, science, health. But approaching these subjects through a lens of gender."

   Though...really...how is this different than the overall orientation the NYT already has?

Is Trump Unraveling?

link

California: Harsher Penalties For Refusing To Misuse Pronouns Than For Knowingly Spreading HIV

Progressivism is insane.
   Congratulations, moonbats, for making Trump a plausibly-less-bad alternative. I mean, Trump is an asshat who might kill us all...but he's less flat-out delusional than the progressive left.

Police Keep Antifa Away From Columbus Statues By Taping Job Applications To Them

link

Now It's Columbus Statues

link

How Two A-10 Pilots Saved Marines Cornered By The Taliban

Jarheads and Hawgs vs. Talitards

Republicans Not Consistent Champions Of Free Speech

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Trump's Twitter Tantrums Continue To **** Things Up

link
I think Twitter's a bad thing for American public discussion even independent of the Trump train wreck. Trump's just the icing on the cake. Twitter ought to shut itself down for the sake of humanity.

The Plague Spreads In Madagascar

Pneumonic, no less

Republicans Prove They Genuinely Care About The Debt

LOL psych

The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions

Because of departmental peculiarities I haven't taught philosophy of science in something like ten years, so it's been basically that long since I thought much about Kuhn or cracked open my copy of SSR... You know, as much as we all punch it around anymore, that really is a damn interesting, impressive, cool, readable, exciting book. I'd really forgotten how much fun it is to read. Though, embarrassingly, I really am pretty ignorant of the secondary literature. I really ought to fix that in my copious spare time.

[Good news! My first duck-rabbit came out almost perfect! I still got it...]

Mary Katherine Ham: Contraception Isn't In The Constitution...

...but religious freedom is.
   Boy, I just don't see how I've ended up disagreeing with the American left so much. But I'm certainly inclined to agree with Ham about this. The state should have more of an interest in protecting freedom of religion than it does in getting all insurance plans to include contraception coverage. I mean...I'd like for more women to have easier access to contraception. Primarily because I think unwanted pregnancies are really bad...not because I think there's some kind of right to have contraception covered by insurance...though...the left now seems to think that we have a right to everything it thinks it would be good for us to have... But women can pay for their own contraceptives, or they can buy supplemental insurance, or they can avoid jobs that don't provide insurance with contraception coverage. However, a person with religious objections to contraception would be semi-excluded from going into business if they have such objections and there was no work-around. You might say that they, too, could do something else...something other than going into business. But that seems more burdensome. And, again: there's no right to contraception in the Constitution...
   What'm I missing here?

Cook Political Report: Dems Have Shifted Sharply Leftward

link

ISIS Fighters Surrender En Masse

link

Saletan On The Las Vegas Shooting And Gun Control

Saletan seems to me to typically occupy the reasonable center. Nothing really surprising in there, actually.

I'd just suggest, again, that we do need some positive reason to think that restrictions will help. It's stupid to accept less freedom without reason to believe that something important will be gained.

I think we should guard our rights jealously--especially given the relentless leftwardness of the left. Since they seem to treat every concession as a beachhead from which to push for further concessions, I'd say that arguments in favor of concessions have to meet a fairly high standard of proof. 

  But, of course, I really don't know what to do.

White Supremacists Rally Again In C'ville; Dems Respond With A Bunch Of Anti-First-Amendment-Sounding Stuff

And so the cycle of suck continues...

Americans Are Addicted To Outrage

link

Tillerson: Trump Is A "Moron"

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CA Declares Itself A "Sanctuary" State

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On the one hand, I've long been inclined to say: I wish the left would go ahead and admit that it's for open borders.
On the other hand, as Brown notes, this doesn't prevent ICE and DHS from operating in CA and doing their thing.
On the other other hand, it does seem to be the state of California impeding the feds as much as it can get away with.
   I suppose that, to some extent, this sort of disagreement has become symbolic, and actual details about good policy have been kind of shuffled off to the background. I'd think it'd be obvious that we have to discourage people from entering the country illegally and staying here illegally. OTOH we have to do that humanely.
   I just don't have a clear enough fix on the details of what's going on to deserve much of an opinion. Though my guiding though recently has been that the greatest danger is posed by a flood of unassimilated illegal aliens. Without fairly strong reason to believe that this won't cause major problems, I say avoid that.
   As I've said before, though: if the Dems were finding their inner libertarian, I'd be more sympathetic. That is: if they were arguing that we should throttle back on governmental controls generally, it'd be different--if, say, they were arguing that nobody really needs a drivers' license, the government need not keep track of us all so closely, filing tax returns isn't such a big deal, etc. I'm not necessarily for those things--but at least it'd be principled. But they aren't. They're arguing ad hoc...though in predictably ad hoc ways.
   Eh, I don't know.

Behold, Casual Progressivism: Betsy DeVos Is Rich Edition

A challenge: see whether you can find a valid criticism of DeVos anywhere in this.

tl;dr: I don't know anything about policy, but I heard DeVos was rich, and so now I'm an activist I guess.

   Oh, there's another hint at a criticism: DeVos doesn't have a background in education. This is actually a point in her favor, however. Ed schools are catastrophes.

   Seriously. There's dumb on both sides, of course. But this seems to me to be one paradigm of it on the left: I have no idea what's what, but I've got some feelz and suddenly I'm woked or whatever! 

The Brain Has A Lymphatic System

I didn't even know that we didn't think that the brain had a lymphatic system...and here it goes and turns out that it does have one after all. Also, I wasn't sure what the lymphatic system did.

Larison: "The Fanatical [Iran] Nuclear Deal Saboteurs Return"

Tom Cotton and that bunch...they're cracked.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: "How Ta-Nahisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power

This is good, IMO. Of course I don't agree with all of it:

   Amazingly, despite his near godlike status within white liberal circles, in the collection’s finest essay, “The Case for Reparations,” originally published in The Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Coates worries that “today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything.” It is a jaw-dropping sentence if you take even a moment to consider the current discourse in progressive circles.
   “We Were Eight Years in Power” can leave a reader with the distinct impression that its author is glad, relieved even, that Donald Trump was elected president. It is exhibits A through Z of Mr. Coates’s national indictment, proof that the foundations of the United States are anti-black and that the past is not dead — it’s not even past, to echo William Faulkner.
   This argument, which would have been much harder to prosecute had Wisconsin and Pennsylvania stayed blue, is compelling because there is much disturbing truth in it. Pent- up white racism did fire Mr. Trump’s candidacy, and he happily fanned the flames. Yet that alone cannot explain why, in 2016, of the nearly 700 counties that voted for a black president twice, over 200 opted for Mr. Trump rather than backing a member of the white Washington establishment.
   In “The First White President,” Mr. Coates’s blistering jeremiad that serves as the book’s epilogue, he momentarily gestures at this greater complexity. “The politics of race are, themselves, never attributable ‘just to the politics of race,’ ” he writes. Yet despite this throat-clearing, he continues to argue as though they are. “White tribalism haunts even more nuanced writers,” he argues, training his sights on The New Yorker’s George Packer.

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Trump To Move Toward Nixing Iran Deal?

I don't understand this stuff, but I'm under the impression that we can't reasonably expect anything better.
I also have a long-term inclination to think that we could improve the Iran situation with more honey and less vinegar...but that's a really vague impression formed in the total absence of anything even remotely resembling expertise.

NRA Supports Restrictions On Slide-Fire Stocks

I am surprised.

Gareth Porter: "When Did Congress Vote To Aid The Saudi's Yemeni War?"

This Yemen thing is not getting any less ugly.
Support H. Con. Res 81! Resurrect the War Powers Act!

Alice Dreger: "Take Back The Ivory Tower"

Dreger is awesome.
(Though...she does try to argue that the Princeton Halloween fiasco was (anti-female) sexism in that, though Erika Christakis wrote the original memo, Nicholas Christakis ended up taking the brunt of the blowback... So...that's a stretch... Or, rather, some kind of inversion...)

88 College Taglines, Arranged As A Poem

Imaginize the possible you!

Leah Libresco: "I Used To Think Gun Control Was The Answer. My Research Told Me Otherwise."

Congenial to my antecedent beliefs...so I should probably be more skeptical...but here it is.

200 ACLU Employees Repudiate The First Amendment

Talk about burying the lede...this is a very worrisome development.

Conservatives Are Being Purged From YouTube, Twitter, And Other Social Media Sites

Patreon, too. There's been so much of this happening that it's frankly amazing to me that there's not a peep about it on the news...well...actually...come to think of it...maybe not all that amazing...
   Here's the latest: 37 Prager University videos removed from YouTube. Some of the Prager U videos are dumb, but some aren't bad, and some are actually pretty damn good. Not that that matters. They could all suck and it would still be bullshit to suppress them for political reasons.

"Liberalism Is White Supremacy": BLM Shouts Down ACLU At W&M

link
I don't know why it should matter, but I wish more liberals knew how much the ctrl-left hates them.

Las Vegas Shooter Used Bump Stocks

link
I don't understand why those things are legal.

Trump Undermines Tillerson Re: DPRK

I wrote something about this, but it was too angry and profanity-laden to post.

At Least 20 Dead, 100 Injured In Las Vegas Shooting

Jesus Christ.

Trump, Puerto Rico, and Media Bias

So my natural response is to believe most of the plausible criticisms I hear of Trump. But the media's new story / theory that Trump is botching the relief effort in Puerto Rico...it just sent up a couple of red flags. It does sound like Trump's inner circle didn't get out of the blocks fast enough...and that seems like a very significant error. But...on the right, the story is, basically, that we're doing a hell of a lot, there's not a lot more that we could be doing, and that distribution efforts are slow because (a) the infrastructure is destroyed and Puerto Rico is big and it's a lot of people...so it's just hard, and (b) some local officials (e.g. the left's new hero, the mayor of San Juan) aren't cooperating sufficiently with FEMA. Another part of the right's story / theory is that the left (including, of course, the major media) wants to turn this into Trump's Katrina.
   I detest Mr. Trump, but, as I keep saying, my epistemic pendulum has recently swung way, way, way in an anti-major-media direction... So...I really just don't know.
   But here's a /r/neutralpolitics thread on the topic. It seems to lean in the same direction I've been leaning: The Trumpies got a slow start, but other than that, not much more that could be done better. I'm not really even sure how much there is that a President can or should do. I'd think that this is something that's basically up to FEMA. There are a few things like suspending the Jones Act (now done)...but I'm really not sure whether / how much something like this ought to reflect on the President--I also suspect that it's something that is easily spinnable, in part for that very reason. This is something I started noticing during the Clinton e-mail story...we'd just get breathless tales of how Clinton's people handled her server...but I had no way of knowing how the Secretary of State and other cabinet-members usually handled their e-mail at the time...it was all made to sound bad...but I had no idea whether it was unreasonable, because I didn't really understand it, and I didn't know what was commonly-accepted practice among similar people in the U.S. government. Anyway, with no understanding of what the executive branch ought to be doing in Puerto-Rico-like situations, I have no idea whether Trump deserves blame, nor, if so, how much he deserves.

[via Anon in comments: Tobin Harshaw: "No, Trump Didn't Botch The Puerto Rico Crisis"]

[This WaPo story was the first thing I read on all this, and it seems damning, if largely true.]

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: "My Alma Mater Cancelled My Title IX 'Hate Speech' Panel"

There's no liberal bias at universities...universities now incline toward the anti-liberal left. More and more, they tend to find liberalism and its fuddy-duddy hangups--e.g. free speech, due process--dangerously retrograde.

Nutty PC Librarian Rejects Melania Trump's Gift Of Dr. Seuss Books As "Racist Propaganda"

Idiot.
   It's not enough to nastily turn down a gift...of books...for children...not even your own children... But you gotta add a bunch of brainless political babble on top of it to really make the whole thing really repulsive.
   Among the many grotesque things about political correctness / social justice madness is the predictable string of cant that accompanies the antics of its exponents. Blah blah racism blah blah misogyny blah blah colonialism blah blah rape culture blah blah blah. Always that same. Minor variations on the same catechism they are all indoctrinated with. Her actual letter is almost worth reading it's such a parody of PC loonery. I especially like how she works in how her school is such a beautiful reading rainbow of different "gender expressions" and shit.
   Bah, it's 4 a.m. and I'm too zombified to even complain about this properly.
   tt;dw: this librarian is an idiot.

   But...is PC madness common among librarians? Our library declared itself a "safe space." I know that the PC crazy tends to creep into any discipline that's humanities-y. I've also started to think that part of the problem might be that the kind of people who are exposed to PC crap tend not to know any other philosophy. If they did, they probably wouldn't be so smitten by the worst that has been thought and said. I also tend to think a lot of other things too, fascinatingly....

"Inside The Legal Labyrinth Of A College Rape Case"

I thought this was really interesting.
   Not sure why, really. It didn't differ much from several other accounts I've read. One of the most interesting things about it was that, after the accusation is made public, two other women come forward to accuse the same person. When that happens, I personally find it difficult to continue to suspend belief about the accused's guilt. But then it turns out that the other accusers are so unconvincing that the accuser's lawyers won't even put them on the stand...though the lawyers continues to refer to them in public statements. Finally the accused's lawyers force them to stop doing that. Then the accuser makes false accusations against the police, claiming that they asked her paradigmatically humiliating questions...but it turns out that the incidents are all taped. So...she lied even while being recorded... Then her lawyer alters pictures of her from after the incident, to make hickeys look like bruises... Though RealClearInvestigations plays it all pretty straight, after all is said and done, both the accuser and her lawyer seem pretty nutty.