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johnsonma23

O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: If Trial Were Held Today, It'd Probably Be Hung J... - 0 views

  • O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: If Trial Were Held Today, It'd Probably Be Hung Jury
  • The Los Angeles prosecutor who tried and failed to convict O.J. Simpson says the infamous murder trial would probably end in a hung jury if it were held today.
  • Because in the wake of all these police shootings and all the racial mistrust that has been exposed, probably what would result, in my opinion, is a hung jury."
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  • Clark has long contended that wariness of the Los Angeles Police Department and anger over the brutal Rodney King beating figured in the acquittal of Simpson after a five-month trial in 1995 that transfixed the world.
  • Clark said prosecutors amassed a "mountain of evidence" pointing to Simpson's guilt in the killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
  • "They didn't care whether he was guilty or innocent," she told Dateline's Josh Mankiewicz. "They were going to use this case for payback."
  • , 'I'm not black, I'm O.J.,'"
  • s not exactly your civil rights firebrand."
  • "But at the end of the day, the evidence didn't wind up mattering because there was a fundamental large issue standing in the way of seeing the evidence," she said. "You had this enormous mistrust of everything LAPD, everything officer related."
  • "I think he's someone who is a danger to society," she said. "He was getting into one scrape after another after he was acquitted."
drewmangan1

U.S. Navy USS Simpson warship decommissioned - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • The USS Simpson has turned into a ghost ship.
  • The U.S. Navy decommissioned the 30-year-old frigate Tuesday and with it shut the back cover on one of the most significant -- yet little-heralded -- stories in U.S. military history.
Javier E

C.E.O. Deficit Fears Dissolve With the Prospect of Corporate Tax Cuts - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Dimon, along with dozens of other executives, took up the challenge. “The inability to face our fiscal reality is a concern,” he wrote in his annual letter to investors that year, lamenting the failure to adopt the Simpson-Bowles plan to reduce the debt by $4 trillion, in part by increasing taxes, closing loopholes and reducing entitlements. “I believe that if we had adopted some form of the Simpson-Bowles plan to fix the debt, it would have been extremely beneficial to the economy.”
  • Fast forward to this month: With a few exceptions, the community of chief executives that once championed reducing the debt as the nation’s top priority is taking up a position on the other side of the issue. They are advocating an overhaul package that will reduce corporate taxes, even though both the House and Senate plans will increase the national debt by an estimated $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
  • You’ve heard nary a peep from the business community about that. The silence is deafening.
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  • Steven Rattner, the former auto czar under President Obama who now oversees Michael R. Bloomberg’s wealth and was on the steering committee of the Fix the Debt campaign, said he was no fan of the current tax plan. But he said he understood why some executives who once placed so much emphasis on the mounting debt problem would now focus on tax cuts — and how many of them feel that the two positions did not contradict each other.
  • In fairness, the position of Mr. Dimon and others may not be completely at odds with their previous views. Despite the stated goal of the Fix the Debt campaign five years ago, insiders say it was as much a rallying cry for Washington to come together on financial policy as it was about immediately addressing the debt. And much of the campaign was predicated on meaningful corporate tax reform and spending.
  • Chief executives like Mr. Dimon and Mr. Cote offered to pay higher individual tax rates — which the Simpson-Bowles plan called for — but significantly cutting corporate taxes was always a central tenet of the “fix the debt” effort. And with the current tax plan, Mr. Dimon and others have not taken a public position on anything but the corporate tax reduction element; they have not spoken out about the individual rate or other elements.
oliviaodon

It's Not That Hard To Avoid Normalizing Nazis - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Why is it that, in America in 2017, the question of how not to normalize Nazis provokes heated debate? Is there a way to discuss the everyday life of fascists without normalizing? Although there are no quick and easy rules to follow, there are lessons—plenty of them—to be gleaned from history. The most powerful lessons emerge from the press coverage of the Third Reich, especially the soft-focus profiles of Adolf Hitler published in the 1930s. These stories set the journalistic gold standard for how not to write about Nazis.
  • Above all, Alltagsgeschichte exposes the complexity of human agency. To shed light on the choices people make—why one person might condone or participate in hateful acts, while another resists—historians consider the impact of specific social ties, institutions, and living and working environments.
  • From 1935 to 1939, The New York Times ran four stories on Hitler’s homes. On August 20, 1939, the paper published a glowing account by British journalist Hedwig Mauer Simpson of Hitler’s private life on the Obersalzberg. Ignoring the German troops massing on the Polish border, Simpson described the Führer’s beautiful rooms and domestic routine as well as providing details about the ripeness of the tomatoes on his table and his love of gooseberry pie. It was all so ordinary.
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  • But the appeal of Hitler-at-home stories went beyond curiosity about how the other half lives. In fact, their representation of the German leader as a “good man,” whose simple tastes and joys were not that different from ordinary men’s and women’s, reassured readers at a politically unsettled time, when another global war seemed to be approaching. The gracious host depicted in these puff pieces was never interrupted with rude questions about concentration camps. Nazi propagandists insisted that Hitler’s homes existed outside the sphere of politics, and the journalists that covered them largely obliged this view.
  • When the war ended, the fascination with Hitler’s homes continued.
brookegoodman

Alan Dershowitz: Trump impeachment acquittal would make me unhappy | US news | The Guar... - 0 views

  • The Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, a member of Donald Trump’s team for his impeachment trial, has said he will not vote for the president in November and that Trump’s acquittal by the Senate “would produce results that make me unhappy as an individual”.
  • His remarks were no surprise: Dershowitz is a familiar voice in the media, to some degree a controversialist or gadfly, willing to go against the grain of public opinion or to represent unpopular clients, among them OJ Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein. He is a regular presence on Fox News.
  • In the event Trump woke up to tweet about the strong US economy while seemingly watching Fox. But there was plenty of coverage from less friendly outlets available should he choose to darken his mood.
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  • On Friday, it was reported that documents released by House Democrats showed that an aide to Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee and a key Trump ally, worked with Lev Parnas on approaches to Ukraine last year.
  • As the White House faces into the storm, Dershowitz will join a Trump legal team that also includes Ken Starr, who played a leading role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Jay Sekulow, a Trump lawyer and regular media surrogate, and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, will also represent the president.
  • No president has been convicted and removed: Clinton and Andrew Johnson survived Senate trials and Richard Nixon resigned before he could be formally impeached. On the BBC, Dershowitz was asked if he thought Trump was a good president and how he felt about potentially facilitating his re-election.
  • “I’m not going to allow my partisan views to impact my constitutional views and what I think is best for the long term survival of the constitution rather than the short-term partisan advantage of getting my person elected to be president.”
  • He also said that in the Senate trial he would be “only arguing on behalf of the constitution”. He would answer questions from senators, he said, but would have a “limited role”, as agreed with Trump.
  • Dershowitz answered: “Let me perfectly clear, I am an advocate … against impeachment. But I’m politically neutral, that is I would make the same argument whether it was a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t let my political preferences interfere with my constitutional analysis.”
  • More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
Javier E

The Entitled Generation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank
  • The authors examined two categories of federal spending over the past 50 years, representing two of government’s fundamental missions. One was “investments,” which includes maintaining our national infrastructure, keeping our military equipped, helping assure that our work force is educated to a high standard, and underwriting the kind of basic scientific research that is too risky or long-term to attract private money. The report calls this the legacy of President Kennedy’s New Frontier, though the largest infrastructure project in our history, the interstate highway system, was Eisenhower’s baby, a reminder of the days when Republicans still believed in that stuff. The other category was “entitlements,” a catchall word for the safety-net programs that provide a measure of economic stability for the aging and poor: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. You will not be surprised to hear that the red line tracking entitlements goes up while the blue line reflecting investments goes down.
  • In 1962, we were laying down the foundations of prosperity. About 32 cents of every federal dollar, excluding interest payments, was spent on investments, only 14 percent on entitlements. In the mid-70s the lines crossed. Today we spend less than 15 cents on investment and 46 cents on entitlements. And it gets worse. By 2030, when the last of us boomers have surged onto the Social Security rolls, entitlements will consume 61 cents of every federal dollar, starving our already neglected investment
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  • “We’ve reached the point where our working-age population over the next 30 years grows by one-fifth, and our elderly population grows 100 percent,” said Jim Kessler, the senior vice president for policy at Third Way.
  • So the question is not whether entitlements have to be brought under control, but how
  • At least the Republicans have a plan. The Democrats generally recoil from the subject of entitlements. Centrists like those at Third Way and the bipartisan authors of the Simpson-Bowles report endorse a menu of incremental cuts and reforms that would bring down costs without hitting the needy or snatching away the security blanket from those nearing retirement.
grayton downing

BBC Sport - Jamaica doping scandals tip of iceberg, says senior drug tester - 0 views

  • Jamaica's most senior drug tester says the country's recent rash of failed tests might be the "tip of an iceberg".
  • Asafa Powell, the former 100m world record holder, was the biggest name to test positive, but four others including Powell's training partner - the Olympic relay gold medallist Sherone Simpson - also failed tests at the country's national trials in June.
  • Wada officials are due to discuss their visit to Jamaica at an executive board meeting in Johannesburg on Tuesday and could make a series of recommendations to improve the country's anti-doping policies.
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  • The problem is these people were tested positive in competition. What that means is months before you know the date of the test and the approximate time of the test.
  • So if you fail an in-competition test you haven't only failed a drugs test, you have failed an IQ test.
  • That funding - with the help of additional money from Wada - would be used to hire more senior executives to run the anti-doping programme and to hire and train additional drug testers.
  • Our athletes, as confirmed by the IAAF, were the most tested in the world of athletics, so to say your athletes weren't tested is not exactly true.
  • There is a problem worldwide with the use of supplements," said Fennell. "The whole world is induced to use supplements for one thing or another.
  • Athletes are no different. This is not with a view to cheating and I would put my head on the block and say our athletes do not set out to cheat.
  • We do have rigorous testing. If you look at the record for this year you will see our testing record is amazing. Those of our top athletes are on the registered international programmes.
  • "I understand why people pay more attention to Jamaica," said Carter, who won an individual bronze medal in the 100m in Moscow in August to add to his sprint relay gold from the London Olympics.
  • "It was the same when the US dominated. People said they were on drugs and should be tested. That's a part of the sport and we have to accept that. It's going to hurt fans and athletes because no-one wants to be associated with what's going on.
Javier E

The Legacy of Malcolm X - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.
  • For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.
  • I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?
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  • As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.
  • Marable’s biography judiciously sifts fact from myth. Marable’s Malcolm is trapped in an unhappy marriage, cuckolded by his wife and one of his lieutenants. His indignation at Elijah Muhammad’s womanizing is fueled by his morals, and by his resentment that one of the women involved is an old flame. He can be impatient and petulant. And his behavior, in his last days, casts a shadow over his reputation as an ascetic. He is at times anti-Semitic, sexist, and, without the structure of the Nation, inefficient.
  • Marable reveals Malcolm to be, in many ways, an awkward fit for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad’s Nation combined the black separatism of Marcus Garvey with Booker T. Washington’s disdain for protest. In practice, its members were conservative, stressing moral reform, individual uplift, and entrepreneurship. Malcolm was equally devoted to reform, but he believed that true reform ultimately had radical implications.
  • His energy left him with a sprawling web of ties, ranging from the deeply personal (Louis Farrakhan) to the deeply cynical (George Lincoln Rockwell). He allied with A. Philip Randolph and Fannie Lou Hamer, romanced the Saudi royal family, and effectively transformed himself into black America’s ambassador to the developing world.
  • To Marable’s credit, he does not judge Malcolm’s significance by his seeming failure to forge a coherent philosophy. As Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East, as he debated at Oxford and Harvard, he encountered a torrent of new ideas, new ways of thinking that batted him back and forth. He never fully gave up his cynical take on white Americans, but he did broaden his views, endorsing interracial marriage and ruing the personal coldness he’d shown toward whites. Yet Malcolm’s political vision was never complete like that of Martin Luther King, who hewed faithfully to his central principle, the one he is known for today—his commitment to nonviolence.
  • For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain.
  • The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute—the civil-rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. “I committed to nonviolence,” Marable quotes him as saying. “But I’m sort of embarrassed by it.”
  • Like Malcolm, Obama was a wanderer who found himself in the politics of the black community, who was rooted in a nationalist church that he ultimately outgrew. Like Malcolm’s, his speeches to black audiences are filled with exhortations to self-creation, and draw deeply from his own biography
  • perhaps most significantly, it rejected the beauty standard of others and erected a new one. In a 1962 rally, Malcolm said: Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?
  • Virtually all of black America has been, in some shape or form, touched by that rebirth. Before Malcolm X, the very handle we now embrace—black—was an insult. We were coloreds or Negroes, and to call someone “black” was to invite a fistfight. But Malcolm remade the menace inherent in that name into something mystical—Black Power; Black Is Beautiful; It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.
  • For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves
  • Marable details how Malcolm was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once demanded fealty.
  • Some of its most prominent public faces—Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson—have in varying degrees proved themselves all too human. Against that backdrop, there is Malcolm. Tall, gaunt, and handsome, clear and direct, Malcolm was who you wanted your son to be. Malcolm was, as Joe Biden would say, clean, and he took it as his solemn, unspoken duty never to embarrass you.
  • It’s his abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately collective, improvement that makes him compelling. Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us. “Now act like it.”
  • Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our living, black manhood” and “our own black shining prince.” Only one man today could bear those twin honorifics: Barack Obama
  • But the enduring appeal of Malcolm’s message, the portion that reaches out from the Audubon Ballroom to the South Lawn, asserts the right of a people to protect and improve themselves by their own hand. In Malcolm’s time, that message rejected the surrender of the right to secure your own body.
  • What animated Malcolm’s rage was that for all his intellect, and all his ability, and all his reinventions, as a black man in America, he found his ambitions ultimately capped. The right of self-creation had its limits then. But not anymore. Obama became a lawyer, and created himself as president, out of a single-parent home and illicit drug use.
Javier E

Why Trump Now? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The economic forces driving this year’s nomination contests have been at work for decades. Why did the dam break now?
  • The share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to the share going to capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013
  • the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.
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  • The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stoppe
  • Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.
  • that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.
  • After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder.
  • The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated
  • If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.
  • High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”
  • The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.
  • The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.
  • “It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,
  • , TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.
  • The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.
  • A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.
  • On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.
  • . Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.
  • By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”
  • To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.
  • Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.
  • A September 2015 Ispos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.
  • If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.
  • In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.
  • This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.
  • The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.
  • the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.
  • Missing in your narrative were 2 other factors that contributed to American anger and the turn to Mr. Trump. Those two factors are: the group of very wealthy American's who were convened by the Koch brothers to pool their resources to destroy President Obama and the Congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, e.g. Senator Lugar.
  • were suffering from a major contraction and the drying up of credit & jobs and the President unwisely & wrongly appointed the Simpson-Bowles commission to rein in the debt. Remember Harvard's Rogoff & Reinhart who came up with that Debt to GDP ratio? And the rally of our elites & Pete Peterson et al that Deficits were the problem, when the truth, based on history, was just the opposite.
  • The 2nd factor which can also be attributed to the White House as well as Democrats in the Congress who joined Republicans in misdiagnosing the problem as deficits and debt.
maddieireland334

'Making a Murderer' and failing justice system (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Laws are designed to keep chaos at bay, to set a foundation for a civil society. My not slowing down fast enough was not a threat to the social order.
  • About the time of my last ticket, the country was fighting over O.J. Simpson. Most white Americans were horrified that because they believed he got away with a double murder and didn't want to know about prosecutorial mistakes and dubious police actions. Most black people cheered that a system they had long believed was corrupt had been beaten, for once. A lead detective lying on the stand, using the n-word and bragging about planting evidence were not incidental facts to them
  • "Making a Murderer" is forcing us to confront those disparate views anew, as well as encouraging us to better understand that the people who are ticketed or jailed and imprisoned more, and more harshly, than the rest of us aren't necessarily more deserving of punishment than those of us who have skated by dent of birth, happenstance or policy design.
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  • Michelle Alexander did a great job detailing that arbitrariness in "The New Jim Crow."
  • "The clear majority of Americans of all races have violated drug laws. But due to resource constraints (and the politics of the drug war), only a small fraction are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated," she wrote. "In 2002, for example, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, compared to 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense."
  • everyone is innocent until proven guilty; you will only be convicted if there is no real doubt that you committed the crime -- are either outright lies or fantastical tales we tell ourselves.
  • Avery spent almost 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit. DNA testing done by the Innocence Project proved that a different man was the assailant. While he served time, the actual rapist was free to hurt other women. That man, Gregory Allen, is serving a 60-year prison sentence for a 1995 rape.
  • Since the airing of the documentary, we've learned that a juror in the Avery case said the verdict was a sort of compromise, that not everyone in the room believed he had done what he had been charged with: the definition of reasonable doubt if ever there was one. No matter; they sent him to prison anyway.
  • "The 'reasonable doubt' rule was not originally designed to serve the purpose it is asked to serve today: It was not originally designed to protect the accused. Instead, it was designed to protect the souls of the jurors against damnation," he wrote.
  • An alternate juror told me there's no doubt he would have voted not guilty had he been the 12th, not 13th juror -- which would have been enough to set Huggins free. Talk about arbitrary. Because of that roll of the dice, Huggins sits in prison hoping an appeal is successful instead of raising his young kids and taking care of his elderly mother.
  • I complained about the arbitrariness of a cop giving me a ticket in a speed trap. That's nothing compared to what men like Avery and Huggins -- and too many others -- face. Finally, the public seems to be recognizing that ugly reality.
Javier E

What Trump Endorsers Are Endorsing - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • it matters that thought-leaders like her no longer consider deplorability a dealbreaker. They can no longer be trusted to oppose racism or sexism. With a civic arsonist in the White House, they decline to summon the fire department.
  • In short, they have become irresponsible citizens.
  • Were Hemingway oblivious to Trump’s least defensible qualities, or the damage that his comportment does to America’s civic fabric—matters to which many enthusiastic Trump supporters are oblivious—her posture would be less damning.
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  • But she saw his flaws clearly and chose to support him anyway.
  • It is one thing to vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils, or to do too little to oppose him. It is quite another to support and extol Trump, despite his deplorable behavior, because he has advanced a domestic agenda that accords with one’s policy preferences.
  • “My expectations were low—so low that he could have met them by simply not being President Clinton,” Hemingway declared. “But a year into this presidency, he’s exceeded those expectations by quite a bit. I’m thrilled.
  • Ponder what it means to be thrilled, knowing what she knows.
  • Hemingway has written with clarity about Trump’s behavior on matters having to do with comportment, rather than policy, and their effect on American culture. “I fear the republic is lost,” she wrote after one of Trump’s debate performances. “We are an uneducated people that praise ignorance, celebrity, and entertainment over statesmanship. We are degenerates, immoral, and lost. We the people have not acted as those concerned about preserving the gift of self-government. The fraying fabric of society is putting the republic at risk.”
  • in the past, most conservative pundits ensured that the Republican Party’s leadership rejected the bigoted pathologies that threaten to tear diverse, pluralistic societies apart. Today, many of the people who once would’ve kept deplorability in check opportunistically embrace a deplorable.
  • “Another great argument to deploy against Trump is that he plays fast and loose with the facts,” Hemingway wrote in the early days of his administration. “This is an easy argument to make because not only does everyone know this, they’ve known it for decades.
  • Hemingway also called Trump “a narcissist who takes no responsibility for the negative consequences of his ill-conceived and incoherent verbal spews.”
  • When he was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women during the 2016 campaign, Hemingway wrote, “None of it is particularly surprising for a man who spent decades bragging about his sexual prowess, adultery, handsiness, sexual entitlement, and so on and so forth. That this information is coming out is all so obvious that if you saw all these warning signs—and everyone saw these warning signs—and still supported Trump, you should look inward.
  • Even during his presidency she has referred to him as “known perv Trump.” What does it mean for her to write that one month and declare her unsolicited support the next?
  • It means that her standards have been corrupted
  • a more complete reckoning with what Trump has done goes farther toward clarifying why being tied to him puts the whole Red Tribe in peril.
  • Why would anyone who values the civic virtues necessary to preserve the republic trust those who cease to care that it is fraying, throwing support to a man they see as a lying, juvenile insult-monger so long as they’re getting their way?
  • “The Trump nomination may result in principled conservatives leaving the party or laying very low,” Hemingway wrote in 2016, “but if this election has shown anything, it’s that principled conservatives aren’t in nearly as abundant supply as they might wish.”
  • . Like all winning coalitions, the American right is having a hard time imagining how fleeting its political ascendence will be, or the consequences its lack of principle will have in the long term. I expect that its moral failures will echo across American politics for years, undermining the right’s ability to credibly advance its best and worst alike.
  • When Trumpism ends, as every coalition built around a president must eventually end, will there be enough people on the right unsullied by his indefensible behavior to rebuild? As a fan of free markets and small government I fear not. I fear the right is discrediting itself for a generation, robbing America of the benefits of having two competing ideologies at their respective best.
  • In the long run, the right’s best hope lies in the shrinking faction of politicians and pundits that is happy to note when it favors a discrete policy pursued by the president, but that remains perspicacious enough to assert the overall posture of Never Trump.
Javier E

The Right in the Time of Trump: United by Hate, Love, or Nothing? | National Review - 0 views

  • Earlier this year, Senator Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican, was asked what the GOP stood for. He said, candidly, “I don’t know.” What does the conservative movement stand for? I don’t know. Is there a conservative movement? I don’t know.
  • Also present is class resentment — the belief that fancy people who attend cocktail parties are conspiring to do down the little guy. Along with this is identity politics. These two things — class resentment and identity politics — have long been hallmarks of the Left. They are coming to distinguish the Right.
  • In my business — the conservative opinion dodge (h/t William Safire) — there is a way to stay on the happy side of the Right. There is a way not to ruffle feathers, or to ruffle them in the right direction. What you do is attack or mock the Left. You avoid your own “side” and its troubles. You just “go negative,” as they say in politics.
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  • According to some, that’s my job: to skewer — brilliantly! — the Left while ignoring everything else. Well, nuts to that. Let other people be good little tribesmen. (“Good Germans,” we used to say, when I was growing up.) You and I are individuals
  • It is impossible to agree on what conservatism is. That is one of the beauties of conservatism, I think: It is beyond ideology, almost an anti-ideology.
  • Are we, in fact, united by love? Or can the Right give the Left a run for its money in the hate department?
  • I cherish a memory from The Simpsons. The wife of Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart owner, is pregnant, and he is sweatin’ it. Homer reassures him: “Kids are the best, Apu. You can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they practically raise themselves, what with the Internet and all.”
  • Shared hatreds can be very, very satisfying.
Javier E

Confessions of a Columnist - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I was wrong in the priority that I gave the deficit relative to other issues, wrong to discern a looming “fiscal precipice,” wrong in some of the criticism I leveled at both George W. Bush and Barack Obama for failing to care enough about balancing the nation’s books.
  • in hindsight the most important economic argument of the early Obama years was between two schools of thought that agreed we should put more money into the economy and only disagreed about how to do it — the Keynesians who wanted massive government spending and the market monetarists who favored looser monetary policy. Today, both sides of that debate look far better than the strict fiscal and monetary hawks, and the endless arguments about Bowles-Simpson look like an interesting exercise that did not deserve so much swarming attention from politicians and the press.
  • a rich and powerful country with a stable government and control over its own currency (which is to say, not a prisoner of the euro) should be willing to live with a loose fiscal policy when wage growth is disappointing and inflation low, and it should debate tax and spending changes on their own terms — will this money be put to good use? — rather than pursuing a balanced budget for its own sake.
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  • That low-inflation, slow-growth context prevailed under Obama; to a lesser extent it still prevails today. There will doubtless come a time when deficit scolds make essential arguments, but of late they haven’t — and when I was one of them, I now believe, I was making a mistake.
Javier E

How Does Science Really Work? | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are
  • In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science
  • Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”
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  • Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience
  • geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.
  • Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”
  • Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.
  • it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.
  • In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.
  • How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020
lmunch

The Untraveled High Road of Humility, and a President Laid Low - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “Going well, I think!” President Trump tweeted late Friday. Of all the confusing, confounding and contradictory words that have been spun out of the White House in recent days, that two-word caveat — “I think” — was instantly seized upon by the president’s allies and adversaries alike.
  • The absence of humility, Mr. Danforth said, can poison any chance for a collaborative culture.
  • He is hardly the first to suggest this. “Those who travel the high road of humility in Washington, D.C., are not bothered by heavy traffic,” said the former Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, in a 2018 eulogy for President George Bush. It is a familiar adage around the capital, if rarely heeded.
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  • And why would Mr. Trump take a ride in the presidential S.U.V. so he could wave to supporters near the hospital? He did this on Sunday afternoon, which seemingly placed his Secret Service detail at risk of infection, as many pointed out.
  • Be humble, in other words, or try to fake it.That of course has never been Mr. Trump’s way. Self-doubt is for “losers.” Humility invites vulnerability. The approach has made him, depending on where you stand, an inspiring leader or an insufferable know-it-all and con man. It has made him immensely wealthy, or lent the impression of such.
  • The capital might contain the most powerful people in the world, but there is humility in remembering that their future and the nation’s rests elsewhere — with voters, laws and fate.
dytonka

Walter Wallace Shooting - 0 views

  • Two Philadelphia police officers shot and killed a 27-year-old Black man holding a knife on Monday afternoon as his mother watched nearby. Protests in the city have raged in the nights since.
  • Simpson said a person who he later learned was Wallace's mother told police that Wallace had mental health issues.
  • Wallace suffered from bipolar disorder and was in crisis during the time of the shooting, his family said.
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  • Johnson said that Wallace was suffering and in a doctor's care, and that he was receiving treatment for his mental health issues.
  • "It's emotionally taxing to think about how you can call for assistance and wind up with the people who you called killing you," he said.
  •  
    Black man shot in Philadelphia that had a mental illness
kennyn-77

Jury selection begins for Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed 2 protesters : NPR - 0 views

  • When jury selection begins Monday in the high-profile trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two protesters and wounded another last year in Kenosha, Wis., the small manufacturing city will again be in the national spotlight.
  • But what has been lost and will be at the heart of this case are two homicides.
  • Defense attorneys will argue Rittenhouse acted in self-defense
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  • Rittenhouse faces multiple felony charges of homicide and recklessly endangering the safety of others, along with one misdemeanor count of possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor.
  • On Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, traveled a short distance from Illinois in response to a call from a Kenosha-based militia group saying it hoped to protect businesses from protesters.
  • Conservatives immediately took to social media with some painting Rittenhouse as a martyred patriot and others lionizing him.
  • Most recently, he upheld a long-standing rule in his courtroom that the men whom Rittenhouse shot can't be called "victims" during the hearing. He did say the defense can refer to them as "rioters, looters and arsonists."
  • Despite Rittenhouse's reported ties to white nationalist groups, including the Proud Boys, Simpson doesn't believe he belongs in jail.
  • But it's not a normal case. It will determine whether Rittenhouse was a defender of law and order during violent unrest, or a vigilante responsible for needless deaths.
Javier E

A Professor Reviews CliffsNotes and Other Cheat Sheets - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them
  • What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.
  • “Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.
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  • Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.
  • CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.
  • In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.
  • CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.
  • Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”
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