Tag Archives: culture

A DNC Lawsuit

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The Tom Perez and Keith Ellison-led Democratic National Committee is suing the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks, claiming the three acted to mess with the 2016 elections.

Bring it.

I have two comments on the suit.  One is, admittedly, purely cynical.  The Trump party should refuse any attempt to settle the suit.  Instead, they should force the thing into court and through all appeals brought by the DNC, and they should use every hour of any time periods allowed to produce this or that document, brief, what-have-you for the court.  Use up the DNC’s money.

The other comment is more serious and more straightforward.  Discovery should be fun.  Let the Trump party have all of the DNC’s servers and contents for inspection pursuant to this suit so they can look for evidence of the interference.  Included in that discovery must be those DNC servers and contents that the DNC claims were hacked and which the DNC refused to allow the FBI to inspect at the time in the FBI’s search for evidence.  In addition to the servers and contents, the DNC should be required to provide all the steps it took to preserve that evidence from the time of the hack.

“Support the Troops”

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Maj ML Cavanaugh, Nonresident Fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute, had an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal demurring from Alphabet’s Google’s (a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet) employee’s objection to Alphabet’s working with DoD on a major artificial intelligence project: such work would “irreparably damage Google’s brand” they argue because military.  Cavanaugh suggested that, on the contrary, such mutual work was to the net good, falling behind our enemies on AI could well be fatal to us, DoD should work to expand Defense/tech company interaction, and so on.

Then he closed his piece with this hopeful claim.

Silicon Valley and the US military share compelling interests, and in the end they’re on the same side.

Are they on the same side? With Alphabet’s and Facebook’s repeated anti-democratic copying of personal information, coupled with their deliberately convoluted and incomplete instructions on how individuals can manage parts of their personal information, and now Alphabet’s apparent disdain for the US being able to defend itself, I’m not at all sure that’s accurate.  Especially with Alphabet having already signed a contract with the People’s Republic of China to work on…artificial intelligence.

A Judicial Miss

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Recall the Marquette University case wherein a graduate-student instructor, Cheryl Abbate, shut down debate on the subject of gay marriage, arguing that views that didn’t accept such things were “homophobic and unwelcome in her classroom.”  Tenured Political Science Professor John McAdams objected, in blunt terms, to the evident bigotry demonstrated by Abbate in a personal post on his personal blog.  Marquette disciplined him for disagreeing—that’s a violation of Marquette “speech” policy.  McAdams demurred and took Marquette to court.

Milwaukee County Circuit judge sided with the university. The judge, David Hansher, wrote that academic freedom “does not mean that a faculty member can harass, threaten, intimidate, ridicule, or impose his or her views on students.”

And yet, that’s exactly what the graduate-student instructor was doing. Hansher needed to pay actual attention to the facts of the matter.

Equal Protection Under Law

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Harmeet Dhillon, a trial lawyer and California Republican National Committeewoman, has a tweet up regarding equal protection, San Jose, CA, style:

From the 9th Circuit argument Monday morning in Hernandez v. San Jose—City attorney says SJPD should not be held responsible for forcing Trump supporters to walk through a violent mob, because attending a Trump rally is an inherently dangerous act! Did they ask for it?

Play the video, and listen especially to the exchange between the San Jose lawyer and the judge (you may have to crank up the volume to hear the judge).  San Jose is utterly disingenuous in this case.  Equal protection applies, in SJ, only to SJ-approved groups of people.

A Lesson About Discrimination

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A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about a teacher and a principal who taught a 1968 lesson about racial tolerance, using the equally arbritrary blue eyes-brown eyes discriminant as the teaching prop.

A Letter to the Editor response decried both the lesson and the pride in it that was conveyed in that article.

…one of the most disturbing and emotional things I had ever experienced. Teachers whom I once looked up to were subjecting me to irrational and arbitrary treatment based on my eye color. … My father … called my school’s leadership and received a complete apology.

How sad, that letter writer and his father missed the point of the lesson and missed precisely that “disturbing and emotional thing” that real victims of irrational and arbitrary treatment experience.

On the other hand, a commenter in the Letters thread asked this:

Does this same reasoning that this was child abuse apply to the teachers lecturing about “white privilege” and setting up situations to guilt trip children based on their skin color?

How sad, too, that that discrimination is actively practiced today.