71 Comments

Professor Loury, as a man deeply concerned about the fate of the victims of violent crime, you should at least confront this innocence fraudster Bazelon on her repeated re-victimization of those who have suffered at the hands of criminals. She is deeply connected with disgraceful scams like the "innocence" (wink wink) project, the Boudins and Krasners of the world, and the general scourge of letting violent monsters out on the street only to have them harm more innocent people.

Richard Glossip, who she references in your video, is guilty as ALL of the people for whom she advocates most likely are are.

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There are too many people in college who do not belong there. Too many black men are intellectually and socially ill equipped to succeed in college and far too many of them engage in unacceptable behavior toward women the same way white men do. At the same time there are too many women who cry rape at the drop of a hat because they are offended at something someone said or did. Victim culture started in the academy and has to end there. The entry requirements for college need to change starting with requiring anyone who wants to attend college to go to work for a few years to engage with the real world they will work in when they graduate. That will increase their level of maturity. Colleges should also check the criminal backgrounds of all applicants before they are admitted to ensure they do not admit people who pose a clear and present danger to anyone. And' finally, every applicant should be subject to a mental health exam to ensure that they can function competently and successfully in an academic environment. They also need to ensure that anyone accused of anything receive the chance to defend themselves fairly and properly. False accusations can lead to ruining people's lives and justice should be a top priority for all colleges.

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The problem is that most progressives could care less about Civil Liberties. The days of Civil Libertarians on the left are long gone. They have no use for freedom if it gets in the way of amassing power. The Democrats are no longer classical Liberals (Liberty, equality). They are Marxists. Your Liberties must give way to the will of the people. Equality (Equal opportunity) has given way to Equity (Communism or equal outcomes). Government must trample your freedoms and your rights to assure Equity.

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The notion that many of Trump's supporters would abandon him if the left began to champion individual rights is, in my view an odd one. Would I support a leftist if he/she/they/them/XYZ started supporting the 1st and 2nd amendment? I don't know. Would they also stop spending my money on abortion, student loans for diplomas in gender studies, and in attempts to make our military touchy feely? How about spending buckets of money defiling the landscape with useless wind turbines? Sure, if they abandoned their nonsense for traditional American freedoms, I'd give them a look.

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The censoring, anti-democratic democrat party progressives are morally depraved and are on a simple mission to pervert and destroy our civil liberties...like they pervert EVERYTHING they touch!

They want authoritarian rule, period.

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"She’s in the uncomfortable position of having to side against organizations like the ACLU and with Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos in their attempts to add protections for those accused of sexual assault to Title IX regulations. "

I'm uncomfortable with people being uncomfortable with siding with Orange Man when he is so obviously right.

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I had something happen a few years ago that changed how I thought about this. I was getting high with this older guy at my community college. I’m late 20s, he’s in his 50s and we’re surrounded by people aged 18-22, some younger, some older. He was telling me about hanging out with this young girl, and said he wanted to, “unleash the fangs, but that he didn’t.” He later approached me about finding this girl. I thought the whole thing was weird so I talked to the Title IX office. So a little later I’m hooking up with this girl from my class. We were friends, then suddenly more than friends, and the inevitable result of this was a good time that ended in drama. During the drama she tells me the sex wasn’t consensual. She tells me this while we were both working at the community college. The story ends with me spilling my guts to Title IX about some shit I did. The shoe can always be on the other foot.

https://youtu.be/7m1s2NFOGyg

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Your discussion pointed out a key bit of “hypocrisy’ in the way society deals with sexual intercourse. In victorian times, holding hands was considered “intimate” (in today’s religious Jewish world, it still is)…in the early part of the 20th century, “kissing” was considered intimate.

We would all agree that “forced anything” is over the bounds….if one of the parties says “no”…it means “no”. But what if one of the parties does NOT say “no”….then it is in the mind of the individual as to whether or not consent was given and even in the best of times, words spoken in the heat of passion are often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

In the religious-Jewish dating world, the expectation is that men and women do not touch one another before they are married - so if it happens it is clear that the touch-er is not playing by the rules.

In the secular world - there aren’t any rules other than if one of the parties says “no". Much of the difficulties in this area could be cleared up if two people could decide a-priori whether or not they were "hooking up", "going out together" or "dating-for-the-purposes-of-ultimate-possible-marriage".

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What is wrong with saying "sex"? Why is Glenn Loury being corrected for saying "sex" and not "gender" and why does he even thank his guest for the "correction"? Biological sex is real and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the word "sex".

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I appreciate Lara B. I first heard her chatting with the boys over at 5th Column. It's wonderful to see someone who identifies as a "progressive advocate" who simultaneously has some commonsense left. The problem with racializing everything, and skipping due process sometimes, and attempting to prevent speech when it's people whose opinions you don't like, is that it's fundamentally authoritarian. I am a free-thinker centrist Dem who voted for Biden, mainly as an anti-Trump vote. But it cracks me up how hard it seems to be for most progressives to grasp that Republicans are reacting to the Left's insanity. That doesn't justify the right. In my book both sides are nuts at this point. My point is that: If the Left keeps lying, and being censorious and anti-Democratic (the lefties loudly admit they think the Constituiton is racist and unnecessary) then of course the Right will keep reacting just as absurdely. It's a classic positive feedback loop. The adults have left the room and we've got anti-abortion and anti-election nuts on the right, and Lefties who insist that men can be pregant. C'mon.

Michael Mohr, "Sincere American Writing"

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

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It was way back in the 80s when I, then very liberal, began to encounter patient rights advocates in mental health. They had done many good things, and would continue to do good things. Yet I could easily detect that for many of the attorneys the facts of the case for a particular patient did not much matter. They were interested in the competition of kicking a big institution in the balls. They were in NH for a few years on their way to DC to do some bigger ball-kicking. But I knew the patients, and sometimes what they were fighting for was ruining their lives. These were people I knew. Because I had grown up around here, two were people I had known as children, now mentally ill.

I won't take away from them that they have done good things. But I think they are riding on that legacy now. I think the goal in the 21st C is to bring down the powerful to show how powerful you are. The ACLU is not about civil liberties so much as bringing down the powerful - or at least, certain ones of the powerful. The others they let alone. The shift has been subtle, and slow, and I don't think it is complete. But David Burge's formulation comes to mind:

1. Identify a respected institution

2. Kill it

3. Gut it

4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, demanding its respect.

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How does someone reason themselves into a position of "Trump is anathema to me" while also supporting the rules put in place during his administration? That's how arguments shift from principles to principals, with the latter far too often have outsized importance. When court rulings line up with Trump policies and the interview subject describes those outcomes as "common sense," then sorry, but Trump as anathema no longer applies. Beyond that, not every single issue in the country has to be considered through the prism of Orange McBadman.

It is almost stereotypical that the case she chose to participate in involved a black suspect and white accuser. Why that one? The point here is not race or gender; it's first having campus kangaroo courts attempt to adjudicate matters of law enforcement and criminal justice, and second, campus policies in which regret has become tantamount to rape. Sometimes, two drunken college students having sex is just that. When it's more than that, you call the cops.

Universities have become poisoned almost to the point of no redemption. It's sad. My father was an academic back in the day when professors taught the subjects in which they had knowledge. The student's job was to learn the material and the adults ran the campus. Today, a transient student community has been empowered to believe that it has run of the place and can have permanent staff members fired over specious complaints.

If progressives were that concerned about civil liberties, they'd be all over the campus scene defending professors and others who are attacked by petulant overgrown children, and they would have something to say about consent policies that attempt to govern relationships between students, and they would wonder how the faculty can tilt so far to one side. But they're not. If they were, then this case would not be the subject of an interview. It would not be the outlier that it is.

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Thank you Mister Humphries.

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Progressives and the ACLU favor due process and free speech when they are not in power. When they are in power they don’t.

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(I am trying to say that there was not enough of a civil liberties constituency for Trump to have to pay the slightest attention to them in anything that he did including nominating judges)

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I will be very cynical and say that the slice of the electorate that votes on civil liberties is just not big enough to swing national elections. In particular anyone who agreed with the ACLU on national security knew that Kavanaugh was completely unacceptable but you had to read things like Scotusblog or Lawfare to understand that. Abuse of the Title IX process feeds into broad narratives of group rights vs. individual rights.

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