CRT Related Censorship and Tribalism Make Inroads into the American Legal System

Detailed article by Aaron Sibarium, writing at Common Sense, the Substack of Bari Weiss.  The title to the article is "The Takeover of America's Legal System: The kids didn't grow out of it." Here are a couple excerpts:

The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.

Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.

One more . . .

Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate—and an illegitimate legal order. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse—the 17-year-old who killed two men and wounded another during a riot, in Kenosha, Wisconsin—was “further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system.” At UC Irvine, the university’s chief diversity officer emailed students that the acquittal “conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies’ matter.” (He later apologized for having “appeared to call into question a lawful trial verdict.”)

Professors say it is harder to lecture about cases in which accused rapists are acquitted, or a police officer is found not guilty of abusing his authority. One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he’s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.

“I got into this job because I liked to play devil’s advocate,” said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family.”

Other law professors—several of whom asked me not to identify their institution, their area of expertise, or even their state of residence—were similarly terrified.

Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School, told me: “I massively self-censor."

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How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 26: The Magic of Tuna Acceleration and Workspaces

This is Chapter 26 of my advice to a hypothetical baby. And yes, what I'm really doing is acting out the time-travel fantasy of going back give myself some pointers on how to navigate life. If I only knew what I now know . . .  All of these chapters (soon to be 100) can be found here.

You are only 26 days old, but you will someday escape your crib and your room with the same aplomb with which you escaped your mother's womb. And at some point in your adventures as a bipedal ape, you might be lucky enough to see some fish. One thing that I always found amazing is how fast a fish can go from zero to some absurdly fast speed. It turns out that this was explained in Andy Clark's excellent book, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (1998). I had the opportunity to take four graduate seminars with Andy at Washington University and he excelled at filled our heads with non-stop counter-intuitive observations and explaining them in clear English. Here's how fish can take off like rockets:

The swimming capacities of many fishes, such as dolphins and bluefin tuna, are staggering. These aquatic beings far outperform anything that nautical science has so far produced. Such fish are both mavericks of maneuverability and, it seems, paradoxes of propulsion. It is estimated that the dolphin for example, is simply not strong enough l to propel itself at the speeds it is observed to reach. In attempting to unravel this mystery, two experts in fluid dynamics, the brothers Michael and George Triantafyllou, have been led ro an interesting hypothesis: that the extraordinary swimming efficiency of certain fishes is due to an evolved capacity to exploit and create additional sources of kinetic energy in the watery environment. Such fishes, it seems, exploit aquatic swirls, eddies, and vortices to " rurbocharge" propulsion and aid maneuverability. Such fluid phenomena sometimes occur naturally (e.g., where flowing water hits a rock). But the fish's exploitation of such external aids does not stop there. Instead, the fish actively creates a variety of vortices and pressure gradients (e.g. by flapping its tail) and then uses these to support subsequent speedy, agile behavior. By thus controlling and exploiting local environmental structure, the fish is able to produce fast starts and turns that make our ocean-going vessels look clumsy, ponderous, and laggardly. " Aided by a continuous parade of such vortices," Triantafyllou and Triantafyllou (1995, p. 69) point out," it is even possible for a fish's swimming efficiency to exceed 100 percent." Ships and submarines reap no such benefits: they treat the aquatic environment as an obstacle to be negotiated and do not seek to subvert it to their own ends by monitoring and massaging the fluid dynamics surrounding the hull.

The tale of the tuna reminds us that biological systems profit profoundly from local environmental structure. The environment is not best conceived solely as a problem domain to be negotiated. It is equally, and crucially, a resource to be factored into the solutions. This simple observation has, as we have seen, some far-reaching consequences. First and foremost, we must recognize the brain for what it is. Ours are not the brains of disembodied spirits conveniently glued into ambulant, corporeal shells of flesh and blood. Rather, they are essentially the brains of embodied agents capable of creating and exploiting structure in the world.

This passage brings me to today's advice: Don't just "Do," as Yoda suggests. Prepare your workspace and then "Do" with apparent super powers! Tuna prepare the nearby water by setting up their own currents before tapping into them. Ka-Bang!  Reminds me of the acceleration technique of the cartoon Roadrunner, but tuna acceleration is not fiction.

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What Harvard did to Economist Roland Fryer

Glenn Loury introduces a narrative that tells a story about what happens when a person diligently follows the evidence where it leads, but where it leads conflicts with a prevailing cultural-media narrative. In this case, Fryer's research showed police have not been killing unarmed "black" men at a rate greater than they kill unarmed "white" men. Wikipedia's version: "In 2016, Fryer published a working paper concluding that although minorities (African Americans and Hispanics) are more likely to experience police use of force than whites, they were not more likely to be shot by police than whites."

This is the story of the Harvard community reacted to those inconvenient numbers.

Glenn Loury introduces the video:

Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.

He was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur “Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence. It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because it happens to challenge the status quo.

To do the kind of work Roland does, you have to be more than brilliant. You have to be fearless. And I cannot help suspect that now Roland is paying the price for pursuing the truth wherever it leads. Several years ago, he was accused of sexual harassment by a disgruntled ex-assistant. In my opinion and that of many others, those accusations are baseless. But Harvard has used them as a pretext to shut down Roland’s lab, to curtail his teaching, and to marginalize him within the institution.

I’ll not mince words. Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily, heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist. Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital research not because it was flawed but because they found the results to be politically inconvenient. “Veritas” indeed.

I’m not the only one infuriated by what is happening to Roland Fryer. The filmmaker Rob Montz has made a short documentary about this subject. I’m interviewed in it alongside others who see this fiasco for what it is, some of who have much to lose by publicly coming to Roland’s defense. People need to see this film. They need to know the truth about Roland Fryer. So I ask you to watch and to judge for yourself, and if you feel so moved, to share it as widely as possible.

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Ukraine, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem with Whataboutism

I'll start by saying that Putin is a bad actor who is acting aggressively and killing innocent people. But I also need to add that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals. Is there really a problem saying both of these things? Turns out that I'm going light on the United States here. As Noam Chomsky recently stated, the United States thinks that it owns the entire world.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Except in today's tribal crazed environment, where the U.S. is entitled to protect its borders through its militarily-enforced hyper-extended sphere of influence but Russia is not allowed to resist NATO's death machines from being parked on its own borders, "because Putin is Hitler." End of Argument. Freddie DeBoer expands on a story about mass hysteria, fact-denial and hypocrisy that risks getting all of us physically roasted in a nuclear holocaust:

The people who say “whataboutism” don’t want to talk about carpet bombing in Cambodia. They don’t want to talk about death squads in El Salvador. They don’t want to talk about reinstalling the Shah in Iran. They don’t want to talk about the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. They don’t want to talk about giving a hit list to rampaging anti-Communists in Indonesia. They don’t want to talk about the US’s role in installing a far-right government in Honduras. They don’t want to talk about US support for apartheid in South Africa. They don’t want to talk about unexploded ordnance that still kills and maims in Laos. They don’t want to talk about supporting the hideously corrupt drug lord post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They don’t want to talk about aiding literal Nazis and Italian fascists in taking over the government in Albania. They don’t want to talk about giving support to the far-right government’s “dirty war” in Argentina. They don’t want to talk about the US-instigated far-right coup in Ghana. They don’t want to talk about our illegal bombing of Yugoslavia. They don’t want to talk about centuries of mistreatment of Haiti, such as sponsoring the coup against Aristide. They don’t want to talk about sparking 36 years of ruinous civil war, and attendant slaughters of indigenous people, in Guatemala. They don’t want to talk about our drone war in Pakistan. They don’t want to talk about how much longer this list could go on. So when do we talk about that stuff, exactly? . . .

Well, OK, fine: I denounce Putin. I denounce his invasion. I support neither and have never suggested I did. Now will you, dear reader, denounce the oceans of blood the United States has spilled in pursuit of its own selfish interests, in the past century? Or do you have some jury-rigged excuse for every American crime I listed above and all the ones I didn’t have space to fit?

If you want the world to operate under the principle of self-determination of countries, you need to start with the country that is the indisputably most powerful and influential country on earth. And if you’re American your first priority and greatest influence lies in America’s government. I will repeat myself in saying that, if you don’t want to acknowledge our role in the world, it’s so much better simply to say, “I’m an American, I think America comes first, I don’t care about the wrong we do, love it or leave it.” That’s not a very enlightened attitude, but it has the benefit of a certain grim integrity, of plainfaced honesty. To insist that you care about self-determination and the principles of non-interference, and to maintain that the United States has the moral authority to opine about them, and to ignore our bloody history… for me, personally, it’s a bridge too far.

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