Over at Defector, Diana Moskovitz has two recent articles about Chad Wheeler almost beating Alleah Taylor to death. I feel really conflicted about writing this. I don’t want to excuse Wheeler’s violent assault and near homicide, nor ignore Taylor’s trauma. Domestic abuse is a huge problem in this country. But so is abominable mental healthcare. Wheeler does not belong in jail; he belongs in a compassionate and effective psychiatric treatment facility. (Compassionate because without that effective treatment is impossible). I suffer from severe depression and have lived at a treatment center for the past three and a half years. For all my struggles, I thank god that I don’t have bipolar disorder. Mania really is the opposite of depression. At my worst depths I truly believe that I am the worst human being to ever live. Worst than Hitler. People in the midst of mania believe the opposite. I have known enough of them to be pretty sure that Wheeler truly and utterly believed he was akin to Jesus Christ when he demanded Taylor kneel down before him. The sudden change from being a loving boyfriend to being a nightmare is so familiar. I’ve known people who have betrayed their…
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@ayjay wrote a strong piece challenging tensions within contemporary liberalism. I need to spend more time digesting it and the piece by John Gray that he links to. Here are some initial reactions though: Gray claims that liberal elites have run the West for the past 30 years. Yet, from the 80s onwards the US has been on a rightward march from the economic liberalism of the New Deal through the Great Society. Conservative thinkers and Republicans seem to have been setting the terms of the debate. The austerity in response to Great Recession had much more to do with conservative Austrian Economics than liberal Keynesian solutions. How much have the resulting economic shocks fueled the extreme left and right? Also, the Chicago School’s 90s shock therapy for Russia may have quite a bit to do with their illiberal turn. I guess the upshot of the above is a question about the relationship between economic beliefs and social beliefs. Has the move back towards conservative economics and greater income inequality affected the place of liberalism within society? Are conservative social beliefs connected to the conservative economic approach? And, if so, how does that relationship affect the liberal response to the…
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Today Dave Winer linked to his earlier post claiming there was a small justification for the internment camps at the border. I’m going to leave aside the argument that there can be a moral justification for imprisoning these children. If a law is fundamentally unjust and immoral, the duty of the law-abiding is civil disobedience, not acquiescence. So, for sake of argument, it is moral1 to imprison refugee children, either by separating them from their parents or with their parents for an indefinite length of time. To justify such a law, for legal asylum seekers who have committed a misdemeanor2, the policy would have to be both by far the most effective and least punitive. Oddly enough, Winer himself has linked to the evidence that interning asylum seekers and their children does not meet these standards. ICE used to have two less punitive and restrictive methods: the Intensive Supervision Alternative Program (ISAP) and the Family Case Management Program (FCMP). In the former, electronic ankle bracelets were used to track asylum seekers and 99.6% showed up for their court dates.3 Regular phone check-ins and unannounced visits were also part of the program. This is hardly “catch-and-release”. In the FCMP, social workers…
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Here are some things people can do to help fight what’s going on at the border. There are also rallies planned for June 30.
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Calling the atrocities un-American is important. We have dismally fail to live up to our ideals again and again. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and a rapist. But his words in the Declaration of Independence are America too. We have done terrible things. We have made a mockery of our rhetoric again and again. We have killed and tortured and raped and slaughtered. We must not let that happen again. We must rise to the challenge of our claim that all men people are created equal. Those who are torturing children do not own the flag. The true patriots are those protesting at the gates. Update 10-13-2018: Was looking back through the blog and noticed the gendered quotation.
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This isn’t the preeminent crisis at the moment, but I wrote a response on the urgency of carceral state reform and thought it worthy to post directly on my blog. The full conversation is here. You are right that we need to work on getting buy in from the rank and file. But even if you’re correct and the system only fails 20% of the time, that’s thousands of innocent people suffering. They shouldn’t have to wait for justice because it’s hard to get the rank and file on board. Also, there will be times when it is simply not possible to convince them. If we reduce the incarceration rate to triple the European average, the majority of prison guards will lose their jobs. They are going to fight hard as hell to keep their livelihood. Or an example from Pennsylvania: if a former prosecutor turned Republican State Senator, multiple rigorous studies, and participating in a five year commission couldn’t convince the DAs to accept reform, the hill is a pretty steep climb. How many people suffered unjustly while we were trying to persuade them? So, at the same time we work within the system, we must also, as Dr.…
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© ProPublica. Reposted under the Creative Commons Attributiom License.
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@dynamitemoth They have the best of intentions, but it’s within a very flawed system. The reason that plea deals are used so much is prosectorial discretion: they’ll threaten to charge with more serious counts adding up to an incredible amount of years. It then only makes sense not to risk a trial. It’s also hard to believe that 97% of all cases involve a guilty defendent; that would require nigh infallible police and prosecutors. Also, here’s an explanation of how a federal guilty plea works and the absurdity it can become. Prosecutors are also loathe1 to provide evidence of innocence. There’s a ton of pressure of prosecutors to win cases, so they’ll even block the release of clearly innocent people. Expert witnesses and forensic experts are often relied on again and again even without evidence that the science has any basis in fact. There are a ton of incentives for detectives to quickly close cases, so they often settle on the first or second suspect. Police are taught to be overly defensive and often escalate situations. Once a department gets a SWAT team, they find reasons to use it. Military supplies and civil forfeiture create perverse incentives to play with…
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I often put on this act of a fearless fighter when talking about the mistreatment of my people, but tonight I had a direct one-on-one conversation with someone who actively denies the humanity of Palestinians (one of the apparent majority) that resulted in me crying non-stop for thirty minutes straight. It had me wishing I wasn’t Palestinian because I wished I were part of a group that received some sort of empathy from fellow humans. The truth is that being Palestinian is one of the hardest things I will ever go through and that no matter how much hope I am given from peers and emerging humanitarian organizations (particularly American-Jewish ones), I will constantly live with the fear that our narrative will conclude the way the Native American one has now- with genocide of the majority of our people, theft of ALL of our land, and the complete dehumanization of our people in order to do it quickly. We’re on our way there and I don’t know how much more I can ask for help and allyship. If you somehow don’t condemn the current treatment of Palestinians, delete me from your friends list because we are not friends. My friends…
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