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Peter Arenella

@arenella1

31 May

For those Americans who lost family members fighting in WW2, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, this is a sacred day. My father was a Navy Lt. who commanded the landing craft used to storm beaches in WW2. He was badly wounded twice yet insisted on going back to his job.

2] I once asked him years ago why he kept returning to active service during the final days of the war against Japan: his answer "50-80% of the young soldiers in my landing crafts never made it to the shore. I needed to honor their sacrifice." Today, we have millions of our

3] citizens whining about mask mandates to protect the more vulnerable among us. And Flynn asking for another violent insurrection against our government. Before my father died from the collateral consequences of a bullet that damaged his lungs, he told me that he was disgusted

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Peter Arenella

@arenella1

25 May

The following might seem counter-intuitive given the understandable relief most Biden supporters feel[myself included] after he defeated Trump and did such an excellent job making vaccines available for all American adults. However, three critical post-election actions by the

2] Republican Party and its most rabid followers suggest that the risk of losing our democracy is even greater now than before Biden's victory. First, the violent premeditated insurrection was designed to postpone the electoral count in Congress so Trump could declare martial law

3] Put simply, it was the first step of a violent coup to keep Trump in office. So far, our Justice Department has not been able to hold the king-makers behind this plot to defeat the will of the electorate accountable. The second critical series of actions involved the passage

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Peter Arenella

@arenella1

18 Aug 20

1]My colleague and good friend Kim Crenshaw has written an important essay in the New Republic that I am hoping you will share with your followers. Here is her conclusion: "These facts point us toward a troubling but essential fact: that the behavior of police inthe United States

2]has hardly been about law enforcement; its instead been about the protection of a very particular status quo. And that status quo is tied directly to the maintenance of the inferior status of Black people. It is a calculated legal institutionalization of white dominance that's

3]been kept in place for all of American history" I witnessed this oppression as a young Public Defender when I defended my minority clients in court and interviewed them in our jails and prisons. I then taught criminal law courses for almost 30 years in some of this nation's

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Peter Arenella

@arenella1

16 Jul 20

My only son, now 35, was born with brain damage as he was an undiagnosed breach baby[ex insisted on a midwife who was "anti technology"] who suffered severe anoxia at birth causing mild retardation. By the time he was 11, he was diagnosed with severe bi polar manic depression. I

2] offer these facts o explain why a criminal law professor, would be motivated to develop an expertise in child development theory. I spent years reading the relevant literature as well as consulting with some terrific child psychiatrists and clinical psychologists at UCLA.

3] As a result of my new expertise, I started to research and write about sociopathy and moral psychopaths. This background helped me realize why Trump had no difficulty lying constantly and suffered no cognitive dissonance when he would say X on one day, and the opposite of X

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Peter Arenella

@arenella1

9 May 20

List of things Americans should be sad/angry about:

1] we are the richest nation in the world in terms of material resources/wealth yet one of five children in the US go bed hungry every night because they don't have enough food to eat.

2] We have lost over 70,000 human beings with the numbers of dead growing exponentially every day yet many of us feel angry about the necessity of social distancing and the consequent incursions on our freedom of movement; equating it with a loss of liberty that is not comparable

to the caging of children who had the bad luck to be born to poor parents fleeing their homeland for a better life. Ironically, many legal immigrants to our country are willing to ignore the plight of these children because they lack empathy for anyone outside their own family.

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Peter Arenella

@arenella1

18 Apr 20

Are there evil people or only evil acts? If the former category exists, what defines an evil person if one rejects a religious conception? The most evil people I have met in this life are those individuals born with significant mental ability [e.g. genetic moral luck] in

2] supportive families[environmental moral luck] who are hard wired to ignore social/moral norms unless compliance with them is in their self interest. They know what they are and are indifferent to the damage they cause others as they pursue their particular goals. These people

3] lack a basic attribute of humanity; the capacity for empathy. While psychiatry shuns conceptions of good and evil, it has a diagnostic category that covers this type of person: moral psychopaths who "suffer" from anti-social personality disorder. I put suffer in quotes because

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