Author: Andrew Sullivan

The complexities of the Times Square bomb plot escape many in the media. It's a story that does not fit into any easy pre-fabricated ideological narrative.

A reader writes:

I think there's something important that's by-and-large been left out of this discussion.  To me, the most alarming thing about the 3L email incident is how it demonstrates what I suppose you might call "Liberal Epistemic Closure.'  This woman attends a university.  She, like other bright young people with an independent, contrarian streak, wrote in an email that she was disinclined to accept the dogma of her environment as gospel simply because it was what she'd been spoon-fed and told to believe, and pointed out (quite fairly) that scientific conclusions tend to be somewhat warped by the political and cultural climates in which the studies take place.  She was doing what people should be doing in academic environments: questioning accepted truth.  But questioning accepted truth doesn't mean the rejection of that viewpoint, it means that she was playing around with ideas, asserting her right to engage with them until she was able to reach a satisfying conclusion on her own terms, as opposed to allowing her mind to be molded by popular prevailing opinion.

People like that are vital to society.  We need them.  They should be celebrated, not vilified.   In fact, one could argue that the entire purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach people to think in an independent, contrarian, "I'm not going to think what you tell me to think until you convincingly demonstrate to me why I should" way.  Academia should be the safest place for people to explore ideas and ask questions.

However, when this woman tried to do that, not only was she shot down by her peers and labeled as a racist, her email was leaked to the outside world, where she's pilloried, bullied, had her reputation utterly destroyed, and, quite possibly, her life ruined.  On blogs, people have left comments saying that she should never have been allowed into Harvard Law in the first place – in other words, suggesting that university applicants conform to some kind of ideological litmus test as a condition of admittance. The dean of Harvard Law, instead of defending the intellectual rights of the young minds under her care and the sanctity of the academic environment, instead chose to throw this young woman under the bus by issuing a statement that did nothing but cover her own ass.  The liberal and academic communities' response to questioning – not even rejecting, mind you, simply questioning – liberal dogma is evidently to engage in a mass, Hester Prynne-style public shaming.  And nobody is horrified by this?

Here's the thing: if people have questions about race and ethnicity that they're not allowed to ask, and are in fact publicy rejected and shamed for doing so, they're going to go someplace where those questions are accepted.  And I don't think we'd like the answers they get there.  Right now, I'll bet dollars-to-doughnuts that the only letters of support this woman is receiving are probably from white supremacist groups.  Is that really where we want to drive young people who think these thoughts and ask these questions?  Isn't it possible to present a convincing intellectual argument for "our side" while keeping it in the realm of ideas, as opposed to attacking the people as individuals?

Another writes:

I'd only like to add that the strength of opinions elicited by this discussion illustrates the very issue our original emailer was attempting to describe. Even when made in the abstract, as in this case, any mention of a link between race and intelligence brings forth the most intense political opinions. How do you think this hullabaloo affects those scientists who, as honestly and ethically as they can, choose to study the link between geographic variation and any sort of biological trait? Would you choose a topic of research knowing that you would cause a ruckus and risk marginalization every time you mentioned your work? In other words, if you're just trying to get funding, which side of this issue would you make sure your research came down on?

Mike Tyson commits to a no-cannoli life:

Tom Dollar thinks that Cameron should learn from Canada's hung parliament:

So what can David Cameron learn from his friends in Ottawa? The principal lesson is Go Big or Go Home: voters would rather see the government boldly pursue its agenda than dither over coalition-building. A hung parliament does not have to mean inertia, and a plurality of 308 seats should give the Tories enough leeway.

Chris Bertram says he's voting for Labour:

[H]ere’s the decisive thing for me. We all know that the next few years in the UK are going to be tough and that the volume of cuts that each party would make are about the same. Where there is a difference is in the distribution of the pain. If the Tories are in power it will fall on the very poorest and most vulnerable. The Lib Dems will be better than that, but they too will appease their middle-class base. A Labour government will still hurt the most vulnerable but less so. Labour aren’t going to win, but it would be very very bad if they came third. Their base, again, composed disproportionately of the worst-off, would become still more marginalized. So share of the vote counts too, even in a first-past-the-post system. I’m voting Labour.

Bubión, Spain, 11.20 am

Pivoting off a post by Hertzberg, Bernstein considers reform of the British electoral system:

[T]he ultimate goal of a political system cannot be to accurately reflect the strength of each party in parliament, much less accurately reflect the strength of all the views of the citizens in parliament, which is essentially impossible anyway.  No, what matters more is whether the government is responsive to citizens.  The composition of parliament is a means to that end.  So in a basically majoritarian system, a method of translating votes into seats that magnifies majorities isn’t inherently problematic.

His verdict:

[O]n electoral reform, my instincts are to be cautious unless there’s a clear violation of democracy that needs to be remedied, such as the massive rural bias that the US remedied with one person, one vote in the 1960s.  I don’t see anything close to that in using first-past-the-post instead of p.r.  That’s not to say that I’d be against reform, but I’d recommend proceeding cautiously.  You don’t want to be (if I can slip in a baseball comparison here) a Bud Selig, constantly changing the rules to react to the latest complaints. 

Meanwhile, Simon Schama all but has an orgasm in the New Yorker over p.r.

I have to say the way some get worked up about this – I’m talking to you, Rick – baffles me. If I were the Lib-Dem leader, I’d be angling to be the second of two parties, not a permanent coalition party of either. And I have a feeling that the potential parliamentary wrangling that will start on Friday will remind Brits of why their system is not so bad after all.

Above is video from a February raid in Missouri. Balko captions:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

And advocates:

I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime. But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

The Onion, of course.