They’re not just funny, although they’re that. They also have a succinct way of stating common sense, a quality which is all too rare these days:
Judge “Ahab” Sullivan keeps aiming his harpoon at General “Moby Dick” Flynn
It is no surprise that Judge Sullivan filed for a full en banc hearing by the DC Circuit Court on the Flynn case rather than comply with the order of the three-judge panel to get off Flynn’s back.
No, no surprise at all. In several previous posts, I’ve compared Sullivan to Captain Ahab, and yesterday’s announcement is further indication that the analogy is pretty apropos. That doesn’t mean that Sullivan is acting on his own; I believe there are plenty of leftists/Democrats supporting him and guiding him in this noble endeavor. His crew, as it were: “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
My prediction now? I think the court will grant the hearing, and I think there’s a good chance – because of the political makeup of the court, which is heavy with Democrats – that they will side with Sullivan. That’s a travesty of justice, but we see a great deal of that these days, don’t we?
I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to feel a little less cynicism. But as I wrote here Wednesday:
If the ruling went against Flynn, such a decision would be an especially egregious case of going against the settled law in order to effect a political end. But the temptation to do it would be great, in order to continue to stick it to Flynn, silence him, and continue the “narrative” that it’s Barr’s actions that have been politically motivated.
And, since most of America is unaware of the details of the case and how Flynn was mistreated and framed, it would probably work. I hope the judges show more integrity than that. But recent trends make it a very real question as to whether they will.
[NOTE: If Trump loses the election in November, once he leaves office and becomes a private citizen I believe that the Democrats will continue and even step up their lawfare efforts against him, thus continuing to transition us to full banana republic.]
[ADDENDUM: Please see this for more information about procedures in the Sullivan/Flynn case.]
Late start to posting today
Sorry about the late start.
I had a lovely night last night. It featured a pretty severe gall bladder attack. That may be Too Much Information, but let me just say this is a rather new affliction for me, one I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone. Intense pain in exactly the place where the gall bladder is, and various other symptoms on the list.
At least I know what I think caused it, a rare treat that will become even more rare in my life from now on – a salami sandwich.
One good thing about gall bladder attacks is that, as bad as the pain is when they’re in progress, once they’re over with the pain goes away almost instantaneously. Odd, that; almost like flipping a light switch.
Seattle dispatchers, police, and violence: does anyone have statistics on this?
At a City Council meeting in Seattle recently:
The types of 911 calls that Seattle police respond to most are reported disturbances, suspicious circumstances, parking issues, public assistance needs and car crashes, accounting for 41% of all calls. Those are mostly noncriminal issues…
“We believe 911 dispatch should be removed from SPD control,” partly because armed police responding to calls too often leads to killings of Black people, said Angélica Cházaro, a representative from Decriminalize Seattle invited to present to the council’s budget committee Wednesday. “911 calls should be referred, whenever appropriate, to non-police responders.”
So let me get this straight – a non-police dispatcher will decide whether a call needs police intervention or whether the response should be from some other agency. To do that, the dispatcher must evaluate the likelihood of violence in the situation. There is the possibility of two types of error: sending police when it’s not needed and needlessly escalating the situation into violence that would not otherwise have occurred, or failure to send police which therefore results in some sort of violence that would otherwise have been stopped by police.
I suppose the results could be evaluated after the new methods have been tried for a while, comparing statistics before and after. My guess is that more violence would occur rather than less.
Also, I’d love to see how often in Seattle “armed police responding to calls…leads to killings of Black people,” when the calls are of the seemingly nonviolent type. In other words, how often last year in Seattle were black people (or any other people – if we can pretend for a moment that all lives actually matter) killed by police in situations in which the initial call was about a non-violent matter?
My guess is that the number is exceedingly small. Does anyone know?
“Does your website have a goal?”
The above question was in an email I received yesterday.
I first read it as “Does your website have a goat?,” which seemed to me a much more interesting question.
Coleman Hughes on Black Lives Matter – and the election
The following is a great video – until the end, when he says he plans to vote for Biden (34:35):
How can Hughes say he will vote for Biden after spending about a half hour arguing against the premises of the Democratic Party, and adding that he doesn’t find Biden “inspiring”? His tepid reason – that Biden can beat Trump, and that Biden is “incredibly boring,” which is how he wants his presidents to be – is not only unconvincing, but to me it’s not even on the money, unlike nearly everything else Hughes says in the video.
Among other things, although Biden has always been dumb and wrong, he’s always also been quirky, an individual given to colorful stories and braggadocio, not unlike the things that Hughes probably detests in the Trump style. Biden still has those characteristics on occasion, and watching him is about as “boring” as watching a slow motion train wreck. Strange outbursts can happen at any moment – “dog-faced pony soldier”; “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” and so many others. And Biden has become the soul of identity politics (including his early announcement of the criteria for his VP pick), something Hughes seems to detest.
So why on earth is Hughes determined to vote for Biden, and more than willing to say so four months prior to the election? I can’t say I expected Hughes to say he would vote for Trump. What I expected him to say was that he’s not keen on either candidate, but that’s it’s still quite some time before the election and many things have yet to happen that could be relevant. Instead, he wasted no time in saying he was voting for Biden.
Looking back, I think the key to why he said that is twofold. First, don’t underestimate the revulsion a very cerebral and calm person such as Hughes might have to someone perceived as non-cerebral and impulsive, such as Trump. Second, the clue comes when Hughes is asked about affirmative action, and he says he would consider affirmative action based on finances. He’s talking about a color-blind but not needs-blind affirmative action, in which standards are lowered and different criteria used for the admission of someone whose family and/or community has less money.
To me, although that has some intuitive attractiveness, it’s another trap that leads to a bad outcome, and is inherently unjust. Why “unjust”? Because it’s another example of the quest for cosmic justice, a quest Thomas Sowell describes and then demolishes in his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Simply put, that is an impossible quest to fulfill. We cannot make such decisions because we don’t know enough. And in our attempts to pursue that goal, we inevitably commit other injustices – for example, a child of rich parents may be up against myriad other obstacles in life that we cannot measure and cannot know (abuse from parents or siblings, just to take one example, or serious depression, or a host of other issues that do not appear on his or her application). The other problem is the same one that all efforts at affirmative action face: that of possible poor fit of student to school, which only goes to hurt the person who is the supposed beneficiary of the program.
The fact that Hughes still potentially favors some sort of affirmative action indicates to me that he has not abandoned the quest for cosmic justice. It’s understandable, because brilliant though he is he still is very young, and because that quest is incredibly difficult to give up. It is so well-intentioned that it is seductive – if only we could finally get it right! But we can’t, and we must “first, do no harm” in the meantime.
So it follows, I suppose, that Hughes also cannot give up some of the dreams that seem to be what the Democrats continue to mouth. And that results in a rejection of Trump and the hopes that Biden won’t be too bad, and that empowering the Democrats somehow won’t be the disaster it promises to be. If someone as brilliant as Hughes can come to this conclusion, it frightens me.
Demoralized and abandoned
NYC cops are filing for retirement in droves.
Logical consequences.
Let’s see NY replace them with social workers – right, that’ll work. And if New Yorkers liked the bad old pre-Giuliani era, then they’ll love the roaring 2020s.
I wonder what New Yorkers thought would happen when they elected a Marxist as mayor – the ones who voted for him, or the majority who shrugged, stayed home from the polls, and let it happen.
SCOTUS rules in favor of Little Sisters of the Poor
Today there is good news in a situation that’s been going on for quite some time:
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration acted within its authority when it expanded exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) requirement for employers to provide insurance coverage that includes contraception — in a victory for Little Sisters of the Poor, the Catholic group that has been at the center of the national debate over the mandate.
The court ruled 7-2 in favor of the Trump administration and the Catholic charity that cares for the elderly in two related disputes against Pennsylvania, which sued over the validity of a rule from the Trump administration that allowed religiously-affiliated groups and some for-profit companies to opt-out of providing contraception coverage to employees…
The Supreme Court also ruled in favor of religious organizations in an employment discrimination case Wednesday. And last week it came down with a ruling that states could not ban religious schools from receiving money from state-funded scholarship programs that are available to non-religious private schools.
Lower court rulings had gone against the administration, with a nationwide injunction putting the exemptions on hold. But the Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday amounts to a huge win for religious conservatives who have been battling the ACA’s contraceptive mandate for years.
The vote was 7-2 in both of today’s religious liberty cases. This is a breakdown which means that not only Roberts, but two of the liberal justices voted with the majority. Interesting. The two were Kagan and Breyer, with Sotomayor and Ginsberg voting against.
Dealing with the NYC public school system: “white adjacent”
One of the benefits of YouTube is that it enables us to hear reasonable people talking reasonably about a host of topics that are usually discussed in a manner so unreasonable as to conjure up associations with the world in which Lewis Caroll’s Alice found herself.
Some of these reasonable people on YouTube are even young, which to me is a cause for hope amidst the gloom.
Here’s one of them. The whole video is worth watching. But I’ve cued up a part that seems particularly insightful (the “they” reference here is to Richard Carranza, the NYC chancellor of education, and a vast group of SJWs in the NYC system; I wrote about them previously here):
So Asians are “white adjacent,” according to self-righteous anti-racist racists who, like a squad of Humpty Dumpties, declare that words mean only what they say they mean.
Here’s how “white adjacent” is generally used:
(n.) A person who is technically a minority, but has access to, utilizes and sometimes benefits from white privilege. This is usually accomplished by said person distancing themselves from the socio political problems their ethnic group commonly faces. Usually by considering considering themselves better than their minority counterparts sharing their same ethnic heritage. This can also be a person who thinks they are are better minorities possessing a darker complexion.
My guess is that soon – if it hasn’t happened already, which it probably has – the term will be lobbed at actual black people who might defend white people, or who might espouse some conservative positions or values.
It happened to Jews long ago. They were brownish or at least unwhite for certain purposes of discrimination. But for other purposes – accusing Jews themselves of racism, for example – they are white as the driven snow. Jews have a long and terrible history of being the victims of some of the most vicious discrimination on earth, as well as genocide. One would think that, in the objective sense, they would therefore stand high in the list of intersectional victimhood. And yet, because Jews on average tend to perform well both academically and career-wise, modern leftism considers them about as white or white-adjacent as you can get.
I would dismiss all of this racist hierarchy propaganda as horse manure, but the anti-racists are already very powerful in education and elsewhere, and their effect is very pernicious. I may be getting boring in that I carp on this and related issues a great deal, but the situation is bad and getting worse. If you’re not affected by it today you will be affected by it tomorrow. Best to be as aware as you can about what you’re dealing with, in order to combat it.
For example, you may be asked – as I have been, by several people – to join the anti-racism cult, admit your privilege as a response to the double-bind situation, and get with the program. Be prepared to answer with knowledge.
[NOTE: Speaking of which…]
Not theOnion and not the Babylon Bee: 2 + 2 = 4 is just “cultural”
Don’t ask Brittany “O’Brien” Marshall to design a bridge for you:
“Nope the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing,” wrote Marshall…
Marshall goes by the pronouns “she/her” and describes herself on Twitter as a “teacher, scholar, social justice change agent, Chicagoan, PhD student, architecture enthusiast, wannabe math person, BLM always…”
As a “wannabe math person,” Brittany clearly has a long way to go. And of course, no one on earth is saying that 2 + 2 is the only way of knowing, so even that part of Marshall’s statement is wrong.
It’s easy to joke about this, but really it’s no joke. What’s actually happening among bona fide scientists and those who decide whether or not to publish their work and/or to hire them and fund them is that cancel culture has been coming for them for many years now. I’m not sure who the first target was, but I know that when it happened to Larry Summers in 2005 I took notice. Back then I wrote:
…[T]his entire [Summers] affair is extremely chilling. There seems to be a trend in academia to try to drag us into a new Dark Ages–this time one in which political correctness, rather than religion, triumphs over science. And some of its proponents are academics and scientists themselves.
And I also wrote in 2005, concerning the Summers flap:
…[T]his is a case where feelings seem to have triumphed over reason. That academics–and scientists, at that–would allow this to happen is not a good sign. Whatever happened to the Enlightment? If Galileo were to return at this point, he might be in grave danger again–at least, if he were to suggest that the earth didn’t revolve around women.
In my own experience in an academic environment during the ’90s, after decades of being away, I was shocked at how far the PC police had come in stifling academic freedom. It seemed the new criterion for censure was whether a remark had offended someone. However careful the professor might be to couch the remark with qualifications, however delicately it was stated, if it offended the tender sensibilities of anyone in the audience, the professor was in trouble.
What happened to the Enlightenment? It got woke.
[ADDENDUM: This news from Princeton is utterly horrendous.]
More on the time frame for Judge Sullivan’s response
…[B]ased on the decision of the DC Court of Appeals, and the 21 day period under the Rules of Appellate Procedure before a “Mandate” issues from the Appeals Court to the District Court, Judge Sullivan has until July 14, 2020 to dismiss the case against Gen. Flynn himself. If Judge Sullivan does not act on or before July 14, then the case will be automatically dismissed by the District Court upon the Order of the Appeals Court. At any time during that 21 day period it could be announced that there has been a vote taken on a request for the case to be reheard en banc — which means by the whole court. As I understand the process, a request for such a vote to be taken, and the outcome of such a vote, would be announced at the same time. In other words, we won’t even know that such a vote was called for until we are told what the outcome of the vote might be. So the fact that we haven’t not heard about such a vote being called does not mean that no such request has been made. We have another seven days to wait.
The Appellate Rules require that a majority of the full time members of the Court — not Senior Status judges — must vote in favor of rehearing a case en banc for such a hearing to take place. There are currently seven judges on the Court appointed by Democrat Presidents, and four appointed by GOP Presidents. With 11 judges, it would take a vote from six of them to rehear the matter. But one of the Democrat appointed Judges is Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, who wrote the opinion in the Fokker Services case that was relied upon by Judge Rao in ruling that the DOJ motion to dismiss Gen. Flynn’s case must be granted. In what was likely a tactical error, Judge Wilkins who dissented in the decision on Gen. Flynn’s case called the Fokker Services case “dicta” with regard to the key passages that Judge Rao relied upon. It must have stung Judge Srinivasan for another member of the Circuit to make such a belittling comment about Judge Srinivasan’s legal analysis as set forth Fokker Services. Since it would be Judge Srinivasan’s decision in Fokker Services that would be undermined by a decision reversing the panel, its quite likely that Judge Srinivasan is a vote against en banc review. In addition, the internal dynamics of a relatively small appeals court are such that other Democrat appointed judges might not want to put themselves in the position of potentially having to side against Judge Srinivasan by rehearing the Gen. Flynn case, when the ultimate outcome of the case is simply not that important “in the grand scheme of things.” If just one Democrat appointed judge feels that way, then there are not 6 votes to rehear the case en banc.
That’s complicated, but it seems to boil down to this: if nothing is announced by the end of the 14th, the case will probably be dismissed automatically. But it’s up in the air till then. And if the court does vote to hear it en banc, the decision could go against Flynn, if the Democrat-appointed judges follow strict political party lines (which they often do).
If the ruling went against Flynn, such a decision would be an especially egregious case of going against the settled law in order to effect a political end. But the temptation to do it would be great, in order to continue to stick it to Flynn, silence him, and continue the “narrative” that it’s Barr’s actions that have been politically motivated.
And, since most of America is unaware of the details of the case and how Flynn was mistreated and framed, it would probably work. I hope the judges show more integrity than that. But recent trends make it a very real question as to whether they will.
“Kafkatrap” is the new name for ye olde double bind
A double bind is a social science term for “heads I win, tails you lose.” It goes like this:
A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, with one negating the other. In some circumstances (particularly families and relationships) this might be emotionally distressing. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will automatically be wrong regardless of response. The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore can neither resolve it nor opt out of the situation.
Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.
Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them both difficult to respond to as well as to resist.
I learned about double binds back in college long ago, and they were one of the concepts that stuck with me and that I’ve found most useful. Even if a person understands the concept, it’s sometimes hard for the person to recognize a double bind when snared in one.
The anti-racism movement (discussed earlier today) specializes in placing its trainees in a classic double bind, often causing tremendous discomfort – a discomfort which is then labeled as just being part of the resistance to acknowledging one’s own inherent racism.
There also are many other situations in life in which a person can be presented with the double bind dilemma. (“Have you stopped beating your wife?”)
The only way out is through a process response rather than trying to deal with the content. In other words: name the game as a double bind, and explain what that is if the person doesn’t already know. That doesn’t mean that your reaction will be acceptable and the person will release you from the double bind situation. But that’s part of the double bind as well.
I’ve heard this sort of thing described as a kafkatrap in recent internet parlance. That’s clever, too, drawing on Franz Kafka’s fictional works such as The Trial, where a person is confronted with a judicial proceeding in which every move leads to a verdict of guilty. A Soviet show trial is similar, too.
There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,’ said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; `this paper has just been picked up.’
`What’s in it?’ said the Queen.
`I haven’t opened it yet,’ said the White Rabbit, `but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to–to somebody.’
`It must have been that,’ said the King, `unless it was written to nobody, which isn’t usual, you know.’
`Who is it directed to?’ said one of the jurymen.
`It isn’t directed at all,’ said the White Rabbit; `in fact, there’s nothing written on the outside.’ He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added `It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.’
`Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?’ asked another of they jurymen.
`No, they’re not,’ said the White Rabbit, `and that’s the queerest thing about it.’ (The jury all looked puzzled.)
`He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,’ said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)
`Please your Majesty,’ said the Knave, `I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.’
`If you didn’t sign it,’ said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.’
There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.
`That proves his guilt,’ said the Queen.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s a good article on kafkatrapping.]