The American Bar Association forces CRT-based education into all accredited law schools

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s probably somewhat fitting, I guess – although it took some forty years – for CRT to become part of the curriculum of every law school that wants accreditation. By saying it’s “fitting,” I don’t mean it’s good. I actually think it’s terrible, because I think CRT is not only a crock intellectually but very damaging to everyone and everything it touches. The reason I say it’s fitting, however, is that law schools were the birthplace of CRT in the very late 70s and early 80s, a phenomenon I noticed at the time because I wasn’t so far removed from my own law school years.

If you want to read a really excellent book on the subject of how CRT began in its law school manifestation known as Critical Legal Studies, please take a look at this book written in 1997 by Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry entitled Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law. Even though it’s about twenty-five years old, it presciently tells the story of how this happened and outlines the dangers. The liberal authors were highly alarmed, and the passage of time has proven their alarm fully justified and then some.

A pernicious and destructive philosophy had been introduced as a fringe idea, was gaining ground by the time the book was written, and has now – in the newer but highly related form of CRT – become entrenched not just in law schools across the country but in education as a whole and even in the workplace. The hour is late to be fighting back, but the right as well as many non-idealogical but concerned parents have been fighting it lately with some marginal success.

This move by the American Bar Association shows the vast reach of the power of the left:

In multiple proposals, one of which will be voted on by the ABA House of Delegates on February 14, 2022, and is all but certain to pass, ABA is forcing law schools to require that students take courses on race, particularly the CRT-driven systemic racism narrative. The hammer is that this is a requirement for the ABA to accredit the law school, so almost all law schools will have to comply.

Now, the traditional mandatory ‘building block’ courses on contracts, torts, constitutional law, and others will be accompanied by the mandatory study of race. Of course, courses on race — namely Critical Race Theory — are offered in many if not most law schools. But the study is voluntary. No longer. Ideological dogma will be enforced by the ABA.

ABA is abusing its accreditation power. States provided the ABA with this near-monopoly, and states need to act.

And here’s a longer piece on the subject. CRT is apparently not explicitly required in the law schools, but it is extremely likely to end up being what is taught:

The ABA pretended to address the problem by adding Interpretation 303-8: “Standard 303 does not prescribe the form or content” of the required education. This doesn’t fix the problem, because law school faculties overwhelmingly lean hard left. Only the naïve or dishonest would expect schools to teach anything other than CRT and a “systemic racism” approach.

This all reflects a politicized sea change. Existing ABA legal education standards stick to general principles of legal education. The ABA requires schools to inculcate “knowledge and understanding of substantive and procedural law,” “legal analysis and reasoning, legal research,” and legal writing (Standard 302). The only specific requirements are a professional responsibility course (added post-Watergate), an experiential course, and two legal writing experiences (current Standard 303).

By contrast, the proposed “bias” education requires specific and non-legal content. As the Yale professors observed, “mandating the content of [required courses] misconstrues the accreditation function.”…

he most important action that states can take is to stop requiring bar applicants to graduate from an ABA-accredited school. Because state structures vary, in some states this may require changes implemented through state supreme courts or quasi-independent bar agencies. States also can substitute state licensing, as already takes place in Alabama, California, Massachusetts, and Tennessee, which allow graduates of local non-ABA law schools take their bar exams. States also should consider whether a law school degree is needed, by revisiting self-study and apprenticeship in lieu of increasingly politicized law school curriculum and related student debt.

I agree that the ABA now has way too much power, and it’s time to remove that power.

What’s up with China’s Olympic accommodations?

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t the Chinese even have the Potemkin village concept down?

Maybe they realize that ratings are abysmal, and so this time the whole world isn’t watching. Because this sounds awful:

Complaints from athletes and officials are pouring in about the alleged poor living conditions, dining options, isolating rooms, and debilitating weather conditions, according to social media posts.

German Alpine skiing coach Christian Schwaiger criticized the catering in Beijing and raised concern about limited food options to fuel the high-performing pro athletes.

“The catering is extremely questionable because really it’s not catering at all. “There are no hot meals,” Schwaiger said, via the Sun.

“There are crisps, some nuts and chocolate, and nothing else. This shows a lack of focus on high-performance sport.”

Team USA reportedly came prepared and brought extra food to the Winter Games, including bags of pasta.

Starve and freeze and isolate the athletes from foreign countries, and maybe your own athletes will get more medals. But you won’t be getting any PR points for style.

They’re isolating anyone who test positive for COVID:

Athletes who test positive for COVID-19 at the Winter Games, but are asymptomatic, must isolate in a designated hotel. For those experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, immediate hospitalization is required.

Athletes can return to competition once they have submitted two consecutive negative tests.

Here’s a quote from a Finnish ice hockey coach:

Head coach Jukka Jalonen blasted: “Marko has been with our team for about a week before we came here and he tested negative.”

“We know that he’s fully healthy and ready to go and that’s why we think that China, for some reason, they won’t respect his human rights and that’s not a great situation,” he added.

For some reason China “won’t respect his human rights”? Where have you been, Jukka?

To top it all off, the weather has been bad, too. Doesn’t harm the indoor venues, but for outdoor sports it’s a problem.

Open thread 2/10/22

The New Neo Posted on by

When I listened to this video I wondered why Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris would be covering a song I knew from the Everly Brothers. Turns out it was the Everlys who’d done the cover and it was Knopfler who had written and recorded it first.

I wouldn’t think Knopfler’s and Harris’ voices would blend well, because they’re so very different. But they do:

Biden’s Afghanistan retreat

The New Neo Posted on by

I think for the most part we already knew much of what’s reported here, at least those who were paying attention:

A 2,000-page Army investigation found that senior military officials were frustrated by the inability of the White House and State Department to recognize the imminent security threat that led to the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The investigation, first obtained by the Washington Post Tuesday through a Freedom of Information Act request, was launched in response to the deadly events of Aug. 26, when 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians were killed by a suicide bomb attack…

he top U.S commander on the ground during the evacuation, Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, told Army investigators that service members would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.”…

The State Department, DOD and National Security Council (NSC) began planning for a potential mass evacuation that summer but did not predict Kabul would fall as fast as it did. The U.S. military had complained privately for months that the State Department and U.S. Embassy were not moving fast enough to approve Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) and begin evacuating Afghan allies.

What was happening on the ground was obvious. The need to keep Bagram open was also obvious. But the administration insisted that military personnel be reduced to a number that necessitated closing it prematurely.

The State Department comes out especially badly in this report, but they say the military is just passing the buck to them. Who knows? I think there’s more than enough blame to go around, but I place it primarily on State and the Biden administration. However, long before this report, I felt the military had better plans that were overruled by Biden and company.

The Afghanistan withdrawal was a turning point for the Biden administration in terms of public perception. This report won’t help, but I imagine most people aren’t paying too much attention at this point. It’s over. But I think the damage has been done – to the administration, to Afghanistan, and to the United States.

The mother “realignment”

The New Neo Posted on by

There seems to be something of a political change in some mothers:

“Those on the left keep ignoring parental concerns and diminishing them,” Steinkamp says. “All it does is radicalize people and foster realignment.”

Radicalize is another way of saying “reconsider one’s tribe.” Burns, like Steinkamp, like Maron— like all of them—isn’t sure which tribe she belongs to. She belongs to the Kids Tribe. She likens herself to Glenn Youngkin, the surprise Republican victor in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial race, who rode to victory on a wave of angry parents fed up with the status quo. “Every Republican who misses that message of the betrayal of our kids—and there are a lot who are not fully engaged on this—is leaving votes on the table,” Burns says…

“I’ve seen movements rise and fall,” Maron tells me. “Occupy Wall Street was so omnipresent in this city, until it was completely gone.” She says she’s not interested in being a one-hit wonder. She sees herself as part of a new, emergent center, one interested in fixing the supply chain, having a functional police force, and treating the opioid epidemic. But before all that—the kids.

“When I saw my seven year-old’s backpack hanging at the door for months at a time, it broke my heart,” Murakhver says. “That’s what started all this.”

The article features women who previously were mostly liberal Democrats and a NeverTrump Republican. They are mothers activated to new awareness. They haven’t made the transition to Republican (except for one who started out as one), and that doesn’t surprise me. I doubt they ever will, although it’s possible. But they say they’ll vote for whoever helps their kids:

These women don’t really care about The Big Lie or Russiagate or filibuster reform. They could not care less about Big Abstract Theories Of Government. They traffic in hashtags like #TeamReality, #RationalGround and #SmilesMatter. After so many years of endless yammering about conservatives, neoliberals, progressives, alt-righters, the woke, the anti-woke, the only thing they really care about is what works. What is actually happening in the real world. What is being done to their children. And they are willing to vote for whoever can actually bring a return to normal.

I would ask them whether they think all these things are separate. Why is Russiagate and the deceptions involved with it not related to the lies that kept their children at home all this time? Wasn’t one party mainly involved – the party that most of them used to support? The same party that’s trying to get more and more power over their lives by (among other things) ending the filibuster?

“Abstract Theories of Government” end up being operationalized in the real world as policies – decisions and rules and edicts that affect you and me and your children and your children’s children.

I understand that children are the focus and that a lot of women – and a lot of people – hate politics. But, to paraphrase a remark attributed to Leon Trotsky, a man who was very in interested indeed in politics and Big Abstract Theories of Government, “You might not be interested in Big Abstract Theories of Government, but Government is interested in you.”

And just like that, it’s time to end COVID restrictions

The New Neo Posted on by

Funny how you’re seeing calls to end restrictions – coming from the left this time, now that they realize how much it’s hurting the Party. Draconian measures weren’t a bad thing, I guess, when they were just hurting people in general, and children, and the economy, and not even seeming to be clearly related to any improvement in COVID numbers. No, it’s only now that the left is getting worried about the midterms that it seems there are lots of calls to change tactics on COVID.

But first, of course, we have a disclaimer:

In March 2020, I wrote that America should “cancel everything” in response to the acute threat posed by COVID-19: Mass events should be postponed, companies should send employees home from the office, and schools should move classes online.

I remain convinced that this was the right thing to do. Before anyone was vaccinated, and before doctors had even a preliminary understanding of how to treat the disease, these measures were necessary to save lives and avert a collapse of the medical system.

No proof of that offered. No comparison of how a country such as Sweden, which didn’t have that approach, has fared.

Furthermore:

The most severe government restrictions on everyday activities adopted at the height of the pandemic have since been lifted. So in response to my call to open everything, some will inevitably claim that America is no longer closed. Just this week, they will note, Democrat-led states including New Jersey and Connecticut announced that they would soon end some mask mandates.

Ah, those wonderful Democratic-led states, leading the way! No mention of all the states that never imposed mask mandates, or ended them long ago, and how those states fared in comparison.

Accepting restrictions that weaken our social ties when they seemed temporary was one thing. Putting up with them indefinitely is quite another.

Two years was fine? But now – now that midterms are coming and polls show Democrats in big big trouble, it’s time.

It’s pretty clear that the Democrats are going to try to loosen things up and declare that they, and Biden, have vanquished COVID (except for those troglodyte unvaccinated, who get what they deserve). Victory! What I wonder is how many people will accept that claim at this point. Will it seem reasonable, or will it seem profoundly and disgustingly mendacious and hypocritical? Are memories short or are they long?

The Biden administration: sympathy for the terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

This is unsurprising:

Mohammed al-Qahtani, who planned to hijack planes on Sept. 11, 2001, for al Qaeda but was denied entry into the United States, will be transferred to Saudi Arabia following the Biden administration’s decision late last week to set him free. He is scheduled to be flown to Saudi Arabia and placed in a “custodial rehabilitation and mental health care program for extremists,” according to the New York Times.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), lead Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, called the Biden administration’s decision “an appalling capitulation to the far-left.”

“Letting a 9/11 hijacker walk free is an appalling capitulation to the far-left,” Rogers said. “On Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people—Mohammed al-Qahtani was supposed to be one of the hijackers that day. He flew to America to participate in the attack and would have succeeded but for sharp-eyed INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] agents. The leader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, was waiting in the airport parking lot to pick up al-Qahtani when he was denied entry to the United States.”

Al-Qahtani is one of 39 accused terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Most were freed and transferred to other countries during the Obama administration. Now the Biden administration is following suit as part of a bid by Democrats to shut down the facility.

This isn’t a person who was just thinking about it – this is a person who came very very close to participating in 9/11 and who was stopped only by other circumstances.

The article goes on to add that al-Qahtani is reported to be mentally ill. I’d really like to know more about that. One could argue, I suppose, that he was always mentally ill, but if he really was part of the plot and trusted by the other hijackers, I doubt he was mentally ill back then (unless one considers fanaticism a mental illness). My guess is that his mental illness is a claim but is untrue, but that in any event it doesn’t take away from his possible dangerousness. I certainly wouldn’t trust the Saudis and their rehab program to make a difference, either.

The US government admitted in 2008 that al-Qahtani had been tortured. Here’s what happened:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

The legal definition of torture is not what most people think of when they hear the word:

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

It also included various forms of humiliation, and insults to his family members. And yet at the time, Crawford added:

“There’s no doubt in my mind he would’ve been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001,” Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. “He’s a muscle hijacker. . . . He’s a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go.'”

That was in January of 2009. But now the Biden administration has done just that.

Distrusting health officials: what was the turning point?

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this was indeed a pivotal moment that made the situation starkly clear:

But there were earlier clues for me that all was not right, and that public health authorities weren’t leveling with us. The bottom line to all of it was that Trump was president and it was logical to assume that the majority of these government workers didn’t want anything to reflect well on him and in fact wouldn’t be at all disturbed if events came to hurt him politically.

Three early phenomena had made me uneasy about health authorities’ statements. The first was that they kept harping on cases and implying huge death rates even though it was clear almost from the start – based on the Diamond Princess data, which I analyzed here – that very many cases were asymptomatic or mild, and that deaths were concentrated in the very elderly and/or already ill although not limited to them. The second was the about-face on masks, which didn’t seem based on new information but instead on practical considerations of mask availability. The third was the vigor with which continuing lockdowns were embraced, long after the “two weeks to flatten the curve” period was over.

I don’t automatically assume that health care bureaucrats are lying and often doing so for political (and/or CYA) reasons. But I certainly understand why many people have come to that conclusion.

Tragique and triviale; weight and lightness

The New Neo Posted on by

On the previous thread on COVID hope and fear, David Foster offered this quote from Arthur Koestler, as related by Koestler’s friend Richard Hillary:

K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.

Then David Foster adds:

I think much Woke behavior is an effort by people to get more Vie Tragique in their lives, and this also describes those who seem to somehow *like* being afraid of Covid.

This all relates to something Sebastian Haffner noted in his memoir of life in Germany between the wars, which we’ve discussed here a few times. He said there were people who actually *did not welcome* the stabilization of politics and the economy that seemed to be happening at one point…

I think all of this is absolutely true for some people. Every now and then it happens to war veterans, as well. It’s not that they like war. It’s just that during wartime they are living on a different plane, where actions matter intensely, and the bonds forged among fellow “brothers in arms” can be much deeper. I think that perhaps firefighters, police, EMTs and emergency room workers, and in the psychology realm crisis counselors, all have some of that feeling as well.

I’m also reminded of the work of one of my favorite writers Milan Kundera. In the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and if you’ve only seen the movie it does not do the book justice at all) he divides the world and people into two realms, that of lightness and weight. It’s not the same as what Koestler is talking about, but I believe it’s related:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

In another passage in his earlier work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera deals with something resembling Koestler’s tragique/triviale “intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…” that Koestler thinks occurs if a person lives through “a long stretch of personal danger.” Kundera seems to think that it – or something resembling it – is far more common than that, in fact nearly universal:

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border; where everything – love, conviction, faith, history – no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

But I think that both Koestler and Kundera are wrong about how common this is. I don’t think it’s as rare as Koestler seems to think, or to require living through a long stretch of personal danger. But unlike Kundera, I certainly don’t think that everyone lives so close to that border, or that it takes so very little to cross it. In this, as in almost everything, I think there is great variation, and that some people are so grounded that no matter what happens to them they remain far from that border, while for others – for unknown reasons – something in their psyche obliges them to balance on that tightrope described by Koestler, even if the outward events of their lives don’t seem remarkable or especially dangerous at all.

Jonathan Turley on GoFundMe’s game

The New Neo Posted on by

By Jonathan Turley:

GoFundMe’s suspension of millions to support protesting truckers in Canada shocked many, particularly when the company initially announced its intention to distribute the money to other charities. It was less of a surprise for those of us who have criticized the company for years over its use of the platform to target and block funds for conservative and libertarian causes. Indeed, the company has revised an old practice known as the “Nag’s Head light” in luring the unsuspecting into what has become a liberal lockbox on funds.

I suppose Turley has been tracking this for quite some time because GoFundMe has targeted not just conservative causes but libertarian causes, and Turley is a libertarian. I suggest you read the whole thing.

There’s certainly been a theme lately, hasn’t there? Companies (including internet companies but not limited to them) and the state, and the media and the academy, working together to silence dissenting voices on the right.