Category Archives: Social Commentary

CSI

is a fraud.

This is terrible. More thoughts from Instapundit:

When I was in college, I interned for a criminal defense attorney who told me that although most people, including defense lawyers, assumed that the FBI lab was a gold standard, he always sent stuff to an independent lab for verification, and half the time it came back with a different result from the FBI lab. He said he didn’t understand why more lawyers didn’t do that, since a different result in itself might produce reasonable doubt.

The amount of injustice in our “justice” system is increasingly disturbing. And there are rarely any consequences for it, except to those unjustly punished.

Gary Trudeau

Cathy Young punches up at him over freedom of expression:

Trudeau’s biases reflect a common left-wing mindset that sees the world through the lens of “privilege” and “oppression” based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and/or religion: non-privileged good, privileged bad (to paraphrase George Orwell). The result is a bizarre inverse caste system in which right and wrong depend almost entirely on the parties’ places in the hierarchy of oppressions — but only in the traditional Western social order.

From this perspective, because Muslims are a “non-privileged” group in the West, criticism of even the most militant forms of Islam is bigoted “hate speech.”

The Left is insane.

Obeying The Law

It starts at the top:

…for people to want to obey the law for reasons that go beyond avoiding punishment, several things have to be true. First, they must generally approve of the law: Maybe not of every individual provision, but they have to believe that, in general, the laws are just rather than unfair. Second, they have to feel reasonably confident that most others will obey the law, too: People like to feel like good citizens, but they don’t like to feel like suckers. Finally, they have to feel as if the people in charge also respect the law. Examples are set at the top, and if the government treats unwelcome laws as unworthy of respect, you can expect the populace to feel the same way.

Nonsense. Laws are for the little people.

California

…is so over:

…we are producing a California that is the polar opposite of Pat Brown’s creation. True, it has some virtues: greener, cleaner, and more “progressive” on social issues. But it’s also becoming increasingly feudal, defined by a super-affluent coastal class and an increasingly impoverished interior. As water prices rise, and farms and lawns are abandoned, there’s little thought about how to create a better future for the bulk of Californians. Like medieval peasants, millions of Californians have been force[d] to submit to the theology of our elected high priest and his acolytes, leaving behind any aspirations that the Golden State can work for them too.

I don’t know what it will take to break the back of this destructive aristocracy.

[Monday-morning update]

Jerry Brown’s Oedipal struggle.

[Bumped]