What was Harry Reid thinking when he ended the Senate filibuster for federal judge appointments?

The New Neo Posted on by

The year was 2013. Faced with a Republican minority in the Senate that was blocking many of President Obama’s federal judge appointments, Harry Reid made a bold move to end the filibuster for federal judicial nominees with the exception of the Supreme Court.

It not as though he wasn’t warned:

Senator Mitch McConnell stood on the Senate floor and issued a warning to the Democrats who then controlled the majority.

“I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this,” McConnell, then the minority leader, told them. “And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”

Now, with the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats are experiencing that predicted regret.

So why did the Democrats do it? After all, the old rule had held for a long time for several reasons. The first was that, at least until recent decades, each party allowed the nominees of the other party to be approved unless there was some very egregious reason to block the nominee. This ended with the famous “borking” of Bork in 1987, and near-routine blocking of nominees had slowly gotten more frequent over the years. The second was that each party knew that if the rule was changed and the nuclear option invoked, they would regret it when they lost power.

So again—why did Reid do it?

I have some theories, although I don’t profess to know for sure.

The first is that he thought he may as well because the time had come, and if he didn’t do it—and get the advantage of it while Obama was president—the Republicans would do it if and when they came into power. I’m not really sure they would have, but it’s certainly possible, and then Reid’s reasoning would make sense.

The second possibility relies on something that’s quite different, which is that Reid may have calculated that the Democrats had the presidency locked up for the foreseeable future, so it would never come back to bite the Democrats for the simple reason that it would always be a Democratic president making the nominations.

Third, it may be that Reid had so little respect for the cojones of the Republicans in the Senate that he didn’t think they would extend the rule to SCOTUS nominees, the most important judges of all. If that was his calculation, it turns out that he was wrong.

Nike ♥ Kaepernick

The New Neo Posted on by

Nike’s support of Colin Kaepernick has caused a drop in its stock prices. But Nike is all-in:

In the crowded marketplace of athletic apparel, presumably Nike’s overnight transformation from selling an apolitical product to “woke sneakers” for the SJW set is a brand strategy similar to the reason why late night TV aims hard left, Robert Tracinski of the Federalist:

“What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it.”

It’s an interesting theory. I’m not so sure it applies to Nike, though. Nike was doing rather well, and it’s a product that ought to have a broad appeal. It is (or was) inherently non-political, with no content excerpt its material goods, unlike the movies or television.

So, why did Nike do it? Googling “why did Nike do it?” just now, I get a lot of positive responses from market analysts and websites, such as for example this one that basically says Nike may take a hit in the short run, but it will pay off in the long run because history will vindicate their decision and their position.

And this article says Nike’s decision will lead to profits:

…[Nike leaders] realize that despite the heated words and presidential tweets hurled Kaepernick’s way since he first kneeled during “The Star-Spangled Banner” in August 2016, he [Kaepernick] makes people money. Lots of it. He signed his Nike contract in 2011, and he hasn’t been used by the company in two years, but he spent a three-month period in 2017 after he left the 49ers as a free agent leading the franchise in merchandise sales.

Ching ching.

No wonder Nike officials decided to let Kaepernick lead this new ad campaign despite heavy hitters such as Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams and LeBron James. It didn’t hurt their choice that Kaepernick joined former teammate Eric Reid (another blackballed NFL free agent for protesting during the national anthem) in getting a standing ovation this week in New York. They were introduced during the U.S. Open match between the Williams sisters.

I preferred the olden days, when companies stayed out of politics (on either side) for the most part, and patriotism was the name of the game. But those days are long gone and I don’t see them coming back.

Et tu, Sweden?

The New Neo Posted on by

Sweden is facing an election, and the right seems poised to make a better showing than usual:

Polling over the summer has put the ruling Social Democrats on as low as a 21% vote share – down 10% on its showing at Sweden’s last parliamentary election in 2014 and the party’s worst showing for more than a century.

“When we talk about about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries you associate them with social democracy,” Patrik Öhberg, an expert on Swedish politics from the University of Gothenburg.

“But it seems like this era is going to end now. We have become more a country like everyone else. It’s a bastion of social democracy now maybe going to rubble. Something big is going on here.”

The main beneficiary of the centre-left’s slump has so far been the far right Sweden Democrats, who some surveys have predicted will pick up 28.5% of the vote, more than double its performance four years ago before the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis.

Why this is happening is no mystery. The article quotes a Swedish social scientist as saying, “people do not feel at home culturally, they doubt that we are on the right track.” Now, why might that be?:

It is a legacy of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015 when Sweden received a record-breaking 163,000 asylum applicants.

People were told by their government that any objection they had was racist (the following is a quote from a Swedish political scientist):

For such a long time [government officials] said: ‘This [immigration] is not an issue, you’re racist, we should not talk about it, it’s a win-win.

And then reality bit, in the form of crime:

“There are problems with burning cars, shootings and so on in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo,” said Professor Gustavsson [a political scientist].

“But you shouldn’t exaggerate it because in an international context it’s not so dramatic. But it is in a Swedish context because we have not had this kind of thing before.

“To some extent [there is a link between violent crime and immigration] of course. It’s something to do with the fact it’s difficult to integrate all the newcomers but it’s extremely exaggerated because we’ve integrated a lot of refugees from the Balkan wars in the 1990s and up to a couple of years ago the consensus was we were very successful at it.

Note the mealy-mouthed equivocation, and the conflation of one immigrant group (from the Balkans) with another (from the Middle East). Both may have been predominantly Muslim, but previous refugees were European, well-educated, and Bosnian for the most part, from the former Yugoslavia. A very different group from the recent arrivals.

If you speak to actual Swedes who are contemplating casting their votes for that far-right party, however, you get this sort of thing:

“We don’t recognize our country as it is today,” said Bengt Borg, 66. His wife, 64, says she no longer feels safe walking alone at night due to reports of rapes by immigrants. Both plan to join a growing number of Swedes voting for a nationalist and anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats, in Sunday’s general election.

The article I just quoted as says that the Sweden Democrats “have their roots in a neo-Nazi movement.” What does that mean, exactly? The article doesn’t elaborate, but here’s what Wiki has to say on the subject:

The party[founded in 1988] has its roots in Swedish fascism and was primarily a white nationalist movement through the early-1990s, when it first began distancing itself from its past; The SD’s logo from the 1990s until 2006 was a version of the torch used by the UK National Front. Today, the Sweden Democrats officially reject both Fascism and Nazism.[

More here. It’s hard to say, but as best I can tell the party really does have neo-Nazi roots, at least in terms of the history of certain people originally affiliated with it, but has repudiated those roots. There is also some troubling evidence of anti-Semitism among some of the party’s local candidates.

At any rate, as with my recent post on the coming Brazilian election, one could certainly say:

“Elites” are fond of telling people what they can and cannot do, but elites are for the most part protected against the disturbing phenomena they have created in a way that the regular populace is not. So why wouldn’t a Trumplike figure [and/or populist, nationalist, anti-immigrant party] have mass appeal? And why would people heed the warnings of their “betters,” who have not seen fit to offer them any other way to deal with myriad problems except to suck it up, and grin and bear it?

It is quite obvious that whatever it was that led to Trump’s appeal in this country, there are similar (although of course not exactly the same) influences leading to the rise of similar (although of course not exactly the same) politicians in different countries. And the powers-that-be in those countries seem similarly surprised at the entire phenomenon.

Sweden—that tolerant, peaceful, welfare state—is not immune, particularly if it has invited in a group with a higher proportion of less tolerant and less peaceful people who are interested in becoming wards of the welfare state the Swedes have constructed.

The Swedish Democrats are probably not going to win the election, and other parties have so far refused to form a coalition government with them, so the results of the election will probably be that other parties will join together against them. If you want to try to make sense of the possible coalitions in Sweden that might emerge from the election, see this. Reading it may make you very happy we basically have a 2-party system in this country.

Happy Labor Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

Labor Day is the bookend on the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.

July Fourth is summer’s early peak, with the promise of long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the end of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of the beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?

And it goes even more quickly these days. But let’s celebrate the fact that we don’t have to worry about the start of school anymore—except, perhaps, for the teachers among you.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day! Barbecues, picnics, parades, beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire. And for the historically-minded among you, some information the origins of the holiday.

The McCain funeral

The New Neo Posted on by

First let me just say that I didn’t watch it, nor have I watched clips of the proceedings.

I didn’t watch the funeral because listening to speech after speech is of no interest to me and I rarely do it unless the occasion is ultra-important. I also am quite familiar with the basics of the life of John McCain, having written about him many, many, many times.

But apparently this funeral turned into an anti-Trump rally. A bipartisan anti-Trump rally, I might add.

Well, McCain himself was a big fan of bipartisanship, so I suppose it’s fitting. And McCain and his family had a bona fide reason to hate President Trump:

“He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

The remarks, which came after days of back-and-forth between McCain and Trump, were met with scattered boos.

Characteristically, Trump later denied the implications of what he had said:

At a press availability following his remarks, Trump denied saying that McCain isn’t a war hero and said, “If somebody’s a prisoner, I consider them a war hero.”

He also continued his attacks on the Arizona senator, saying, “I think John McCain’s done very little for the veterans. I’m very disappointed in John McCain.”

I’ve already written my own opinion on McCain’s heroism (short version: I would call him a hero). But I can certainly understand why the McCains would detest Trump.

Nor is it a mystery why the Bushes would feel likewise. I described the animus and its origins here.

So none of this should be a surprise, and although it wasn’t a given that it would take the form of speeches at McCain’s funeral, it certainly is in line with the history.

The exclusion of Sarah Palin is a bit more puzzling, although the article I just linked to says that the request that Palin stay away came from McCain’s widow. My only theory about the treatment of Palin—who reportedly has never said an unkind word of McCain—is that Palin’s style was too close to Trump’s for comfort. Perhaps ex post facto she was considered a sort of forerunner, a portent of Trumpy things to come, and thus became persona non grata.

And why on earth would I care how the MSM covers the occasion? They loved McCain when it was politically expedient to do so, and they hated him when that was politically expedient, so for those reasons (and so many more) they can hardly be considered a fair and objective way to look at the proceedings.

And then there’s one of the final reasons that many on the right feel a great deal of anger at McCain, his July 2017 vote against so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare:

…[McCain] stunned his party when the final vote was at hand early Friday when he voted “no” and killed the legislation.

In the process, the maverick dealt what looks like the death blow to the Republican Party’s seven-year quest to get rid of President Barack Obama’s 2010 health law.

Along with McCain, GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined Democrats in the dramatic 51-49 vote rejecting the bill despite intense pressure from the White House…

Before voting, McCain would not say how he would vote, but told reporters to “wait for the show” as he arrived in the Senate chamber.

Note that last paragraph. It was not just the vote itself that rankled—although that was bad enough, considering how long and hard the GOP had campaigned for the repeal (whether you think they were serious or not), and the fact that McCain himself had campaigned in 2016 on a promise to repeal Obamacare [written in September of 2017):

McCain did run [in 2016], as Trump is drumming, on a strong repeal-and-replace platform. In fact, it was the principal distinction he drew with his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick. He would vote to repeal Obamacare. She would not.

McCain did not say that he would vote to repeal Obamacare, provided Democrats agreed. If he had, his Republican primary with Kelli Ward might have turned out differently.

McCain now says that Democrats made a mistake in passing Obamacare on a partisan basis, and that Republicans shouldn’t undo it on a similarly partisan basis. But that’s the equivalent of a Brezhnev doctrine on domestic policy. Democrats can enact legislation on a partisan basis. But Republicans can undo it only if Democrats agree.

McCain is undoubtedly correct that bipartisan policy changes are more enduring. But when one side acts unilaterally, it shouldn’t get a veto when the other side attempts to undo it.

More importantly, there is no bipartisan agreement possible to repeal and replace Obamacare, as McCain vowed to do. That’s because there is no Democrat willing to agree to the first step, repeal.

It was not just the complete impracticability of McCain’s stand, its divorce from political reality, that rankled, although that was the major thing (I wrote about it here). It was also the seeming hypocrisy of his campaign promises vs. his later actions, as well as the theatricality of failing to reveal his vote in advance and telling reporters to “wait for the show.”

These things did seem characteristic of McCain, at least some part of McCain, although somewhat exaggerated. But I have one caveat to offer when thinking about this episode, and that’s the fact that McCain had already been diagnosed with a glioblastoma and had undergone a three to four hour brain surgery about two weeks prior to the vote. Though widely reported to not be suffering from any cognitive decline, this is part of what led to his diagnosis:

He also told his doctor he had, at times, felt foggy and not as sharp as he typically is. In addition, he reported having intermittent double vision. These symptoms and doctor intuition prompted a CT scan.

A brain tumor can affect a person in global and obvious ways or in subtle ones. Perhaps McCain’s tendency towards what, for want of a better word, we’ll call maverickyness was accentuated by brain changes accompanying both his illness and his surgery. So personally, I think that all the decisions he made post-brain-tumor should have an asterisk next to them.

RIP, John McCain.

[NOTE: On a somewhat different topic: remember the brouhaha about McCain’s advanced age when he ran in 2008? I predicted at the time that it was highly likely he’d live past the two terms he might have served as president, and that turned out to have been correct. The actuarial tables said he’d live to about 83 or 84, and although he didn’t make that, he died just four days short of his 82nd birthday. What’s more, his mother—who was very elderly but spry during the 2008 campaign—is still alive at the age of 106 and looking beautiful.]

Neo in Rome

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I’m not in Italy any more. But I have a few things I still want to write about my recent trip there.

First and foremost: Rome, oh Rome, why so few street signs? I had a GPS that supposedly was telling me where to walk to get to my destinations, but it was almost useless because it relied on street signs that were nowhere to be seen. Maybe one in fifty streets were marked, usually with difficult-to-read plaques on the side of corner buildings.

Rome is a major metropolis of the world. What’s up with the lack of street signs?

I only had two days in Rome. I’d been there before, in the 1960s, but obviously it’s changed a great deal, although it’s called The Eternal City. One thing that’s missing now is the traffic, banned from a large area of the city except for taxis, police cars, buses, and some residents. It makes for a somewhat eerie sensation, augmented by the many uniformed officers seeded all around the tourist attractions and some of the rest of the city, holding what to my untutored eye looked like Uzis.

So the famous Rome traffic, which I remember as a loud and chaotic cacophony, is more or less gone. I suppose that’s a plus, but it adds to the perception (already heightened in August, when many of the residents wisely leave for cooler climes, unlike yours truly) that Rome has been entirely taken over by visitors.

Most of those visitors, I might add, seem to be Americans, by the sound of their speech.

In the two days I had at my disposal I did the regular tourist things. First day was the Colosseum and Forum. Second day the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s. These were organized skip-the-lines tours, because everything now otherwise involves tickets and enormous lines, something I do not remember from the 60s.

Each tour was exhausting, involving those aforementioned staircases that were often without banisters, and featured risers of unusual heights (at the Colosseum, for example, at one point we climbed a series of four flights of extremely high steps). But it certainly was well worth doing. I particularly liked the more ancient elements, and at the end of the tour I just strolled around the Forum for a long long time.

There’s really no other city like Rome.

I took this selfie in the Colosseum, especially for the blog. I don’t usually wear hats, but this one came in very very handy both in the enervating sun and the pouring rain. By the way, we ran into a torrential storm while at the Colosseum and got soaked to the skin, although we also dried out in about 15 minutes when the baking sun emerged again:

Long overdue: cutting funding for UNRWA

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a good move:

The Trump administration announced Friday it is cutting nearly $300 million in planned funding for the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, and that it would no longer fund the agency after decades of support. Instead, it said it would seek other channels by which to aid the Palestinians.

The administration castigated the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for failed practices, and indicated that it rejected the criteria by which UNRWA defines Palestinian refugees, whereby the UN agency confers refugee status not only on original refugees but on their millions of descendants…

… something not granted by the UN to refugees from any other places…

The US will now work together with other international groups to find a better model to assist the Palestinians, the statement said…

“Israel supports the move because UNWRA is one of the main problems perpetuating the conflict,” Hadashot news quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office as saying on Friday evening.

The article goes on to say that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany are going to take up the slack to support UNRWA financially. What are they supporting? A group that advocates and trains children in this sort of thing [hat tip: Legal Insurrection]:

The Federalist Society: judge-makers

The New Neo Posted on by

This Politico article by Michael Kruse on the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982 is a curious piece. It conveys what I assume are the general facts—that a bunch of far-flung conservative law professors, judges, and law students met together at Yale in order to share ideas and try to get more conservatives into the legal and judicial fields—while at the same time subtly insinuating that such a meeting and such a plan was something vaguely underhanded and not altogether cricket.

It’s a long article, and only some way into the piece does it mention the reality that led to this meeting, which is that by 1982 liberals almost completely dominated the legal profession:

In the fall of 1980, Calabresi would recall in an interview with the ABA Journal, he was struck by what happened when the 88 members of his first-year class at Yale Law were asked whether they had voted for Reagan: Only two people raised their hands…

It had been this way for decades. “The law schools were exceedingly one-sided,” McConnell, the Stanford law professor, told me. Being a conservative then at a college or a law school, Scalia later said to biographer Joan Biskupic, made one feel “isolated, lonely … like a weirdo.”…

“It is an intellectual debate,” Bork said in his talk [at that initial meeting in 1982].

And at that point, it was one they were losing. “Conservatives have simply been outgunned at the federal level for half a century,” Scalia said.

“When liberals are in power,” he added, “they do not shrink from using the federal structure of what they consider to be sound governmental goals.”

The solution, according to Blackwell, the veteran organizer of young conservatives? “Study how to win,” he told the symposium audience.

In other words, the relentless liberal/left Gramscian march through the legal profession and the judiciary, that had taken hold during the administration of FDR fifty years earlier, had succeeded in completely dominating those fields, so much so that this 1982 get-together (of only about 200 people, and that included students) was one of the very few times a group of conservative law scholars had assembled in any significant numbers.

And what did they do? They decided to use a more practical approach than their previous “Sir Galahad theory: ‘I shall win because my heart is pure.’” They decided to organize their geographically-dispersed forces and focus on winning.

What a novelty for the right in the legal profession. Till then, the technique had been owned by the left.

However, the fact that they have succeeded to a certain degree in transforming the Supreme Court by getting many of their picks on it has been dependent on the election of GOP presidents to nominate them and also on a GOP Senate (or at least one with fairly moderate Democrats) to approve them. If that had not happened, the Federalist Society would have been spinning its wheels as far as SCOTUS justices and other federal judges are concerned.

The election and re-election of Barack Obama undermined whatever inroads the conservatives had made (the following was written shortly before the inauguration of President Trump):

Republicans cannot wait to begin dismantling President Barack Obama’s accomplishments, but there’s one thing they can’t undo, even with full control of Congress and the White House: his judicial legacy.

Obama will leave office with 329 of his judicial nominees confirmed to lifetime posts on federal courts. That includes two U.S. Supreme Court justices and four judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the two most powerful courts in the nation. Because of Obama, Democratic appointees now have a 7-4 advantage on the D.C. panel, and those judges will play a major role in deciding cases during the Trump administration related to environmental regulations, health care, national security, consumer protections and challenges to executive orders.

Obama also tilted the partisan makeup of circuit courts. Nine of the country’s 13 appeals courts now have majority Democratic appointees, compared with just one when he took office in 2009.

The Politico article states that Trump’s SCOTUS nominees were made on the recommendation of the Federalist Society. The author writes that Trump “subcontract[ed] this task to the Federalist Society, which had performed this duty for previous Republican presidents but never so explicitly.” Would the left have preferred Trump to have drawn the nominees’ names out of a hat? Winged it and found them on his own? Perhaps; then they could have criticized him all the more. Presidents ordinarily get advice from legal experts, and Trump did the same. The only reason it was more explicit in this case was that Trump made a point of publishing his picks before the election, in order to burnish his previously non-existent conservative credentials, and the MSM made a big deal of that process as well.

Kruse goes on to say that “the architects of the Federalist Society have attained a level of influence on the courts they never could have imagined, in a way they never could have envisioned.” Well, I doubt that they—or anyone else except Trump—envisioned Trump as the mechanism by which they would increase their influence, but they certainly did imagine that they could ultimately come back, at least to a certain extent, from the relative nadir of their influence at the time of their formation as a formal group.

How far does their influence extend? Further than liberals and the left would like it to, because liberals and the left seem to think that it is their own right to dominate the legal profession and judiciary almost entirely. Anything else is considered a usurpation. If my quite elite law school alma mater is any indication (I get regular mailings of their magazine which updates me on happenings there), the domination of the faculty and student body by liberals and the left is still nearly complete.

[NOTE: The comments to that Politico article are quite instructive. Just looking at some of the first few right now, I see these sorts of criticisms:

What did you expect from a bunch of ” self entitled kids” with no doubt fathers who were already right wing money grabbers…

The issue is that the GOP to stack the Supreme Court is allowing a tainted President to appoint a nominee who may not have the authority to do so.

An organization whose explicit goal is to politicize the federal judiciary should be considered subversive. Membership in the Federalist Society should disqualify would-be nominees to the bench.

what happened? a few rich little pricks living off mommy and daddys $ decided to never help anyone again but themselves.

So, basically, let’s make sure only the rights and whims of the white and wealthy are counted in 2018 by enshrining as perfect a document created when only the white and wealthy counted. That about it?

A group of Selfish sexist Rich or wannabe Racist AynRand Libertarians who Sold their Souls for money to Tea Bag MILLIONAIRE Fascist Republicans !!! Scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO is GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY LOCK THEM ALL UP !!! Scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO is a LYING Sexist BIRTHER Racist piece of Trash & a Tax CHEATING Wife CHEAT Business CHEATER Draft Dodger Chicken-Hawk COWARD !! LOCK HIM UP & his Band of BreitFART Fascist Republicans !!! REMEMBER this scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO opened CONCENTRATION CAMPS for Children !!!…

Etc., etc., etc..]

On algorithms and their glitches

The New Neo Posted on by

This is starting to sound like a Philip K. Dick novel:

“People say, ‘Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them.’ But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves. Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on …”…

Corporations like Facebook and Google have sold and defended their algorithms on the promise of objectivity, an ability to weigh a set of conditions with mathematical detachment and absence of fuzzy emotion. No wonder such algorithmic decision-making has spread to the granting of loans/ bail/benefits/college places/job interviews and almost anything requiring choice.

We no longer accept the sales pitch for this type of algorithm so meekly. In her 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, a former math prodigy who left Wall Street to teach and write and run the excellent mathbabe blog, demonstrated beyond question that, far from eradicating human biases, algorithms could magnify and entrench them. After all, software is written by overwhelmingly affluent white and Asian men – and it will inevitably reflect their assumptions (Google “racist soap dispenser” to see how this plays out in even mundane real-world situations).

Hey, that’s from the Guardian, so what do you expect? Leftists assume that those “affluent white and Asian men” will of course introduce assumptions that will hurt the other, more righteous races and genders (ignoring the fact that so many people in the computer industry are on the political left, no matter what their race and gender). The central point, however, is a good one, which is that algorithms are not inherently fair and not inherently and always better than what actual human individuals would do.

This is not unfamiliar territory. The machine running amok and creating its own trajectory is a staple of science fiction. That’s where Philip K. Dick comes in (see also this).

More on the civil war brewing in the Catholic Church over alleged sexual abuse and its coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

If this article by Paul A. Rahe is true, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

I would add, however, that although (as Rahe states) same-sex pederasty, not pedophilia, is the mechanism of a great deal of the alleged child abuse by priests, same-sex pedophilia as well as abuse of girls still accounts for a significant amount. It is difficult if not impossible to know the figures overall, but the most comprehensive data may appear in this lengthy 2004 report issued by John Jay College for Criminal Justice (also cited by Rahe). You can plow through it if you like; it is really very thorough, and describes US cases from 1950 to 2002 (very roughly the same time frame as dealt with by the Pennsylvania grand jury report).

Here are some excerpts from the John Jay report (which I have not read in its entirety; these are from the summary):

Approximately one-third of all allegations were reported in 2002-2003, and two-thirds have been made since 1993. Thus, prior to 1993, only one-third of cases were known to Church officials. The allegations made in 1993 and 2002-2003 include offenses that allegedly occurred within the full time period from 1950-1993 and 1950-2002…

The majority of priests with allegations of abuse were ordained between 1950 and 1979 (68%)…

The majority of priests (56%) were alleged to have abused one victim, nearly 27% were alleged to have abused two or three victims, nearly 14% were alleged to have abused four to nine victims and 3.4% were alleged to have abused more than ten victims. The 149 priests (3.5%) who had more than ten allegations of abuse were allegedly responsible for abusing 2,960 victims, thus accounting for 26% of allegations. Therefore, a very small percentage of accused priests are responsible for a substantial percentage of the allegations…

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Quite a bit can be learned from that. The first point is that, although the offenses occurred much earlier, a large proportion of the victim reports came out many years later, after sexual abuse by priests had been heavily covered in the media. What does this mean? It can obviously mean that victims had kept silent all those years out of shame, and finally felt empowered to tell their stories. That is almost certainly true for a significant number of them, perhaps most or even all.

But it can also mean that there could have been a contagion effect and/or a false memory effect, at least for some. What’s more, with such old offenses, there was the problem of investigating when whatever evidence or witnesses existed were long gone (and many alleged perps were dead), and memories faded. That’s the exact reason that there’s a legal statute of limitations on many offenses. Another thing that emerges is that the alleged perps were of a somewhat older generation, not a younger one, having mostly been ordained between 1950 and 1979.

Rahe has written the following:

…[Based on the John Jay report] something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and very few of them were, in the strictest sense, children. They were nearly all what we euphemistically call young adults.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, 81% were boys, according to the report. But—as shown in the quotes from the report that I’ve offered here—“16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7,” which means that roughly 1 in 5 were absolutely unequivocally children (also, about 1 in 5 were girls). However, we have no idea how many in that largest group, ages 11-14 (which constituted 50.9% of the whole), were 11 and how many 14. If the majority were boys, and many were 11 or 12, most of them would be per-adolescent or very early-adolescent boys right at the beginning of puberty and not “young adults” at all.

It may seem a technical point, but it’s relevant if you want to understand the picture. “Pedophilia” is defined as sexual activity with prepubescent children, usually 13 or younger.

Another thing we learn from the John Jay report is that most of the abuse was by multiple offenders, whose numbers were relatively small. Of course, it may be that single offenders were actually multiple offenders as well, and that their other victims have not come forward.

I would separate out the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of seminarians by priests. This seems to almost certainly involve pederasty—in other words, it is same-sex male activity, and it features an older priest and a younger, but post-pubescent and sometimes technically adult, seminarian. That is what the McCarrick scandal is about, the one that seems to directly involve a coverup by the present Pope.

The Rahe article seems to conflate the two phenomena. It’s an understandable type of confusion, but I think it helps conceptually to see them as two related but somewhat different problems within the Church.

[NOTE: Please see this article for a different point of view.]

A little cache problem

The New Neo Posted on by

On my computer and phone there’s sometimes a little time lag in new posts or new comments showing up on the blog. Hope it isn’t happening that way for you, but if it is, I suggest you try clearing your cache. If that doesn’t work, try going to page 2 of the blog and then back to page one. Sometimes that does the trick.

For me, the problem occurs only on my cell phone and not on my laptop.

I’ve been compiling a list of these small glitches that are still occurring on the blog, and in a little while I plan to take them to the web developer and ask him to try to fix them. Till then, sorry for any inconvenience.

Sexual abuse: the Catholic Church and the daycare cases

The New Neo Posted on by

Someone has to write it, so I guess I will.

How are the accusations against Catholic priests—such as those that appear in the Pennsylvania grand jury report—substantiated as true or almost certainly true? How many involve evidence in addition to the victims’ reports, how many include confessions, and how many are possibly the result of fabrication, fantasy, exaggeration, and/or the bandwagon effect? Those things are always a risk with accusations about activity that occurs in secret and in private.

This is not to say that I believe that any of the accusers are lying. They all may be telling the truth, and all the accused may be 100% guilty of what is alleged, and more. But it has to be taken into consideration that there is a possibility that some of them are not.

After all, there is a history of significant numbers of false accusations of abuse. Some of these false accusations have ruined the lives of the alleged perpetrators, for example in the McMartin and Fells Acres cases. Both were textbook cases of what not to do in such investigations (see this and this). I do not think it likely that the false accusations in those cases were made with any bad intent by the accusers. They were a result of a combination of hysteria and the power of suggestion, coupled with ignorance about how it is that leading questions can lead to false testimony and the implantation of false memories, especially memories that are “recovered.”

These cases occurred mostly in the 1980s, when not that much was known about how to handle these large-scale situations of abuse within institutions such as day care centers, and very poor interrogation methods were used.

I have done a relatively brief search, looking for information on the dates of most of the accusations, as well as the methods used to question the accusers. For example, did many of these cases involving priests occur during that same 1980s era, when there was a sort of accusation hysteria going on regarding day care, and false accusations were not so very uncommon? So far I have not been able to find that information about dates (or much of anything else), although I did find this:

DiNardo and Doherty noted that the [Pennsylvania] grand jury’s report spans 70 years, and many of the abuse accusations were made before 2002, when the bishops adopted new policies.

Not only did the bishops adopt new policies beginning at that time, but it was not long before that (I believe some time during the 1990s, if I’m recalling correctly) that law enforcement and therapists became more aware of the problems inherent in investigating accusations of abuse, and became more adept at questioning alleged victims in other cases.

If any readers are interested in how far the situation can go regarding false accusations and the belief in them, not just by victims but by alleged perpetrators in certain cases, I suggest reading the book Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory, on the subject of the Thurston County ritual abuse case.

I have no dog in the fight about the Catholic Church. I have absolutely no wish to absolve the guilty, priests or otherwise. I always have a wish to protect the innocent. That refers to the children and the other victims, of course. But it can also include the adults—even priests—some of whom may have been falsely accused.

[NOTE: I would really like to know more about the Pennsylvania cases, and if anyone has a link to a more thorough description, please offer it in the comments.]