Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

fair enough, i mean that is kinda a trademark of this whole thing right? an op-ed about an article about a title XII investigation about an op-ed about another investigation... it's the internet! everyone needs to have a take.

trust no one

https://itself.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/kids-these-days/

One almost begins to think that administrators are opportunistically deploying student complaints as weapons in their ongoing war against faculty job security, while taking an equally opportunistic approach to more serious accusations that could significantly damage the institution’s reputations.

that does seem to be an often unspoken aspect of all this--there's not much discussion about how larger institutional changes can be driving some of this stuff.

some background on vox if you were curious Important Corrections of Record

re above talk of alice goffman:

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/docs/goffman/A%20Reply%20to%20Professor%20Lubet.pdf

her response

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/docs/goffman/Alice%20Goffman%20Statement.pdf

and a statement of full support from her university re allegations of misconduct

First, let me say as plainly as possible: At no time did I intend to engage in any criminal conduct in the wake of Chuck's death.

i only drove around a guy who had a gun and the express purpose of killing another person, a person whom i also "wanted to die." i didn't intend anything criminal!

there should probably be a chilling effect on professors conspiring to commit murder

nah i think her statement is pretty good overall. i think there's some element of "ppl don't actually know what ethnography is" at work.

would also kinda not be surprised if someone in her situation consulted with a lawyer to make sure she was on solid ground claiming not to have any criminal intent! or we could just yknow do the usual

i mean Lubet is a Northwestern Law professor and longtime criminal defender himself; you're not going to do much better than him for an accurate analysis of law. but it's pretty irrelevant in this case because a first-year law student can tell you that driving a car with an attempted murderer with the purpose of helping him find his target is felony conspiracy.

I sent the relevant paragraphs from On the Run to four current or former prosecutors with experience in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Their unanimous opinion was that Goffman had committed a felony. A former prosecutor from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office was typical of the group. “She's flat out confessed to conspiring to commit murder and could be charged and convicted based on this account right now,” he said.

oh ok so we're doing the usual then.

in that case my question is he sent the query to "former prosecutors" so uh people who lean towards "we'll try to prosecute you for anything"

and also when he says "relevant paragraphs" did he perhaps omit some that would have cleared it up?

so long as we're just wildly speculating without knowledge anyway it seems clear she's describing emotional state which is clearly different from actual intent?

nah i think her statement is pretty good overall. i think there's some element of "ppl don't actually know what ethnography is" at work.

― got bent (mild cheezed off vibes) (s.clover), Monday, June 8, 2015 12:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

though it doesn't really come through in her statement i agree that this is the elephant in the room. i suppose some people would say that this is acceptable in the name of academic discovery but that strikes me as a really hard line view of 'academic freedom'.

the mens rea for conspiracy is meant whether or not you intended your action to further the criminal purpose. you only have to intend to do the action itself.

is met whether*

but the action is "being in a car" rite?

yes! it's a really broad doctrine that thousands of people are spending decades of their lives in prison because of

Intent is tricky. In the absence of a statement equivalent to "I intended to assist the would-be murderer in committing this crime", one can only infer intent from actions. Being in the car is incriminating and when viewed in isolation it strongly implies an intent to aid and abet. But she had a very complex backstory leading up to getting into the car, which could be used in her defense.

One night Mike thought he saw a 4th Street guy walk into a Chinese restaurant. He tucked his gun in his jeans, got out of the car, and hid in the adjacent alleyway. I waited in the car with the engine running, ready to speed off as soon as Mike ran back and got inside. But when the man came out with his food, Mike seemed to think this wasn’t the man he’d thought it was. He walked back to the car and we drove on.

During the period surrounding Chuck’s death, I started studying shootouts in earnest: how and when they happened and what the ongoing conflicts looked like over time. But I don’t believe that I got into the car with Mike because I wanted to learn firsthand about violence, or even because I wanted to prove myself loyal or brave. I got into the car because, like Mike and Reggie, I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.

right that's a better statement of the law than mine, sorry

xp

That quote's very self-incriminating. It specifically eliminates most of the motives that would exonerate her.

wanting somebody to die is a feeling.

i get it sometimes, i don't know about u

Her feelings of wanting someone to die spilled over into the action of getting into a car along with people who were lethally armed, whose stated purpose in driving that car was to find the person that she wanted to die and kill him. And she as much as says that her only motive for riding along was she wanted to see him die.

i've never done that. i don't know about u

tomato tomato

jesus christ sterling would you give anyone but a pretty left-wing sociology professor this kind of benefit of the doubt?

you're such a drip.

i mean had her companion killed someone she would have obviously been materially responsible for not only helping him find the deceased but helping the killer escape the scene of the crime.

my theory is that she's making it all up anyway.

which is why she's keeping silent.

honestly having read a significant chunk of her book a lot of it seems like poverty/violence porn to me. she went in (nominally) intending to write something about police abuse of underprivileged populations but (surprise surprise) ended up writing a study of habitual criminals. which is--or can be--valuable in itself but we shouldn't pretend that it isn't a distinct subgroup.

you're such a drip.

― he quipped with heat (amateurist), Monday, June 8, 2015 7:00 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's uncalled for

this is the _internet_, let's not be rude on it

that's uncalled for

I know what, let's kill him!

what is happening here

I'll drive.

honestly having read a significant chunk of her book a lot of it seems like poverty/violence porn to me. she went in (nominally) intending to write something about police abuse of underprivileged populations but (surprise surprise) ended up writing a study of habitual criminals.

Did you read the part of the book where she talked about other poor people in the same neighborhood who weren't involved with the justice system at all, and their strategies for maintaining that, or poor people who lived in nearby neighborhoods for whom staying out of the justice system wasn't even a very big challenge? It's one of the things her book is about.

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8753721/college-professor-fear

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122010/professors-do-live-fear-not-liberal-students

hadn't heard of the S.C. legislature's funding moves before

this basically gets it right. Hostile state legislatures defunding scientists who work on climate change, poverty, policing, etc. are a real-world threat to academics 100x that posed by humorless radical feminists policing our tweets

http://aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/

xpost -- yup!

deej that essay had me shifting from one foot to another ("come on it's a little rich to generalize about the crimes of the genre of conceptual poetry by choosing two recent terrible people who happen to write it") but then i got here

In the domain of fiction, for example, Dave Eggers’s second novel, You Should Know Our Velocity, centers on straight white men who feel an emptiness in their lives and try to find their social conscience in a foreign country. If this problem was autobiographical, Eggers solved it by situating his next two books around the traumas of men of color: Zeitoun, the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian man who survives Hurricane Katrina only to find himself mistakenly targeted by the War on Terror; and What Is the What, a novel told from the point of view of Valentino Achak Deng, a man who fled the Civil War in Sudan to find freedom in America. If Eggers’s first few novels are primary documents of white feelings of insufficient soul and excessive privilege, these next two books showed the elixir: for the white author to vanish and achieve derivative authenticity by telling stories through the mask of a traumatized person of color.

and my dissent basically evaporated

idk much about ConPo but it can't all be about stuff like this, right?

I guess maybe people find the whole enterprise gross, or pointless, or anti-art (this is the argument I see on FB about VP--someone calling her GOTW twitter "basic bitch poetry")

there's also printing out giant piles of garbage from the internet and putting it all in a bit stack in a museum

and a 200-page motion-by-motion description of goldsmith getting up to piss one day

lotta angles

gone on that wind

idk much about ConPo but it can't all be about stuff like this, right?

― Is It Any Wonder I'm Not the (President Keyes), Friday, June 12, 2015 1:54 PM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're right, it definitely isn't, that's what i was getting at.

I'm only part way through reading it ... really captivatingly well-written. I got to the Eliot part, which felt inevitable.

http://www.inkedmag.com/cant-get-fucking-neck-tattoo-jane-marie/

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/14/fearful-symmetry/

http://alicedreger.com/Hunt

so fuckin boss

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/15/suicide-dropped-sociology-exam-a-level