A marxian law and policy podcast by the Nonplus Ultra Media Hegemony. First episode premier: Who knows? my friends call me J. you can call me Jason.
Oct 7, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I agree with condemning violence against Israeli civilians. But refusal to condemn the violent ethnic supremacy laws of the Israeli state toward arabs with the same (or stronger) geneaological ties to palestine as the Jewish diaspora have to Israel is racist.
I don't blame either palestinian civilians or native born israeli civilians for their bellicosities towards eachother. What's unconscionable are the way their leaders use those understandable fears as a way to maintain power. But what's even more unconscionable is for people who+
Jun 30, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
They will become less black & Latin only if the elite institutions continue to cater to wealth (as they have done while using racial diversity admissions policies to simulate diverse student bodies). There are all manner of socio-economic characteristics schools could select for
that would offset the racial disparity built into traditional elitist selection criteria. Among them are family composition, parents highest level of education, geography, whether applicants graduated from public or private secondary schools, grandparents & great grandparents...
Jun 12, 2023 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
There are a number of things about Dworkin & McKinnon’s Model Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance I find puzzling. In the past I've always chocked them up to Dworkin having no legal training so she didn't really have the experience to see the problems w/how its drafted. But...
the more I look at it, and reread Dworkin & MacKinnon’s 1988 defense of the ordinance after it was already dead in the water, us that there seems to be something INTENTIONALLY flawed in it. By that I mean that, aside from the outright misrepresentation of the findings in the...
Jun 12, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I just did a dive into Anglo-Norman Legal French to try to figure out why the ANF phrase “treinez, pendrez, [decollez], and quarterés” got adopted into Legal English vernacular as “Hanged, Drawn, & Quartered” rather than “Drawn, Hanged, [Beheaded], & Quartered.” the latter is...
the proper order, since “drawn” refers to the dragging of the condemned along the ground by a horse to the place of execution, where they are hanged not as a form of execution but as a form of torture. The actual execution is by beheading (which is specified in the 1397...
Jun 11, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
So I'm on my second listen to the @TIRShowOakland Patreon only podcast discussing the child accused of murdering another child in Maryland who prosecutors & various yellow journalists have fitted with an oversized Willie Horton Harlequin mask. @J_Myles_TIR talking about his
emotional turmoil, as a father, to his empathic reaction to the impossible confrontation of being a good parent to a child who has just self/inflicted the psychic wound of taking a life; well, I'll just say as an expectant father myself, it kicked me in the guts w/ even more...
Mar 31, 2023 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Lots of people with lots of opinions about a sealed indictment they haven't read based on evidence presented to grand jury they haven't heard charging him with a crime they don't know the elements of.
Here’s one:
People talk a lot about how the ideological center of SCOTUS has shifted to the extreme right. This is a facile trending toward vapid analysis that is both of the ideological misrepresentations of the federal judiciary by people seeking office in the political branches.
The Martin Quinn score for the median justice continues to hover in the same range it has since the beginning of Rehquists term in 1985 when liberal lions Marshall & Brennan were at their most radical. Justice Brown Jackson has already shown herself to be more liberal than...
Mar 29, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
BRKLN DSA pretend journalist Seth Ackerman thinks real journalism has been improved by social media.
Seth also gets paid by a supposedly socialist magazine that repeatedly calls for the legalization of commercial sexual exploitation & assigned the job... jacobin.com/2023/03/iraq-w…
of describing the post Sanders “future of socialism” to the scion of a payday lending empire who, by her own admission, didn't realize she was a socialist until after she had published her first book on politics.
I am grateful for Seth’s revisionist history of 2003 where
It is not GOOD ENOUGH to have a negative critique of capitalism, liberalism, neoliberalism, “reformism” (whatever that means to you), “revisionism” (likewise), populism, trade unionism, progressivism, or any other programmatic political constituency. ...
Mar 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I don't know why people take platypus affiliated society seriously. Spencer Leonard told @DougLain “arguably the police are unconstitutional” in the sublation parrot room today, demonstrating in capsule form that he has no qualms about talking out of his ass.
“The left is giving up on the gains of 1776” because of an Oliver Wendell Holmes opinion in 1919 that he largely repudiated and was overturned by bog standard liberals 55 years ago? The guy is just a fucking shitbird.
Mar 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
What’s interesting to me about this silly claim is that the statue in question is a marble copy of a lost-wax bronze original. You can tell from the fact that there are various compromises made by the carver to strengthen the protruding thin elements against breakage that were…
not a problem for the original, made out of a much stronger, less brittle material. For example, the left leg is braced against a tree stump that is added in a way that spoils the composition of the posture, but is necessary to help bear the greater weight of the solid marble.
1:17:30 in the @InfraHaz v. @BenBurgis debate something important comes up that’s worth being addressed by someone who actually knows what the fuck they’re talking about. And I apologize in advance for lack of clarity; I made up a drinking game where I drink every time Haz says--
something stupid. Naturally, an hour and 17 minutes in, I'm now well lubricated.
Anyway, Haz is trying to wriggle out of the the fact that Burgis caught him out stating that Biden had “made it illegal for the RR unions to strike.” Biden did nothing of the sort, not could he,--
Feb 9, 2023 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
Detwiller’s response is fairly reasonable, but even though he’s a whole shed full of tools, @RepMichaelDavis has brushed against an adjacent problem for some aspects of gender identity accommodation in US law.🧵
Davis’s “undue burden” language is bullshit, because it doesn't affect him at all what someone else has on their birth certificate. However, that doesn't mean he’s entirely incorrect with this line of thinking. As @TTExulansic has pointed out repeatedly & effectively, gender...
Feb 9, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Vegans will never successfully win over significant majorities with this arg. It is is deeply specious. As Jeff Winger pointed out in the first episode of community, humans can care about anything. That Isn't what gives them moral worth. The question of what we owe to non-...
human animals is difficult to parse because there is no widespread agreement about why we count anything as a moral reason. I have my own answers, obviously, but they are just my answers. I think they make sense, but I don't have a history of success at persuading other people..
Feb 7, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
So having read “On Gender-critical disputes” by @MForstater I am uncertain if Forstater read the same pamphlet as I did. Many of the critiques seem to be more interested in minimizing the presence of the misogynistic and patriarchal elements increasingly
link.medium.com/w4eYREBsexb
present in the GC sphere. But at the same time, it makes the traditional antifeminst claim that naturalizes patriarchy as cause by sex differences (rather than imposed on the basis of) sex differences. Which is precisely the sort of anti feminist message that @MForstater seems to
Jan 6, 2023 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
A thread providing a disordered syllabus of works making the point that This reviewer highlights awkwardly from Malik’s new book:/1
I’ve decided that I’m a Mr. Rogers communist. I believe that the neighborhood should be the basic unit of politics, government, & land management. Being neighborly is a perfectly workable starting point for building anything. Consider an archetypal perfect neighbor & i think you
also get basically the model citizen for a workable communist confederation: someone you know by name and know where they live. someone you share tools with and help out in a pinch, but you don’t directly support them. You put them up or watch their kids in an emergency.maybe
Dec 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So while i understand and am sympathetic to the Amber Heard partisans who want to take something positive out of her settling, there’s just no way to spin that as anything other than failure to prove her defense. Thing is, it’s possible for both her to have been telling
the truth right up to the moment she got on the stand and lied about donating their divorce settlement. But that’s what lost her the case. She lied under oath and so the jury didn’t believe anything else she said. I stand by my initial assessment that it’s impossible to tell what
Nov 28, 2022 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
A thread on how media portrayals of sex (porn) shapes developing brains. my sexual desires were altered irreversibly by precocious reading during my pubescent years. I came of age before the internet was the prime vector for pornography. For my generation, real pornography was /1
something you had to go to specialist shops for and if you were under 18 they remained inaccessible. I was always a kid who spent a lot of time at the library, though, and so when i developed normal adolescent curiosity about sex, my obvious solution to get answers w/o any /2
Nov 23, 2022 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Radfems have had this problem before. In the early 80s in the US, rather than uniting behind a concerted, broad based push to solidify reproductive rights and constitutional protections against sex-based discrimination with the ERA, radical feminists made a different choice.🧵
by the time i was on the scene as a disenchanted anarchist man in the late nineties, it was fait accompli. My generation had grown up associating feminism with the push to censor pornography and various histrionic things said by radfems about heterosexual sex. For young /2
