Showing posts with label Duke Lacrosse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duke Lacrosse. Show all posts

Friday, October 05, 2007

He Retires Victorious

K.C. Johnson of Durham in Wonderland is retiring from regular posting at his blog. He did as much as a human could to get the story out of the railroading of the three Duke Lacrosse players by disgraced District Attorney Michael Nifong.

He follows in the path of another intrepid Professor who stood athwart history and said "they shall not pass", Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who fought at Gettysburg. Let me quote a bit from Professor Chamberlain on the fight at Gettysburg.

The roar of all this tumult reached us on the left, and heightened the intensity of our resolve. Meanwhile, the flanking column worked around to our left and joined with those before us in a fierce assault, which lasted with increasing fury for an intense hour. The two lines met and broke and mingled in the shock. The crush of musketry gave way to cuts and thrusts, grapplings and wrestlings. The edge of conflict swayed to and fro, with wild whirlpools and eddies. At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men; gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp convulsive energy; squads of stalwart men who had cut their way through us, disappearing as if translated. All around, strange, mingled roar—shouts of defiance, rally, and desperation; and underneath, murmured entreaty and stifled moans; gasping prayers, snatches of Sabbath song, whispers of loved names; everywhere men torn and broken, staggering, creeping, quivering on the earth, and dead faces with strangely fixed eyes staring stark into the sky. Things which cannot be told—nor dreamed.

How men held on, each one knows—not I. But manhood commands admiration. There was one fine young fellow, who had been cut down early in the fight with a ghastly wound across his forehead, and who I thought might possibly be saved with prompt attention. So I had sent him back to our little field hospital, at least to die in peace. Within a half-hour, in a desperate rally I saw that noble youth amidst the rolling smoke as an apparition from the dead, with bloody bandage for the only covering of his head, in the thick of the fight, high-borne and pressing on as they that shall see death no more. I shall know him when I see him again, on whatever shore!
So Professor Johnson on whatever shore we may meet again, I shall know you.

God Speed,

Simon

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Will Blog For Abuse

So I'm reading Stuart Taylor guest blogging over at The Volokh Conspiracy and one commenter notes that a previous guest blogger only lasted for two posts.

No disrespect to her but maybe she was unfamiliar with the level of discourse on the blogging medium?
Well yeah.

So my friend Eric at Classical Values makes a similar point today.
I'm convinced there has to be a blogging gene. I mean, who would do this voluntarily without pay, day in and day out? Think about it.
And then a bit earlier I had a couple of real charmers show up at this post: Conspiracy Theories. My attitude? Some of us enjoy the abuse.

So my motto is "Will blog for abuse. At least it increases the traffic." I'm in this for the abuse. Pile on.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Monday, June 25, 2007

Because It Is Popular

Ann Althouse is looking at what makes Mike Nifong or as I expect, the soon to be JailFong, different from other prosecutors? Was it the elements of the case: sex, athletes, strippers, and a hooker? Or was it his behavior?

Which got me to thinking. The whole Drug War is prosecutorial misconduct.

We now know from the NIDA no less that Addiction Is A Genetic Disease.

So why does the Drug War continue? For the major reason that you have prosecutorial misconduct. It is popular. Nifong did what he did because he thought it would be popular where he lived. He was right.

Commenter at Ann's place Bruce Hayden had this to say at 11:54 AM:

Realistically though, I don't see most prosecutors crossing the line. I personally have a much better experience with them than I do with cops, in the area of abusing the power of their offices. More than once, I have seen prosecutors dismiss overreaching charges filed by the cops, sui sponte.

That is not to say that they don't work with the cops to overcharge in order to plea bargain into what they consider a reasonable sentence. You see this all the time - where they have charged a dozen felonies, and plea bargain to one or two. Many times, the added charges are not all that strong, but the chance that the prosecution might win on one or two of them is all it takes to rationalize a plea bargain, even if you know yourself to be innocent.
Bruce,

That is exactly how I see it. Prosecutors have the tools to railroad any one they want and they prefer to use the tools only on the guilty.

No one cares as long as it is done to "them". It is when it is done to "us" that people rise up. Who ever the "us" is that gets catered to.

We have in fact condoned the railroading of the guilty. No surprise if the innocent get caught up in that little machine every now and then.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Friday, May 18, 2007

Reynolds Likes Murders, I Like Sex

Glenn Reynolds seems to like to do tabloid bits (who doesn't?) and today he is featuring the CHANNON CHRISTIAN / CHRISTOPHER NEWSOME KILLING, a particularly gruesome job, with black criminals and white victims. BTW note how important it must be to be ALL CAPS. Well at least he didn't go the extra step and BOLD IT as well.

Murders are so ugly, so instead I'm going to do a non-rape of strippers case with home video of nude strippers toying with college kids. Lots of alcohol. And two completely different views of the events of the fateful evening. One view is the stripper's point of view. The other point of view is of the pledge master (did I forget to mention fraternities? - yep, two of them are involved) who hired the strippers. Yep. Two of them. Sorta like the Duke case, except the strippers are white. Plus lots of geeky frat boys. With that particular insolent affectation that some youth (boys especially) of that age have. Did I mention that there is video? Which is NOT WORK SAFE. OK? Raw Deal: A Question of Consent - 20 minute preview - NOT WORK SAFE. Oh yeah. You get to meet the mother and grandmother of the stripper who claimed to be raped.

Rape is a serious crime and not to be taken lightly. However, there are a lot of false rape claims. Plus, it is a sad but true fact of life that the level of protection for women in that line of work is reduced. Because it blurs the lines of consent/non-consent.

I have watched the preview and I must say that the story is a strong one. Besides which would you rather do for your tabloid fix today? Read about gruesome murders or watch some strippers in action?

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Civilization vs. Mob Rule

KC Johnson of Durham in Wonderland has posted a Sunday Round Up. Reading it gave rise to some thoughts.

I have heard that it takes about five years from a personal willingness to look at the evidence until a change in personal view point takes place. In the 80s I started looking into the Vietnam War and economics and by '88 I was voting Libertarian (I thought the Republicans were too compromised in their principles - I thought politics was a science/engineering problem. My study of war from the micro to the macro cured me of that attitude).

KC, when I started reading the Sunday Round Up I honestly thought I was reading a dyed in the wool Republican site - libertarian (liberal) orientation.

I think in five years (more or less) you will look back and wonder how you could support your current favorite candidate (unless things changed while I wasn't watching). At last look it was Obama.

We have laws and proceedures to bias the odds in favor of justice, and heavily against injustice to the innocent. One of the reasons the Republicans idea that our government system must be governend by rules. It is the best hope that the system will ultimately serve justice and prevent injustice.

When those laws and regulations are breached - to get the usual suspects - injustices are done.

The justice system in America is broken in the oughts for the same reason it was broken in the '20s. Prohibition is corrupting the system.

The political right is starting to come around on this issue. When more of them get it that realization will bust the justice system in America wide open.

I predict we will find corruption so widespread that confessions followed by amnesty will be the only reasonable way to fix it.

Your exposure of the Duke case has opened a lot of fracture planes in America. Equality vs. affirmitive action. Justice based on evidence vs. justice based on mob rule. Upholding standards vs flexible standards. Belief vs. evidence.

A whole array of human behavior. In the end it comes down to civilization. Mob rule, rule by intimidation, is incompatible with civilization.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

It Had An Unfortunate Gloating Tone

KC Johnson at Durham in Wonderland is discussing hate mail. Specifically hate mail recieved by some of the professors involved in the Duke Hoax.

The latest example of creatively interpreting what constitutes “harassing” e-mails comes from the newly elected chairwoman of the Academic Council, Paula (“No to Due Process”) McClain. A Free Republic reader sent two emails to McClain. The first asked for comment about the end of the case; the second said that she had been “hoisted on the petard of Political Correctness, racial identity politics, gender determining feminism and what [the writer] coined as ‘Tawana Brawley Syndrome’.”

The reader continued, “Aside from the fact that petty tyrants like you have turned US college campuses into little ivy covered North Koreas, I suspect that you were seeking to appropriate PC bonus points and obtain instant moral authority by championing the cause of the “other” (marginalized black exotic dancer) against racist male chauvinist members of the privileged white elite. A case of cultural Marxist Class warfare that boomeranged. GOD how I love it so!!!!!”

I would not have sent the e-mail above. It had an unfortunate gloating tone.
Yeah KC. I loved it too!

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Friday, May 04, 2007

A Social Misfit Nature

Cedarford commenting on a comment about the Duke Rape Hoax had this to say:

I like your devil's advocacy. While not a lawyer, I have major personal unlikabilty factors, social misfit nature and am morally conflicted...meaning in my desperation to be friends with anybody, I have to settle for some lawyer friends...
Cedarford has commented here occasionally. It is all beginning to make sense.

Tara Is In SANE

Tara Levicy, the the sexual assault (SANE - Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) case nurse, who helped examine the false accuser in the Duke Rape Hoax is considered unprofessional by many other SANE nurses.

If, then, a trial had occurred, Levicy would faced a difficult time. Yet any shortcomings in Levicy’s testimony would have been almost immaterial to Nifong. As Jim Coleman recently pointed out, it increasingly appears that in his final months running the case, Nifong’s chief goal was somehow to get to trial, regardless of the verdict.

In that respect, Levicy was of critical assistance. Her statements to police allowed Nifong to mask his false assertions about the “crime” in the cloak of medical evidence, while her willingness to alter her story in ways that always seemed to aid the D.A.’s case gave Nifong at least one witness on whom he could absolutely rely—not an easy task in a case where the accuser tended to dramatically change her story every time she spoke to law enforcement.

Kethra, SANE nurse who frequently posts on the Liestoppers forum, concludes:
Ms. Levicy’s actions were unconscionable, unprofessional and the inherent sign of an incredibly biased person and nurse. She alone, is responsible for the start of this witch hunt in my opinion. By not telling the actual facts, by misrepresenting to the police the signs and symptoms of a rape victim, by “embroidering” the true patient findings and historical story, by her sheer ignorance of appropriate forensic evidence collection technique, her sheer ignorance of basic pathophysiology, her sheer ignorance of general medical conditions and the identification of those conditions and by her glaring egotistical need to portray herself as an expert, she sent the police down the trail of deception. Combine that with a rogue prosecutor and shoddy police work (didn’t they read the stupid medical reports for themselves?) she almost put three innocent men in jail.
So what is Tara doing these days?
According to the Duke website as of Monday, Tara Levicy remains in the employ of Duke University Medical Center, as a fully certified SANE nurse.
That is right. Tara Levicy is still in SANE.

Update: 04 May 007 2154z

More background on Tara's work on the case and even more.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

It Is A Crock

I'm back on the minutae of the Duke case.

There is a lot of discussion going on about the work of the nurse who collected the rape kit and the doctor who actually did the exam.

With more discussions here and here.

Let me deal with just the work of Dr. Manly (who is a woman).

Mangum was different in several ways. Most rape victims are withdrawn and quiet but cooperative. Mangum, on the other hand, called attention to herself by screaming; Manly had never seen that behavior before, she told defense lawyer Doug Kingsbery in October.

Manly made one notation on the rape kit report: "diffuse edema of the vaginal walls." It was the only medical evidence in Nifong's files that might support Mangum's version of what occurred at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd.

In an interview with Kingsbery, Manly said she did not recall seeing that kind of swelling in any of her previous sexual assault exams. Manly had seen similar swelling in others of the hundreds of routine pelvic exams she had performed, but there were other reasons for it.

During the exam of Mangum, Manly had seen discharge she assumed could be semen. After learning the rape kit turned up none, Manly came up with another possibility:

Mangum had the whitish discharge and vaginal swelling common to a yeast infection.
Let me refresh your memory on the time line. October of 2006 would be at least four months after Mike Nifong announced that no semen from the Duke players was found on Magnum (the dancer). It was several months before it was announced that semen from others was found on Magnum. Also note that no discharge was noted in the medical exam (rape kit) report.

This seems quite strange. Unless Dr. Manly thought she was covering her tracks for some sin of omission or commission. Isn't there any one associated with the Durham side of this case competent? Or at least with enough honor to tell the truth?

Newport at Liestoppers has altered my view of this question. There was in fact no semen (in detectable quantities) found. What was found was a very few sperm from a number of different men.

Still called into question was why the rape kit report did not have the "discharge" observation noted and why no pictures were taken of Magnum's injuries.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Duke And The Cultural Marxist Program

I was commenting at Durham in Wonderland about the Duke Lacrosse case. I was explaining what the faculty Group of 88 are really up to and explaining their motivation.

==

Cultural Marxism explains what the Gang 88 is up to.

The subversion of America. i.e. turning America into the USSR.

an excerpt from the above Cultural Marxism link:

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

an excerpt from a link at the above link:

Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class. The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a "long march through the culture." Additionally, a new proletariat must be created. In his "Prison Notebooks," he suggested that the new proletariat be comprised of many criminals, women, and racial minorities.

Thus thugniggaintellectual.

Communists have always used the criminal element to advance its cause. They represent the muscle of the movement. Thus the New Black Panther Party (NBPP).

The NBPP is not an abberation. It is part of the plan. Where argument and persuasion do not work intimidation will be used.

BTW this was all worked out in the 1920s.

About 5% of the American population creates the wealth we all enjoy. That 5% are our top intellectual performers.

In any Communist regime they will be the first up against the wall.

This is what the thugniggas of the world are up to. Which is why this is the "perfect" case for them.

The sex stuff is all about destroying coherent families because such families are naturally in the way.

I have been pretty much a libertine in my youth. However, nature changes all that when children start to arrive. It surprised me. Children naturally seem to change most people's point of view on the subject. Conservatism is nature's political program for families.

The USSR was a bastion of free sex in the beginning. That went away after the first few years because it is not natural for families. Families are naturally conservative. It has nothing to do with politics. It is nature.

To reduce the power of natural conservatism, sexaul libertinism is promoted for all, not just the unmarried, because it breaks family bonds and family bonds as Gramasci saw were an impediment to "revolution".

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Valerie Solanas

Anybody remember Valerie Solanas? Founder of SCUM. The Society for Cutting Up Men. Writer of the SCUM Manifesto.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the mail has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness. He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the services of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can't relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. He is a half-dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings -- hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt -- and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn't.
Well, it gets better or worse depending on your point of view.

So the relevance of this to current events? It looks like the John Edwards campaign has hired what appears to be a Valerie Solanas clone, Amanda Marcotte. Let us look into some of her writing. KC Johnson of Durham in Wonderland has excerpted from some of her posts. This is typical:
This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice. In her part of the country, both women and black people are seen as subhuman objects to be used and abused by white men.

Yeah, I know, Alon. Which is why I’m frustrated that people are pretending ‘can’t identify which one raped her” somehow equals ‘wasn’t raped’. I had some initial confusion about exactly who was assaulting me when I was assaulted, but that doesn’t mean that his hands weren’t actually where they were.
So it is not about evidence. It is about which class you belong to. Well I haved blogged about this particular post myself. Now Ms Marcotte has disappeared it down the memory hole.

Which probably makes her perfect for the Edwards Campaign. Which is all about the class struggle he is waging from his 24,000 sq. ft. mansion with heated swimming pool and when he gets tired and needs a vacation he has an nice vacation home on an island. Kind of like a castle with a moat. Keeps the lower classes out. They want to class struggle? It will have to be from some where else.

So all this has caused a lot of heat. The cover up, such as it is, even more.

Eric of Classical Values is covering Ms Marcotte from a different angle. Her recent blogging duel with James Lileks.

Lie Stoppers is looking at the Edwards campaign aspect. And, the missing posts.

There is also lots in the comments at all the above places. If you don't mind sifting.

I think Marcotte is sunk and so is Edwards.

A nice overview courtesy of Instapundit.

The opinions of Amanda Marcotte.

Note: fixed Lie Stoppers link.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Friday, February 02, 2007

IQ Test

Great discussion going on at Durham in Wonderland about the relationship of IQ and Angry Studies. And the usual person chimes in saying it doesn't measure anything and besides it is not useful and it is psuedo-science and it is the one thing that can't be differentially distributed between different populations. Pygmys may be short, and Watusis may be tall, but every one gets the same distribution of brains.

So I invented this little IQ test for the person who believes they are not valid. See if you can pass.

You are a passenger on a 747-400 and you have a choice of pilots, each has similar visio-spacial co-ordination and motor skills, one has an IQ of 70 the other has an IQ of 130.

Who you gonna call?

To say IQ has no validity is BS. It is a belief that not even your own experience will support.

If you choose the IQ 70 guy all that will prove is that there are at least two morons on the plane.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Angry Studies

My friend Jim who posts frequently at Durham in Wonderland as RP and Roman Polanski has invented a term for classes in victimology taught in so many universities. He calls them Angry Studies.

I told Jim that at least the first time I used it I woud give him credit. So Jim credit where due.

BTW I did search the term on Google and found nothing matching this useage. It is possible I missed something.

The Duke Chronicle has an example of just how angry the Angry Studies departments can get. Thanks to Durham in Wonderland.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

The Right Loses Faith

It is interesting to read the hard right's take on the justice system based on the Duke case.

When folks from Free Republic lose faith in the justice system, we are in serious trouble.

Here is a typical comment:

To: TommyDale

"Multiply that in North Carolina, where the legal system can screw innocent people and the general public would never know,"

That is everywhere in the country.

10 posted on 01/24/2007 6:14:39 AM PST by SmoothTalker
Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

A Culture Of Rape

Commenter firebug at Durham in Wonderland points out this really wonderful site called Pandagon and a discussion of the Duke case going on there.

They talk about the culture of rape that allowed and encouraged the "rape" of the "victim" in the case.

If Federal Crime Statistics[pdf] are to be believed there is very little white on black rape in America. The numbers show that black on white rape is the predominant interracial rape crime. If you account for population it is even worse.

So I suppose you could say that there is a culture of interracial rape in America.

What supports it? Just listen to the music.

When a culture no longer honors its women, you have a culture in serious decline.

Clayton Cramer discusses the statistics.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Camille Paglia on the Duke Case

No, actually I couldn't find anything by Camille on the case. However, I did find a LOT on line that speaks to the acedemic issues involved.

Feminist ideology has totally failed to deal with humanity's instinctual drives. No matter what garbage you hear from Foucault's minions, sex is ultimately about procreation. It's in the best interests of the species for fertile women to mate with the strongest, most vital and resourceful males.
Paglia Speaks


Foucault's analysis of "power" is foggy and paranoid and simply does not work when applied to the actual evidence of the birth, growth and complex development of governments in ancient and modern societies. Nor is Foucault's analysis of the classification of knowledge particularly original -- except in his bitter animus against the Enlightenment, which he failed to realize had already been systematically countered by Romanticism. What most American students don't know is that Foucault's commentary is painfully crimped by the limited assumptions of Saussurean linguistics (which I reject). As I have asserted, James Joyce's landmark modernist novel Ulysses (1922) contains, chapter by chapter, far subtler and more various versions of language-based "epistemes" inherent in cultural institutions and epochs.

I'm afraid I bring rather bad news: Over the course of your careers, your generation of students will slowly come to realize that the Foucault-praising professors whom you respected and depended on were ill-informed fad-followers who sold you a shoddy bill of goods. You don't need Foucault, for heaven's sake! Durkheim and Max Weber began the stream of sociological thought that still nourishes responsible thinkers. And the pioneers of social psychology and behaviorism -- Havelock Ellis, Alfred Adler, John B. Watson and many others -- were eloquent apostles of social constructionism when Foucault was still in the cradle.
Catching on are we?
Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax. Again and again -- in memoirs, for example, by trendy but pedestrian uber-academics like Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt and Brown's Robert Scholes -- one sees the scenario of Melancholy, Bookish, Passive, Insecure Young Nebbish suddenly electrified and transfigured by the Grand Epiphany of Blindingly Brilliant Foucault. This sappy psychodrama would be comic except for the fact that American students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded of a genuine education in intellectual history and political analysis (a disciplined genre that starts with Thucydides and flows directly to the best of today's journalism on current events).

When I pointed out in Arion that Foucault, for all his blathering about "power," never managed to address Adolph Hitler or the Nazi occupation of France, I received a congratulatory letter from David H. Hirsch (a literature professor at Brown), who sent me copies of riveting chapters from his then-forthcoming book, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz (1991). As Hirsch wrote me about French behavior during the occupation, "Collaboration was not the exception but the rule." I agree with Hirsch that the leading poststructuralists were cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents' generations in Nazi France.

American students, forget Foucault! Reverently study the massive primary evidence of world history, and forge your own ideas and systems. Poststructuralism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs!
Paglia on "Junk Bonds..."


How should the humanities be taught, and how should scholars in the humanities be trained? These pivotal questions confront universities today amid signs of spreading agreement that the three-decade era of poststructuralism and postmodernism is over.

It remains my position—as detailed in my long review-essay, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” published in Arion in 1991—that Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault were false gods, created and promoted by secular academics who might have been expected to be more skeptical of authority. As it became institutionalized in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, poststructuralism hardened into dogma, and many humanities professors lost the ability to respect, assess, or even recognize any hypothesis or system outside their own frame of reference. Such insularity has little to do with genuine intellectualism and is more akin to religious fundamentalism.

Most seriously, poststructuralism did manifest damage to two generations of students who deserved a generous and expansive introduction to the richness of the humanities and who were instead force-fed with cynicism and cant.
I fail to see that American students are emerging today even from elite universities with a broad or discerning knowledge of arts and letters. Nor has poststructuralism produced any major new critics—certainly none of the towering scholarly stature once typical of prominent professors who had been educated in the first half of the twentieth century.
I bolded the bit above.

Duke - are you listening?

Post Post Modern Camille

Uh. Oh. I did finally find something on the Duke Case from Paglia. It was April 5, 2006.
During questions and answers after her talk at GW the other night, Paglia was asked about the situation at Duke. Here’s what she said, more or less:
University athletes these days are a kind of master race. They get special favors, special dispensations. Does this sense of entitlement lead to crime? How does the ethos of the college sports team turn into Attila the Hun?
It was still early in the case, before a lot of information came out, so maybe she deserves some slack.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Setting The Reichstag On Fire

In the comments at Durham in Wonderland commenter anon. (who is very prolific on the board) points to an article by Bill Anderson with this quote:

"For example, any number of college campuses have been the site of "racist" attacks that later were found to be contrived, something I pointed out a while back in looking at what I call "Reichstag Fires" on college campuses. Furthermore, I noted that Duke’s latest episode of angst was another rendition of that famous fire, and the nonsense is not limited to Duke. A few years ago at the prestigious Claremont Colleges, a social psychology professor, Kerri Dunn, returned from a free speech rally to find her car windshield smashed and "nigger lover" and other such things spray-painted on her car.

"Naturally, the campus erupted in mass rallies, where people expressed fear at the racism that was engulfing their beloved campus. However, police and the FBI (yes, the FBI was called to investigate) soon discovered that the perpetrator of this "hate crime" was none other than Dunn herself, who had done the damage before the rally began. (Unfortunately for her, bystanders witnessed the vandalism and told investigators what they saw. Thus, Claremont’s Reichstag Fire went out quickly.)"
Bill explains the genesis of the problem in a bit that came before the above quote.
The pool of qualified black faculty members was – and is – small compared to whites, Asians, and people from the Middle East (qualified means having an earned doctorate from an accredited university). In my profession, economics, only about 40 percent of those receiving doctorates in any given year actually are from the United States, and the vast majority of them are white. This is a very good situation for those blacks who do earn doctorates in economics, as their chances for landing a well-paying job are going to be good, since many institutions of higher learning are going to compete for their services.

Unfortunately, not all economics faculties that would like to fill an opening with a black applicant can do so; as a result, most faculties are dominated by people from white, Asian, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. That is a hard fact of life, not a situation that is due to racist attitudes or hiring practices, no matter what the critics might say.

But such hard facts still do not mitigate the problem that elite universities face. They want more black faculty members; they need more black faculty members, so they permitted the creation of new disciplines in order to "solve" that problem. Thus, on most campuses – and especially at the elite universities – there are entire departments devoted to things like "African-American Studies," "Women’s Studies," or "African Studies." These academic areas did not exist a few decades ago, but have become popular, especially with administrators who are pressured to keep up their numbers of black professors.

A real quandary exists, however, and that is that these particular areas of study are based upon historical racism and sexism in society, and that such "isms" must be kept alive in order to legitimate them. In other words, it is not enough to deal only with historical racism, such as the Jim Crow era or black chattel slavery. Every speck of current racism must be discovered, exposed, and magnified, and if none can be found, it can be created.
Bill then ties all this to the Duke "rape" case.
Even as the case is falling apart, however, most of the faculty members who signed the original document have lent their names to a new statement, one that justifies what they said before:
As a statement about campus culture, the ad deplores a "Social Disaster," as described in the student statements, which feature racism, segregation, isolation, and sexism as ongoing problems before the scandal broke, exacerbated by the heightened tensions in its immediate aftermath. The disaster is the atmosphere that allows sexism, racism, and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus. The ad's statement that the problem "won't end with what the police say or the court decides" is as clearly true now as it was then. Whatever its conclusions, the legal process will not resolve these problems.

The ad thanked "the students speaking individually and...the protesters making collective noise." We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time. We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence.

There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these. We think the ad's authors were right to give voice to the students quoted, whose suffering is real.


Therefore, if this latest document is to be believed, Duke University is a living hell for black faculty and black students. Racism runs unchecked; women are raped; students face intimidation at every turn, and their lives are governed by fear.

Yet, in modern times, I seriously doubt that one – one – black student or faculty member at Duke University (or any other college or university in this country, elite or lower-tier) ever has faced what the lacrosse players faced each day during that terrible time last spring on the Duke campus. A few years ago, a black member of the Duke basketball team was accused of rape (a false charge, but a charge nonetheless), yet he never had to face signs on campus openly calling for him to be castrated.

Indeed, Duke was an unsafe place – a dangerous place – for some young men who engaged in behavior that was no different than what other students at Duke have done: have a party with drinking and hire strippers. (I am not endorsing either, but neither do I believe that what they did was a Crime Against Humanity, as so many at Duke seem to be saying.)

Here was the ultimate fraud, the ultimate Reichstag Fire. Faculty and students – each group claiming to be the brunt of vicious racist attacks – joining forces to launch a vicious and racist – yes, racist – attack on people who did not deserve what they were receiving. In the end, the supposed victims ended up creating real victims and helping to ruin many lives in the process. Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all.
What the race baiters won't tell you is that black on white rape is by far the most prevalent and way out of proportion to the number of black males in the population.
When it comes to interracial rape and sexual assault, the statistics contained in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and the Department of Justice's National Crime Survey during Wilbanks' study revealed that white rapists chose black victims 8,448 times.

However, black rapists chose white victims in 17,572 cases. In other words, according to Wilbanks, there were more than twice as many black-on-white rape cases as there were white-on-black cases. Overall white-on-black violence cases numbered 100,111, whereas black-on-white cases totaled 466,205. Therefore, blacks using violence against whites is over four times more likely than the reverse.
If you adjust for population the rate of black on white to white on black rape is not just a factor of 2 but a factor of 6 to 10 (I haven't done the math).

On the other hand rape rates in general are are declining at a fairly steady clip. So however difficult things seem they are getting better. What we need to do, as usual, is to face reality as it is and keep our prejudices from causing a rush to judgement.

Keep in mind that even with the statistics I showed, very few black men are rapists. So you can leave your stereotypes at home.

It would seem though, if the Black Studies Departments are to be honest they have to live in today. We are not where we were 40 years ago, we are certainly not where we were 150 years ago and no amount of screaming will make it so. Thank the Maker.

I have only excerpted bits of Bill Anderson's piece. Go read it all for it is good.

Durham in Wonderland has a round up of the last weeks news and commentary for those (like me) who cant get enough of this train wreck.

Here are some statistics[pdf] on rape by the percieved race of the victim and the perpetrator. It turns out that whites raping blacks happens in less than .1% of the cases and is listed as zero.

Update: There appears to be a discrepancy noted between the two sets of statistics re: white on black rapes. Any one have a clue? The second set is directly from the Department of Justice. The first numbers quoted are from a post that refers to a study of FBI numbers.


Cross Posted at Classical Values

Saturday, January 20, 2007

The Whole University System

Some one claiming to be a professor at Duke asks in the commetnts at Durham in Wonderland that the credentials of some of the University Faculty not be questioned. That the dignity and internal cohesiveness of the university might be undermined. Here is my answer. The "pot bangers" refers to people actually banging on pots in the early days of the case and calling for castration of the accused 3 boys.

Are you telling me that the dignity of the pot bangers needs to be preserved?

Let me give it to you in Marxist terms:

The whole university system in America is being ripped apart by internal contradictions.

Sorry Duke had to be first.

Most unfortunate.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Duke Meets OJ

The Duke case and the OJ case have a lot of similarities.

I watched the OJ trial from the point of view that the LAPD was a corrupt police department. I knew this because I followed the drug war and saw lots of instances of LAPD corruption in that war. OJ's defence made the point that the police may have corrupted the evidence. Guess what? We found out a few years later in the Rampart scandal that the LAPD was corrupt and had routinely planted evidence. The defence took advantage of community knowledge before it became public knowledge. In othter words it may very well have been a case of the LAPD framing a guilty man.

In the Duke case we have the DA and police framing innocent men.

In both cases the problem is corrupt police and in the Duke case a corrupt DA as well.

The common thread is the corruption of the justice system. I believe this is SOP across the country. Look up testilying. (I wrote about that in Corruption Is Routine.) It is rampant. This is another case of the system's bad habits catching up with it.

I blame drug prohibition for the bad habits.

===

The above was inspired by the comments at this post: Durham In Wonderland

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Friday, December 29, 2006

Corruption Is Routine

For those who have been following the Duke "Rape" Case you will know that it is a case of egregious prosecutorial misconduct. And yet there are similar cases every day in the USA. Why don't such cases recieve wide publicity? Simple - if such procedures were shown to be widespread the "justice" system in America would collapse.

Ankle Biting Pundits are outraged at the misconduct in the Duke case. Yeah. Sure. The outrage is palpable. No doubt.

Now tell me why testilying in drug prohibition cases is so common that we have a name for it? Alan Dershowitz in testimony before Congress said:

Police perjury in criminal cases - particularly in the context of searches and other exclusionary rule issues - is so pervasive that the former police chief of San Jose and Kansas City has estimated that "hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests" alone.
A few bad apples no doubt.

BTW any one notice how alcohol prohibition corrupted our justice system? I thought not.

In other words save your phoney outrage for the ignorant. What Nifong (the DA in the Duke case) did is an outgrowth of what goes on in America every day in every jurisdiction. Who will call for a clean up of that? Or is it another case (like Nifong) where jobs depend on it?

Christopher Slobogin in the University of Colorado Law Review shows why testilying is so corrosive:
Perhaps most importantly, police lying intended to convict someone, whether thought to be guilty or innocent, is wrong because once it is discovered, it diminishes one of our most crucial "social goods" — trust in government. First, of course, the exposure of police perjury damages the credibility of police testimony. As the aftermath of the Fuhrman debacle has shown, the revelation that some police routinely and casually lie under oath makes members of the public, including those who serve on juries, less willing to believe all police, truthful or not. One comment that a New York prosecutor made about the impact of the Simpson case illustrates the point: "Our prosecutors now have to begin their cases defending the cops. Prosecutors have to bring the jury around to the opinion that cops aren't lying. That's how much the landscape has changed."

Police perjury can cause other systemic damage as well. Presumably, for instance, the loss of police credibility on the stand diminishes law enforcement's effectiveness in the streets. Most significantly, to the extent other actors, such as prosecutors and judges, are perceived to be ignoring or condoning police perjury, the loss of public trust may extend beyond law enforcement to the criminal justice system generally.
Here is a bit by Scott Morgan on the corruption of police power in drug prohibition:
First, a revealing story of police misconduct from The Journal Inquirer in North Central Connecticut:
A Hartford police detective arrested days after his retirement in 2004 on charges of falsifying an arrest warrant has been granted a special form of probation that could lead to his arrest record being expunged.

The decision came after a hearing in which [Sgt. Franco] Sanzo's lawyer, Jake Donovan of Middletown, called another retired officer who said that police frequently sign their names to warrants - and swear before judges - that they've seen things they haven't.
So basically Sanzo's defense was that this type of misconduct is a matter of routine at his department. And it worked! I don't know if I'm more shocked that a defense attorney would offer an argument so contemptuous towards the Fourth Amendment, or that a judge would actually be persuaded by an attempt to rationalize police misconduct.
When this all comes crashing down it is going to hurt America for decades. Just as alcohol prohibition did.

Here ia another case where the town fathers are trying to steal a man's business based on trumped up drug charges:
This is the story of David Ruttenberg, the totally law-abiding owner of Rack N' Roll billiards in Manassas, Virginia, who for years now has been targeted in repeated and fruitless attempts to link his business to drug activity. His livelihood is now almost completely destroyed and most of the cops and public officials in Manassas seem to be in on it. Motivated by an apparent desire to build an off-track betting facility on the property, Manassas police and others have spared no expense in this otherwise inexplicable series of bizarre events.

My favorite part is when Ruttenberg tries to explain his plight to a local news reporter at 1:00 in the morning and the Mayor suddenly jumps out of the bushes and tells the reporter not to trust to him.

Balko's research illustrates the ease with which ambiguous allegations of drug activity can be used by politicians as leverage against their enemies. Still, I suspect that the only thing unique about this story is the fact that someone as meticulous as Balko took an interest in it. His work on the Cory Maye case similarly illustrates the improbability of severe police corruption coming to light absent the involvement of a politically savvy blogger from Washington, D.C.

When business owners can be held liable for activities they had no knowledge of, it becomes painfully easy for corrupt officials with ulterior motives to capitalize on malfeasance.

If you were trying to screw over a business owner, how would you do it? Think about how easy it is to frame someone for drugs. Think about it, then ask yourself how often it happens.
That is a pretty good question. My guess? Often enough so that if this kind of behavior was public knowledge it would bring down the justice system.

Public Integrity has pages, and pages, and pages of this stuff. Probably just a few bad apples.

Here is just a bit from one of the articles at Public Integrity:
It is impossible to know for sure how often a specific prosecutor (or a specific defense attorney, judge, police officer, etc.) bends or breaks the rules. In most jurisdictions, at least 95 percent of the cases that pour in from the police never reach a jury, which means any misconduct occurs away from public view. The only trial those defendants receive takes place in the prosecutor's office; the prosecutor becomes the judge and the jury. The prosecutor is the de facto law after an arrest, deciding whether to charge the suspect with committing a crime, what charge to file from a range of possibilities, whether to offer a pre-trial deal, and, if so, the terms of the deal.

Katherine Goldwasser, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who served as a prosecutor in Chicago before joining academia, suggested that misconduct often occurs out of sight, especially in cases that never go to trial. Those cases by definition do not generate appellate opinions (and thus are for the most part beyond the scope of the Center study). Goldwasser told the Center. "It is not a safe assumption that cases ending with guilty pleas are absent prosecutorial misconduct."
Here is an interesting list of serious cases of prosecutorial misconduct. Men and women sentenced to death or long prison sentences because of the prosecutor's desire to win at all costs. Murder is no object. Scary.

Here is the case of James E. Richardson, Jr.:
In September 1996, a Kanawha [West Virginia- ed.] circuit judge overturned Richardson's conviction based on allegations that state police chemist Fred Zain fabricated evidence and that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence.
Which sounds a lot like the Duke case. Except in the Duke case all this is coming out before trial.

Cross Posted at Classical Values