Terrorism Works

Hamilton Nolan

Terrorism persists because terrorism works. Terrorism works because we let it.

It takes a great deal of violence to wipe out an army. But it only takes a tiny bit of violence to instill a sense of fear in a population. Terrorism is not meant to conquer through force; it is meant to conquer through fear.

How did you feel when you heard that men with machine guns had murdered a dozen people at a French newspaper because they did not like its political content? Angry. Afraid. Those of us in the media felt these twin emotions most of all. "I am shaking with rage at the attack on Charlie Hebdo," wrote the New York Times' Roger Cohen. "It's an attack on the free world. The entire free world should respond, ruthlessly."


Rage and fear. These are the twin goals of terrorists. And terrorism is wonderfully effective at achieving these goals. All of our rhetoric about bravery and freedom and honor and Settled Determination to Push Forward After This Tragedy rarely adds up to anything more than rage and fear. Our responses to terrorism are based on rage and fear. Because of this, terrorism works.

The attacks of September 11 were a spectacular success. Is there any other honest interpretation? They were a success not because of the Americans they killed that day, but because we chose to spend the next decade mired in hopeless, counterproductive global wars that cost us trillions of dollars and killed thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Terrorists wanted to show the world that we were brutal and unjust, and we did our best to help them do that. Terrorists wanted a war, and we gave them one. And we lost. We lost by giving them the stupid, fearful, angry response that they wanted.

Two men with a rifle paralyze Washington, DC for weeks. Two men with a couple of homemade bombs paralyze Boston for days. One man on a plane with a dud bomb packed inside his boots has an entire nation taking off its shoes at the airport for years to come. A small group of religious zealots send three U.S. presidential administrations down a nightmarish rabbithole of drone war, torture, and total surveillance of the citizenry.

Terrorism works. Against us, terrorism works very, very well. Our collective insistence on treating terrorist acts as something categorically different than crime—as something harder to understand, something scarier, something perpetrated not by humans but by monsters—feeds the ultimate goals of terrorists. It makes us dumb. It makes us primitive. It is our boogeyman, and no amount of rational talk will drive it out of our minds.

Terrorists who despise freedom of speech shoot up a satirical magazine. How do we respond? We respond with fear, by censoring ourselves and refusing to show the very images that prompted the attack in the first place. (Nothing new about that—the free press has demonstrated its cowardice on this issue for years now.) We respond with rage, by condemning all of Islam and instinctively calling for a response violent enough to dwarf the violence of the initial attack. We cower in fear and cry for war. We countenance any countermeasure as long as it will keep us safe. We let the ideal we once proclaimed so strongly sink into a pool of terror, and drown.

Sound familiar? It is always the way. We are richer, and mightier, and far more deadly than any of our terrorist foes could dream of being. And yet we happily play into their hands. We declare a "War on Terror" of our own making, an absurd construct with no possible victory. We overreact so harshly to every injury that our reputation as bullies and savages is confirmed. We allow ourselves to be cowed by fear. We allow ourselves to be rendered senseless by rage. The terrorist lays the bait, and we give him the terror he seeks. The terrorist may be the criminal, but we are the hapless suckers who make his act worthwhile.

Terrorism works. But it does not have to. Terrorism reduces us to the sort of society that we claim to despise. But it does not have to. The ideals we espouse when times are calm—justice, understanding, rationality, proportionality, a love of peace—are the ones that we must cling to most tightly when things get scary. If we discard them, we have lost the game from the start.

We cannot control the terrorist. We can only control our response. Let that response be just, and wise, and proportional. Let that response embody the best of who we are, and not the worst. Terror is momentary. A loss of our ideals can last forever.

Where Did Colleges Go Wrong?

From 'puppy days' to trigger warnings, higher ed needs a course correction.

A few weeks ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and I coincidentally published separate articles in separate publications about distressing developments on college campuses, all reflecting deteriorating student mental health. I invited Jon, professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, to chat with me about our mutual concerns. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.


HEM: You coauthored a fabulous piece in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind (link is external), about how students are demanding protection from words and ideas that they don't like and why it's bad. I came into this arena with the groundbreaking article A Nation of Wimps in Psych Today in 2004 and have followed the growing psychological fragility of college students ever since, most recently this September with the article Crisis U. We both recognize that the critical thinking skills expected of education are the same habits of mind that are instilled by cognitive therapy and which help manage psychological distress. What does the huge rise of anxiety and depression on campuses tell us about what’s going on in college and maybe even the wider culture these days?

JH: Western society has transitioned from an honor culture to a dignity culture and now is shifting into a culture of victimhood. In the culture of honor, each person has to earn honor and, unable to tolerate a slight, takes action himself. The big advance in Western society was to let the law handle serious offenses and ignore the inevitable minor ones—what sociologists call the culture of dignity, which reigned in the 20th century. It allows diversity to flourish because different people can live near each other without killing each other. The past 20-30 years, however, has seen the rise of a victimhood culture, where you're hypersensitive to slights as in the honor culture, but you never take care of it yourself. You always appeal to a third party to punish for you. And here's the big concept—you become morally dependent. Young people are becoming morally dependent; they are also less able to solve problems on their own. An adult has always been there somewhere to protect them or punish for them. This attitude does not begin in college. Students have been raised to be morally dependent.

HEM: The shocking part is that colleges are abetting the infantilization of students. For example, they sponsor “puppy days” so that students can pet dogs to relieve the—oh horrors!—stress of exams. It sounds so innocuous but providing such Pooh Bear crib comforts is flat-out capitulation to weakness.

JH: There are three reasons why colleges are doing this. One is the increasing consumer mindset that sweeps through many institutions in market-based societies. There used to be different goods and virtues in institutions outside the market, such as the academy. The academy is now a market-based institution; you have to give the customer what he wants.

HEM: Do you feel that acutely as a professor?

JH: I don't have the trust and respect of my students as much as I did 20 years ago. On first meeting me, students address me using my first name rather than Professor, a sign of familiarity. A more important change is that universities live in terror of lawsuits and losing federal aid. The Obama administration's justice department very much buys into the victimhood culture—the idea that people are fragile and discrimination is so rampant and damaging that we must have zero tolerance toward it. What counts as sexual harassment no longer reflects what a reasonable person would agree is harassment. If any speech is unwelcome, a student can file charges, and every university must investigate the charge. All of us now live in fear that a single word, a single tweet, can suck us into a vortex of investigations and social media shame. Third is the sincere belief of the academic community in the culture of victimhood. Most professors are horrified by trigger warnings and microaggressions. But these things flourish in the identity studies departments, gender studies, race studies, and among any group charged with promoting diversity. These three forces are converging so that everybody's walking on eggshells, afraid of being sued or accused.

HEM: Is this happening across the board?

JH: It’s not yet happening at most big state schools. It's happening at most top schools that lean heavily left.

HEM: It’s happening at the University of Michigan, and that's a big state school.

JH: But that leans heavily left. So does Berkeley. It’s especially the smaller and very progressive liberal arts colleges, such as Wellesley, Vassar, Brandeis, Swarthmore—these schools are eating themselves up.

HEM: Are some first-tier schools literally making themselves into 10th-tier schools?

JH: No, because prestige follows its own logic. I'm hoping that as public disgust with the infantilizing schools rises, market forces will save us—enough parents will hesitate before applying to the crazy schools. Some schools will be able to differentiate themselves as havens of free inquiry. I have my hopes on the University of Chicago, which has issued a spectacular policy on freedom of speech, saying basically it is not the university’s job to take sides. Students can say whatever they want.

HEM: Among the disorders rising on college campuses is self-harm. Some people in charge believe it reflects acting out because students can’t articulate their distress. I reported that young people increasingly lack the ability to emotionally regulate themselves, yet they feel things intensely—beyond their ability to articulate. Earlier cohorts processed distress more internally. Acting out is truly regressive behavior. Are trigger warnings and safe havens preventing students from learning how to articulate their distress?

JH: A core idea is Nassim Taleb’s notion of anti-fragility: Certain things in this world are anti-fragile—they get tougher the more you bang them around. Bones are an example. If you protect your bones and don’t use them much, they’ll get so weak that they’ll break if you try walking. This is one of the biggest difficulties about sending humans to Mars. Children are anti-fragile, too. Throughout all of history, children have experienced setbacks, skinned knees, and fear. That’s how they expand their capacities. If we think of childhood as a long voyage, children now are like astronauts going to Mars. They spend years and years without gravity, so when they get to adulthood, they are fragile, rather than anti-fragile.

HEM: Because they’ve been deprived of the opportunities to get hurt. We’ve taken all the challenge out of it, in the mistaken assumption that our kids should be happy all the time. We see this world as dangerous, no longer as a welcoming place. Even the equipment in your kids’ playground is going to harm them. In A Nation of Wimps, I showed how taking all the lumps and bumps out of childhood creates psychological fragility. How did we get to the victim mindset a decade later? Is it just the trajectory of market-based societies?

JH: In part, yes. With rising prosperity, there’s a demographic transition. Families used to have many children, and they didn’t invest as much in each one. But as nations get wealthy and women get educated, birth rates plummet and each child is prized. This is happening all over the world.

HEM: Another thing that happens in the culture of affluence is that people overestimate the amount of control they have and feel compelled to exert control more, including over their kids. Do you think the University of Chicago’s declaration of free speech is enough to counter all of these really big forces?

JH: No. Until the federal government grants universities freedom from fear of lawsuits, not much can be done. But the problem is not exclusively with universities; it starts before students arrive on campus—in elementary school and at home.

HEM: One thing that has struck me is a huge judgmentalism among parents pushing them to overprotect their kids. Parents are afraid that if they don’t, they’ll be criticized by other parents or a neighbor. It’s a powerful moral force.

JH: That's what I hear, too. My kids are ages 5 and 9, so I’m in the middle of it. We need to have a moral countermovement. Psychologists could play a leading role in helping parents and schools think about what children really need, and how our well-intentioned efforts to protect are often counterproductive.

HEM: You said that the student concerns that lead them to condemn microaggressions or ask for trigger warnings keep them in a state of constant outrage. One thing we know is that crazy-seeming behavior tends to have a purpose. What is the value of staying in a state of outrage?

JH: Moral judgment is not about finding the truth; it is more about broadcasting the kind of person you are to people that you want to like you. You might call it moral posturing. Getting angry about microaggressions shows that you are championing victims. In a victimhood subculture, the only way to achieve status is to either be a victim or defend victims. It’s enfeebling. When victimhood becomes your identity you will be weak for the rest of your life. Marty Seligman has been talking about this for decades. This is a good way to make people learn helplessness.

HEM: For the past 13 years, since I began documenting the increasing psychological fragility of college students, I have been part of Bringing Theory to Practice (link is external), a largely academic group taking steps to counter high rates of distress by fostering academic and civic engagement on campuses. One thing they do is offer grants to schools to test innovative programs. What more can people be doing?

JH: We need to think about this on every level. Parents need to be encouraged to raise their kids with some independence and experiences that help them learn from setbacks. Kids need to learn how to address insults on their own. I would change the freshman reading list. If we really want students to learn how to get along with other people who hold diverse views, they should read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I would strongly discourage using first-year readings to focus on racism, sexism, and anticolonialism. A steady diet of such books draws students into the culture of victimhood and anger.

HEM: I like your idea of good old-fashioned debates. They force people to tolerate ideas they don't necessarily agree with and process a range of ways of thinking. I would arrange for every student to see the play Hamilton, or a film of it. A highlight of the drama is a debate between Jefferson and Hamilton articulating their radically differing views of human nature and government for the young country.

JH: There’s a basic tension between pursuing dynamism and decency. Societies differ on how much to focus on dynamism—encouraging innovation and creative destruction—and how much on decency, which means protecting people from the creative destruction, unemployment, and other problems of capitalism. This is the basis of the left/right divide over capitalism: The left usually focuses on decency, the right on dynamism. In talking to you, I'm suddenly realizing that we have the same issue in the college community. Focusing on decency—it’s called inclusivity—is valuable. But is that all we should do? Should we also focus on dynamism, encouraging students to think in new ways, to take risks, to say things that other people might not like?

HEM: One irony is that what universities think they’re doing, with the best of intentions, to make students feel included and safe doesn’t work and is in fact counterproductive. No one can cater to the range of sensitivities or experiences that make people feel discomfort sometimes. It's a sinkhole. Yale, to take one example, pays so much attention to the academic deficits of first-generation students that the kids wind up feeling they have no strengths. In fact they are often in better mental shape and have more resilience and coping skills just because they were not infantilized in childhood. Many endured serious hardships growing up.

JH: When I was growing up, multiculturalism was all the rage and you were supposed to learn about other cultures, and even wear clothing from other cultures. Today that's a microaggression: It’s called cultural appropriation. How are kids supposed to learn about other cultures if they can get their heads bitten off for saying a word in Spanish or for wearing and article of clothing associated with another culture?

HEM: Yes, experimentation is one of the great expressions of expanding minds. Switching topics slightly, the beauty of a program that inculcates good habits of mind, like CBT, is that it protects you whether stress is generated internally or externally. Without such mental skills, you perceive stress everywhere, which seems to be the case today among college students.

JH: Actual dangers and threats can be going down while anxiety and disability can be going up. People learn from feedback from experience, and a lot of that experience has to be negative. Fear and sadness and disappointment and frustration feel bad when they are happening but are essential for growth.

In China, Your Credit Score Is Now Affected By Your Political Opinions – And Your Friends’ Political Opinions

China just introduced a universal credit score, where everybody is measured as a number between 350 and 950. But this credit score isn’t just affected by how well you manage credit – it also reflects how well your political opinions are in line with Chinese official opinions, and whether your friends’ are, too.

In the West, the surveillance agencies have been trying to stay as low-key as possible, while listening to everything and anything. China has taken a different approach. Not only is the surveillance very overt, you are also constantly nudged to fall in line.

This Chinese credit score, which seemed innocent at first, was introduced this summer. More precisely, it was introduced by Alibaba and Tencent, China’s IT giants who run the Chinese equivalents of all social networks, and who therefore have any and all data about you. People can download an app named “Sesame Credit” from the Alibaba network, and the score has become something of a bragging contest, being interpreted as a kind of “citizen status” – and not entirely falsely so. Almost 100,000 people have posted their “status” online on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.


In the West, our credit score is simple. It’s our ability to pay. It’s measured from our assets, our income, and if we have bought on credit in the past and managed it well. That’s it. In China, the situation is… more nuanced. It’s not just that you have bought things, it’s also what you buy that contribute to your credit score, in either direction. If you’re buying things that the regime appreciates, like dishwashers and baby supplies, your credit score increases. If you’re buying videogames, your score takes a negative hit.

Anybody can check anybody’s credit score using the site Credit China, which again helps people disconnect from people who significantly draw down your own credit score: they’re listed as such. All 869,582 of them.

In theory, Sesame Credit (and its benefits) is optional. So far. For the time being. But China has already announced that it, or something very like it, will become mandatory from 2020. It has also announced that while there are benefits today for obedient people, it intends to add various sanctions for people who don’t behave, like limited Internet connectivity. Such people will also be barred from serving in certain high-status and influential positions, like government official, reporter, CEO, statistician, and similar.

Things that will make your score deteriorate include posting political opinions without prior permission, talking about or describing a different history than the official one, or even publishing accurate up-to-date news from the Shanghai stock market collapse (which was and is embarrassing to the Chinese regime).

But the kicker is that if any of your friends do this — publish opinions without prior permission, or report accurate but embarrassing news — your score will also deteriorate. And this will have a direct impact on your quality of life.

“Sesame Credit, however, also uses other data to calculate the scores, such as a person’s hobbies, interaction with friends, shopping habits and lifestyle.” — Quote from China Daily Asia

The KGB and the Stasi’s method of preventing dissent from taking hold was to plant so-called agents provocateurs in the general population, people who tried to make people agree with dissent, but who actually were after arresting them as soon as they agreed with such dissent. As a result, nobody would dare agree that the government did anything bad, and this was very effective in preventing any large-scale resistance from taking hold. The Chinese way here is much more subtle, but probably more effective still.

This scheme is far more sinister than it seems at first, as you’re also getting assorted immediate privileges based on this credit score:

If your credit score reaches 600, you have the privilege of an instant loan of about $800 without collateral when shopping online.

At a score of 650, you may rent a car without leaving a deposit.

At 700, you get access to a bureaucratic fast track to a Singapore travel permit.

And at 750, you get a similar fast track to a coveted Schengen visa.

There are many more examples – these are just to illustrate.

Do you see what’s happening here? This means that people need to choose between that coveted European vacation and keeping in touch with their old friends who are disagreeing with the regime’s opinions openly. This means that staying in touch with dissidents will cause you and your family to lose out on social benefits. As a result, this will very effectively isolate and neuter anybody who posts unofficial political opinions or unofficial history facts. They’ll effectively be sent into social exile, based on everything they do, write, think, and discuss online.

What China is doing here is selectively breeding its population to select against the trait of critical, independent thinking. This may not be the purpose, indeed I doubt it’s the primary purpose, but it’s nevertheless the effect of giving only obedient people the social ability to have children, not to mention successful children.

People sometimes mock the notion that we’re not at a 1984 level yet. I wonder what it’ll really take to make such people realize that the 1984 point of surveillance has long come and gone.

The elite don’t hand out resources like the rest of us

Those from premier schools take a very utilitarian approach.

by Roheeni Saxena

Economic inequality in the US has drawn attention to the attitudes and behaviors of the elite, as those who are educated in the top universities are both likely to start out wealthy and disproportionately likely to have an impact on the future of this country. To examine how this elite class would manage societal resources, the authors of a paper published in Science studied a group of Yale Law School students.

The findings indicate that they’re more likely to make economic choices based on increasing the overall wealth of the nation rather than on increasing income equality within a nation. Thus, there’s a chance we’re selecting policymakers who are unlikely to address this issue.

For the study, the researchers recruited a sample of 208 Yale Law School students as well as a diverse but “comparatively less elite” (in the authors’ words) sector of the population. The subjects were recruited in spring of 2007, 2010, and 2013—the gaps meant that each experiment would draw from a completely new Yale Law School student population.

The authors selected Yale Law School students as a proxy for social and political elites because of its status as a graduate institution. YLS admits only 11.3 percent of its college-educated applicants, and the student body tends to consist of people from relatively well-off households. Almost half the study participants reported having two parents with graduate degrees, and over half of the participants were raised in ZIP codes with an above-average household income. Typically, graduates of a law school of this caliber enter the job market earning $160,000 a year.

The law students were compared to an Internet sample of 309 adult Americans with a wide representation of demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic characteristics. The majority of these subjects had received less education than the law students. A second control groups included non-Yale elites, defined as participants from the Internet sample who had a graduate degree and household incomes over $100,000. The final control group was UC Berkeley undergraduates—a top university, but it draws students from more diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.

The participants played decision-based games in which each choice had a consequence for the participants themselves and an anonymous player. In these games, the subjects were playing for in-game wealth. Some options they were given promoted equality and consequently reduced the wealth disparity between themselves and other anonymous player. Others promoted efficiency and consequently increased the wealth of both players without rebalancing relative wealth.

The data from these experiments shows that the participants from Yale Law School were significantly more likely than any other group to select efficiency, electing to raise the overall wealth of all players, but they also disregarded the relative disparity that may exist between themselves and others. Elites who were not students at Yale Law School were slightly less fair-minded than the non-elite controls, but this difference was statistically insignificant.

It wasn’t just Yale, though; the students from UC Berkeley were more likely to select efficiency than the non-elite controls, but they were less likely than the Yale Law School students to do so. Of all populations studied, the non-elite controls were the most likely to make choices that would promote equality, decreasing the wealth disparity between themselves and the other player.

The authors think that these results are important because they offer potential insight as to why the US has only made incremental policy steps to reduce income inequality. The findings suggest that, perhaps due to their training or their disposition, the people most likely to end up making policy are less inclined than the general population to sacrifice efficiency for the sake of increased equality. This study adds a meaningful piece of data to the public discussion regarding income inequality and the factors that perpetuate it.

Zero Tolerance

Age-specific alcohol porohibition of persons under the age of 21 enjoys wide public support in the U. S., as does the policy of zero tolerance. Is zero tolerance effective? Are there beter alternatives? This short piece provides answers.

Zero Tolerance in Action

Prohibition for those under the age of 21 currently enjoys wide public support in the United States and is commonly imposed by school policy. For example, Carter Loar, a high school senior at Park View High School in Loudoun County, Virginia, was suspended ten days for violating the school's alcohol policy. Mr. Loar's violation? Using mouthwash on campus. School officials confiscated the contraband and "He was charged with violating the school's alcohol policy which prohibits the possession or use of alcohol on school property. As part of this ten day suspension, Mr. Loar was required to attend a three day Substance Abuse Program sponsored by Loudoun County."
Circumstances, including educational objectives, are irrelevant in judging behavior under a policy of zero tolerance. For example, during a three hour multi-course dinner in Paris as part of a field trip study of French culture, the 14 seventh and eighth grade students in the class were each permitted to sip a "thimbleful" of wine by the chaperon, their school principal. Many parents said they had signed tour company waivers allowing their young people to drink small amounts of beer or wine in supervised settings.
Nevertheless, the superintendent demoted the principal for violating the school's "zero tolerance" policy. Supporting this action was a parental advisor to the school who said, "They tasted wine. But it was not a wine tasting. They did not rinse and spit. They may have ingested alcohol." However, pressure from the students' parents led the superintendent to reinstate the principal after he wrote a contrite letter of self-criticism to the parents.
Not so lucky was Jennifer Coonce, an honor student who was barred from her high school for two months after she politely "took a sip from a glass of sangria as part of a toast" for a fellow employee. It was the student's first day as an intern at the company and she didn't want to cause a problem or embarrass the guest of honor by not participating in honoring the employee.
Because of her school's zero tolerance alcohol policy, Ms. Coonce was suspended for 10 days. Following her suspension, she was not allowed to return to school for two months. She had to take her classes at home over a speaker phone, but was unable to continue the honors courses she had been taking. Additionally, she was forbidden to participate in extracurricular activities and couldn't become a member of the National Honor Society.
These are harsh penalties for taking a celebratory sip of sangria off campus. More importantly, such extreme punishments adversely affect any student's chances for admission to an outstanding college, for receiving scholarships, and for subsequent success in life. However, the school defended its policy of rigid intolerance and insisted its actions were fair.
Not even totally abstaining can protect students from zero tolerance, as Mr. Loar discovered. Another abstainer who suffered was a 13- year-old student in Georgia, who was suspended for two weeks for merely giving his French teacher a gift-wrapped bottle of French wine!
Nor are adults free from the negative consequences of zero tolerance. Consuming a drink in a restaurant cost high school teacher Lori Gallagher her teaching and coaching career.
Ms. Gallagher was suspended from her job as an English teacher and swim coach at Greenwood (Indiana) High School for consuming alcohol at a team dinner after a swim meet.
School regulations don't specifically prohibit a teacher from consuming alcohol in the presence of students but include a vague prohibition against "improper conduct" with students.
The school clearly makes no distinction between the legal and responsible consumption of alcohol by an adult and alcohol abuse. Amazingly, the Teaachers Association agreed, asserting that "Clearly, a situation in which in which alcohol is in the presence of minors is inappropriate." Apparently, merely taking students to a restaurant at which alcohol is available is also unacceptable. The prohitition is extremely vague.
What does this temperance view accomplish? Instead of seeing adults consume alcool in a legal, responsible manner, the message is that alcohol is an exciting taboo that has only one purpose -- to get consumers drunk. What a lesson for a school to teach!

Zero Tolerance Results

These are a few of the many victims of "zero tolerance," which is now all the rage. But what messages does such a zealous pursuit of zero tolerance send our young people? One apparent message is that those who promote such misguided intolerance have lost touch with youth, another is that they are unrealistic and impractical, and another is that their alcohol education messages are not credible.
More important, what does zero tolerance accomplish? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that "zero tolerance" is an effective deterrent to alcohol abuse. It is no more successful than were the scare tactics of early drug education and is almost certainly counter-productive.
Alcohol is a part of Western society and the majority ofAmericans enjoy alcohol beverages. To pretend that young people will grow up to enter a world of abstinence is both unrealistic and irresponsible. Even religious groups strongly committed to abstinence are not very successful in maintaining it among their young people, the majority of whom drink. This is true even among students attending schools supported by abstinence religions. Why should we expect secular education to reach even that very low level of "success?" It can't, and , unfortunately, zero tolerance won't help.

What Really Works

On the other hand, many groups around the world have learned how to consume alcohol widely with almost no problems. Those groups familiar to most Americans include Italians, Jews, and Greeks. The success of such groups has three parts:

1. beliefs about the substance of alcohol
2. the act of drinking
3. education about drinking

In these successful groups, the substance of alcohol is seen as neutral. It is neither a terrible poison nor it a magic substance that can transform people into what they would like to be.
The act of drinking is seen as natural and normal. While there is little or no social pressure to drink, there is absolutely no tolerance of abusive drinking by anyone, anytime, under any circumstance.
Education about alcohol starts early and starts in the home. Young people are taught -- through their parents' good example and under their supervision -- that if they drink, they must do so moderately and responsibly.
In Europe, where the drinking age is generally 16, alcohol is served in some school cafeterias. In referring to the dinner in Paris, alcohol authority Dr. Dwight Heath of Brown University explained that "that is the best way for young people to learn about drinking. It deglamorizes it, it demystefies -- they are drinking in a responsible situation with adults, as an accompaniment to food."

What We Do in the U.S.

In spite of the fact that most Europeans promote responsibility and moderation by introducing alcohol to their children within the protective and supportive environment of the home, we ignore their successful example by denying children meaningful alcohol education in the false belief that young people can't handle alcohol. Our actions lead them to drink in uncontrolled environments, such as in cars, hanging around street corners with their friends, at unsupervised parties, and similar undesirable situations. These are the worst possible environments in which to learn appropriate drinking behaviors. When our unprepared young people subsequently fail to drink appropriately, we see that as "proof" that young people shouldn't drink. In this way, our society is creating the problems it fears.

Teaching Responsibility

But isn't it illegal for anyone under age 21 to drink? No, it isn't. In most states and communities, people of any age can drink for religious reasons, for health purposes, or under the direct supervision of their parents. And in at least 19 states, it is not specifically illegal for people under the age of 21 to drink. 8
Additionally, teaching responsibility toward alcohol doesn't require that young people consume alcohol any more than teaching them civics requires them to run for mayor or vote for president. We teach civics to prepare young people for civic responsibility when they become adults. If we drink sensibly, and think our children may choose to drink as adults, then we need to teach them responsibility, as well.

It's clear

We should have zero tolerance for "zero tolerance."

When You’re Calling Culture Content, You’re Reinforcing The Idea Of A Container

The metaphors we use determine how we see the world. When we're calling all stories, songs, news, gossip, and bedtime stories the bland "content", we reinforce that they're contained by something.

The copyright industry has consistently used the word “content” for anything creative.

Just like most other things the copyright industry does, there’s a thought behind the choice of wording – a choice they hope that other people will copy, because it reinforces their view of the world, or rather, what they would like the world to look like.

When we use certain words for metaphors, the words we use convey meaning of their own. This is why you see the pro-choice vs pro-life camps on opposite sides of the abortion debate: both camps want to portray the other camp as anti-choice and anti-life, respectively.

In the liberties debate and the culture debate, there’s nothing of the sort. The copyright industry has been allowed to establish the language completely on its own, and therefore, we’re using terms today that reinforce the idea and the notion that the copyright industry is good and that people who share are bad.

That’s insane.

Stop doing that.

Stop doing that right now.

Language matters.

You’re on the other side of the pro-life camp and you’re willingly calling yourself “anti-life”. How are you expecting to win anything from that position?

One thing you can stop saying immediately is “copyright”. Call it “the copyright monopoly”, for it is a monopoly, and that should be reinforced every time the abomination is mentioned. Also, use the term “the copyright industry” – as in manufacturing copyright monopolies and profiting off them – as often as possible. Never ever talk about “Intellectual Property”, except when describing why it’s bad to do so, as using that term reinforces the idea that ideas can not just be contained, but owned – something that’s blatantly false.

If you have to use the IP term, let it stand for Industrial Protectionism instead. That’s a much more correct description. Never ever ever use the word “property” when you’re referring to a monopoly. Doing so is so factually incorrect that courts have actually banned the copyright industry from using terms like “property” and “theft” – and yet, they keep doing so. Playing along with that game is stupid, dumb, and self-defeating.

Today, I’ll focus on the word “content”.

You’ll notice that the copyright industry uses this word consistently for everything. There’s a reason for that: If you have content, you must also have a container.

Do you need a container for a bedtime story? Do you need a container for a campfire song? Do you need a container for a train of thought? Do you need a container for cool cosplay ideas?

Of course you don’t. They’re ideas shared, songs sung, stories told. The idea that they must have a container – because they’re “content” – is so somebody can lock up those stories told and those songs sung, and so we can buy the container with the “content” we desire, instead of just singing the songs and telling the stories unfettered.

Compare the mental imagery evoked by these two sentences:

“We need to fill this website with content.”

“We need to fill this website with the stories of people in the area.”

One is locked up, controlled, locked down, devalued. The other is shared, cultural, told.

The word “content” means that there must also be a “container”, and that container is the copyright industry.

Don’t ever use the word “content”. It’s as improductive as describing yourself as “anti-life”. Talk about songs, articles, stories, and ideas. Doing so brings new life to the stories you tell.

Above all, be aware of terms that have been established by the adversary to the Internet, to liberty, and to culture – and refuse using them. The copyright industry is not your friend.

A post about this blog

Over the years I've been posting less and less here. The fact that the majority of this blog is about government malfeasance was getting me down. Most of the things with serious Positive implications for the future are about technology and this was never intended to be a technology blog, and so it isn't. The government side, however, is all negative and I just can't do it. If you want more information like what has been shared on this blog, a simple google search will turn up thousands of examples of how things are going wrong. I'd like to concentrate on what's going right. If you want to find me on Facebook, check out the groups Omni Junto and Just Trans-Humanism, depending on where your interest lie. I will continue to update this blog but it will be less frequent and less negative.

-Keisar

Dead enough

by Walter Glannon

To honour donors, we should harvest organs that have the best chance of helping others – before, not after, death


A previously healthy middle-aged man has suffered a massive stroke from a ruptured artery in his brain and fallen into a persistent, then permanent, coma.

Now imagine that before the stroke our hypothetical patient had expressed a wish to donate his organs after his death. If neurologists could determine that the patient had no chance of recovery, then would that patient really be harmed if transplant surgeons removed life-support, such as ventilators and feeding tubes, and took his organs, instead of waiting for death by natural means? Certainly, the organ recipient would gain: waiting too long before declaring a patient dead could allow the disease process to impair organ function by decreasing blood flow to them, making those organs unsuitable for transplant.

But I contend that the donor would gain too: by harvesting his organs when he can contribute most, we would have honoured his wish to save other lives. And chances are high that we would be taking nothing from him of value. This permanently comatose patient will never see, hear, feel or even perceive the world again whether we leave his organs to whither inside him or not.

Yet harvesting a patient’s organs while he is alive raises all kinds of ethical questions and triggers multiple alarms. The issue is especially complex because biomedicine, and the very definition of death and even consciousness, are all in flux.

Take our hypothetical patient, and the nature of the coma itself. A small number of patients emerge from comas after long periods of time, regaining full consciousness with many or most of their physical and mental functions intact. Far more never recover any degree of consciousness and eventually die.

And there are many states of consciousness and wellbeing between these two extremes. Patients can recover consciousness but find they are locked into paralysed bodies, unable to communicate. They might progress to a vegetative state with sleeping and waking cycles and periods of arousal but no awareness of themselves – or they might enter what doctors call a minimally conscious state, in which they have some degree of awareness but significant, often devastating, cognitive and physical impairment.

No matter where on the spectrum a patient falls, it might be impossible to predict the likelihood of death. The Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a haemorrhagic stroke in 2006. Although he had no chance of recovering consciousness, there was no specific point at which a neurologist could say that his death was imminent. He lived in a prolonged coma until his death in 2014.

To provide a path through the thicket, experts have introduced the so-called Dead-Donor Rule (DDR), which stipulates that donors must be dead before vital organs can be taken from their bodies for transplantation. The DDR is intended to protect severely ill patients from harm by ensuring that they are not killed for the sake of their organs, regardless of whether this action could save the lives of other patients in organ failure.

But what is death? It depends. In the United States, the DDR follows from the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which states that an individual is dead either after irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions (heart death), or after irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem (brain death). Heart death and brain death are not the same, but they are related because when the heart stops beating so does blood flow to the brain. Similarly, when brain processes stop, so do those of the heart.

In any event, the UDDA, today law in all 50 US states, has led to acceptance of whole-brain death as the ultimate criterion for death. Canada and all continental European countries have followed suit, while the United Kingdom and India define death as the permanent cessation of brainstem function alone. Israel and Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Japan, Australia and New Zealand also have adopted a whole-brain criterion of death, despite differences in tests used to determine it.

The upshot is that while the DDR has become the bar for organ transplantation everywhere, the definition of death continues to spark debate. Some question whether mere brain death is dead enough – for is not a beating heart a sign of life, too? Others say that brain death is too much to ask; a patient with only minimal brain function should be considered dead enough to donate organs, they contend.

Would it have been ethical to harvest Ariel Sharon’s heart and kidneys, in the years between his stroke in 2006 and his death in 2014?

Technology blurs the line further. For instance, mechanical ventilation can sustain blood circulation through the body and brain when vital organs can no longer do this on their own. Thus, the heart can be kept pumping artificially for days, months or years – even if the brain is devastated and will never function again.

It prompts the question: could we harvest organs prior to death of the brain? Would it have been ethical to harvest Ariel Sharon’s heart and kidneys, in the years between his stroke in 2006 and his death in 2014? Under the DDR in place in Israel, certainly not: in comatose patients such as Sharon, the brain functions at a level too low to sustain consciousness but enough to sustain breathing and other critical functions without mechanical support. In vegetative patients, the brain allows periods of wakefulness but no awareness of one’s self or surroundings. Yet artificial hydration and nutrition through feeding tubes are required to keep these patients alive. The brain here is alive, but barely. On the other hand, the organs can still be useful if they are perfused with blood and oxygen until the moment of harvest.

In light of all this, I suggest it is time to reconsider the constraints of the DDR, time to think about harvesting organs from some living patients – those who persistently fail to maintain consciousness before the brain is technically dead.

Taking organs before death already occurs on a small scale, when the procedure technically meets the requirements of the DDR. In a protocol developed by the transplant surgeon Paul Morrissey at Brown University in Rhode Island, for instance, kidneys can be taken from patients while they are alive because doing this does not cause brain death or heart death. Death is declared after the kidneys, and then life-support, are removed. This scheme applies only to kidneys, though, and is thus limited. More significantly, it reinforces the questionable claim that causing death by taking organs is always harmful to the patient and is thus morally impermissible.

But the DDR should be withdrawn in other patients, too. For instance, why apply the DDR to patients who are imminently dying? Even if conscious, such patients could be given analgesia or anaesthesia to prevent pain during organ procurement – and their organs could be put to good use.

We could also withdraw the DDR from patients who will live for years in a coma or a disordered conscious state. If a comatose patient lived for years without any capacity for consciousness, then it is difficult to understand how he would be harmed if his organs were taken from his body before a declaration of death. The same could be said about patients in a permanent vegetative state and those in a minimally conscious state with a poor prognosis.

Not so fast, you say? In some cases, a patient can emerge from a coma and regain consciousness. But this becomes less likely the longer the coma persists. And whether a patient is likely to remain in or emerge from a coma can be predicted through imaging scans showing structural and functional features of the patient’s brain. For vegetative and minimally conscious patients, the likelihood of significant improvement in physical and cognitive functions diminishes over time. The organs of those with little or no chance of improvement would better serve the body of a person who could live to the full.

In some circumstances, when donation is a high priority for an individual, we could even remove organs from those with full capacity for consciousness whose lives might go on and on in deep suffering and pain. Among the candidates include those with locked-in syndrome and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, where degenerating motor neurons render the person increasingly paralysed and unable to move.

In their discussion of allowing ALS patients to donate their organs before they die, published in The Atlantic in March 2015, the transplant surgeons Joshua Mezrich and Joseph Scalea of the University of Wisconsin claimed that ‘it may be time to redefine what we really mean by harm’. It might also be time to redefine when people are harmed.

We need to get over the idea that death always harms a person and, more controversially, that taking organs before, rather than after, declaring death always harms the donor. There have been no convincing arguments for the claim that patients with no chance of meaningful recovery from progressive neurological conditions who want to donate would be harmed by organ procurement causing their death. Current legal and medical systems deny them this opportunity and are unfair to donors and recipients alike. If patients make it clear before an injury or disease onset that they would not want to continue living in such a state; if they had indicated that they wanted to be organ donors; and if anaesthesia could prevent pain, then these patients too should be candidates for harvesting alive.

The bioethicists Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu at the University of Oxford have called transplant organ procurement before death ‘organ donation euthanasia’(ODE). ‘[W]hy should surgeons have to wait until the patient has died as a result of withdrawal of advanced life-support or even simple life-prolonging medical treatment?’ they wrote in Bioethics in 2012. ‘An alternative would be to anaesthetise the patient and remove organs, including heart and lungs. Brain death would follow removal of the heart ... If there were a careful and appropriate process for selection, no patient would die who would not otherwise have died.’


‘I can’t think of a better way to undermine public support for organ transplant medicine than to permit killing for organs’

Some might ask how such a position is any different from taking organs from political prisoners or criminal offenders, as practised in China and other countries. The difference is that prisoners have not consented to organ donation. Their organs have been conscripted against their will.

In the National Review Online in 2013, the US attorney Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, wrote: ‘I can’t think of a better way to undermine public support for organ transplant medicine than to permit killing for organs. Not only is this kind of advocacy foolhardy, but it would have the transplant community break solemn public policy promises made to gain support from a public wary of the entire enterprise.’

He has a point. Abandoning the DDR could create public distrust in the transplant system and cause some people to opt out of organ donation for fear that they would be treated instrumentally as nothing more than a source of transplantable organs and killed for them. This could reduce the number of organs available for transplantation.

As a result, more potential transplant recipients would be harmed by poor quality of life and premature mortality from organ failure without transplantation. So there might be consequential reasons for defending the DDR and waiting until after a declaration of death before taking a patient’s organs.

Nevertheless, abandoning the DDR would remove a huge obstacle to procurement of transplantable organs. Allowing procurement before a declaration of death would redefine harm and the practice of transplantation. It would also benefit many people who need organs by saving and improving the quality of their lives.

Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say: How the language police are perverting liberalism.

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the fuck up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs.

This might appear to be the sort of episode that would stoke the moral conscience of students on a progressive campus like Ann Arbor, and it was quickly agreed that an act of biased intimidation had taken place. But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim. His column, published in the school’s conservative newspaper, had spoofed the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus. Mahmood satirically pretended to denounce “a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man” who offered to help him up when he slipped, leading him to denounce “our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss.” The gentle tone of his mockery was closer to Charlie Brown than to Charlie Hebdo.

The Michigan Daily, where Mahmood also worked as a columnist and film critic, objected to the placement of his column in the conservative paper but hardly wanted his satirical column in its own pages. Mahmood later said that he was told by the editor that his column had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one Daily staffer felt threatened, and that he must write a letter of apology to the staff. When he refused, the Daily fired him, and the subsequent vandalism of his apartment served to confirm his status as thought-criminal.

The episode would not have shocked anybody familiar with the campus scene from two decades earlier. In 1992, an episode along somewhat analogous lines took place, also in Ann Arbor. In this case, the offending party was the feminist videographer Carol Jacobsen, who had produced an exhibition documenting the lives of sex workers. The exhibition’s subjects presented their profession as a form of self-empowerment, a position that ran headlong against the theories of Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor at the university who had gained national renown for her radical feminist critique of the First Amendment as a tool of male privilege. MacKinnon’s beliefs nestled closely with an academic movement that was then being described, by its advocates as well as its critics, as “political correctness.” Michigan had already responded to the demands of pro-p.c. activists by imposing a campuswide speech code purporting to restrict all manner of discriminatory speech, only for it to be struck down as a First Amendment violation in federal court.

In Ann Arbor, MacKinnon had attracted a loyal following of students, many of whom copied her method of argument. The pro-MacKinnon students, upset over the display of pornographic video clips, descended upon Jacobsen’s exhibit and confiscated a videotape. There were speakers visiting campus for a conference on prostitution, and the video posed “a threat to their safety,” the students insisted.

This was the same inversion of victim and victimizer at work last December. In both cases, the threat was deemed not the angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas, but the ideas themselves. The theory animating both attacks turns out to be a durable one, with deep roots in the political left.
Related Stories Secret Confessions of the Anti-Anti-P.C. Movement

The recent mass murder of the staff members of Charlie Hebdo in Paris was met with immediate and unreserved fury and grief across the full range of the American political system. But while outrage at the violent act briefly united our generally quarrelsome political culture, the quarreling quickly resumed over deeper fissures. Were the slain satirists martyrs at the hands of religious fanaticism, or bullying spokesmen of privilege? Can the offensiveness of an idea be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense? On Twitter, “Je Suis Charlie,” a slogan heralding free speech, was briefly one of the most popular news hashtags in history. But soon came the reactions (“Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie”) from those on the left accusing the newspaper of racism and those on the right identifying the cartoons as hate speech. Many media companies, including the New York Times, have declined to publish the cartoons the terrorists deemed offensive, a stance that has attracted strident criticism from some readers. These sudden, dramatic expressions of anguish against insensitivity and oversensitivity come at a moment when large segments of American culture have convulsed into censoriousness.

After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned. Some of its expressions have a familiar tint, like the protesting of even mildly controversial speakers on college campuses. You may remember when 6,000 people at the University of California–Berkeley signed a petition last year to stop a commencement address by Bill Maher, who has criticized Islam (along with nearly all the other major world religions). Or when protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of a commencement address by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, blaming the organization for “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Also last year, Rutgers protesters scared away Condoleezza Rice; others at Brandeis blocked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s-rights champion who is also a staunch critic of Islam; and those at Haverford successfully protested ­former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was disqualified by an episode in which the school’s police used force against Occupy protesters.

At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses. Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students. UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.” A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional.

Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma — or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy — merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration. “This is an environment of fear, believe it or not,” she told me by way of explaining her request for anonymity. It reminds her of the previous outbreak of political correctness — “Every other day I say to my friends, ‘How did we get back to 1991?’ ”

But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.” The stories ranged from uncomfortable (“No, where are you really from?”) to relatively innocuous (“ ‘Can you read this?’ He showed me a Japanese character on his phone”). BuzzFeed published part of her project, and it has since received more than 2 million views. This is not an anomaly.

In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” Rebecca Traister wrote recently in The New Republic.

Two and a half years ago, Hanna Rosin, a liberal journalist and longtime friend, wrote a book called The End of Men, which argued that a confluence of social and economic changes left women in a better position going forward than men, who were struggling to adapt to a new postindustrial order. Rosin, a self-identified feminist, has found herself unexpectedly assailed by feminist critics, who found her message of long-term female empowerment complacent and insufficiently concerned with the continuing reality of sexism. One Twitter hashtag, “#RIPpatriarchy,” became a label for critics to lampoon her thesis. Every new continuing demonstration of gender discrimination — a survey showing Americans still prefer male bosses; a person noticing a man on the subway occupying a seat and a half — would be tweeted out along with a mocking #RIPpatriarchy.

Her response since then has been to avoid committing a provocation, especially on Twitter. “If you tweet something straight­forwardly feminist, you immediately get a wave of love and favorites, but if you tweet something in a cranky feminist mode then the opposite happens,” she told me. “The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.” Social media, where swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant, paradoxically creates this feeling of isolation. “You do immediately get the sense that it’s one against millions, even though it’s not.” Subjects of these massed attacks often describe an impulse to withdraw.

Political correctness is a term whose meaning has been gradually diluted since it became a flashpoint 25 years ago. People use the phrase to describe politeness (perhaps to excess), or evasion of hard truths, or (as a term of abuse by conservatives) liberalism in general. The confusion has made it more attractive to liberals, who share the goal of combating race and gender bias.

But political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves.

I am white and male, a fact that is certainly worth bearing in mind. I was also a student at the University of Michigan during the Jacobsen incident, and was attacked for writing an article for the campus paper defending the exhibit. If you consider this background and demographic information the very essence of my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further. But this pointlessness is exactly the point: Political correctness makes debate irrelevant and frequently impossible.

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing. This has led to elaborate norms and terminology within certain communities on the left. For instance, “mansplaining,” a concept popularized in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, who described the tendency of men to patronizingly hold forth to women on subjects the woman knows better — in Solnit’s case, the man in question mansplained her own book to her. The fast popularization of the term speaks to how exasperating the phenomenon can be, and mansplaining has, at times, proved useful in identifying discrimination embedded in everyday rudeness. But it has now grown into an all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man. (MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry once disdainfully called White House press secretary Jay Carney’s defense of the relative pay of men and women in the administration “man­splaining,” even though the question he responded to was posed by a male.) Mansplaining has since given rise to “whitesplaining” and “straightsplaining.” The phrase “solidarity is for white women,” used in a popular hashtag, broadly signifies any criticism of white feminists by nonwhite ones.

If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called “tone policing.” If you are accused of bias, or “called out,” reflection and apology are the only acceptable response — to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of “ally,” however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed “safe.” The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible.

Nearly every time I have mentioned the subject of p.c. to a female writer I know, she has told me about Binders Full of Women Writers, an invitation-only Facebook group started last year for women authors. The name came from Mitt Romney’s awkwardly phrased debate boast that as Massachusetts governor he had solicited names of female candidates for high-level posts, and became a form of viral mockery. Binders was created to give women writers a “laid-back” and “no-pressure” environment for conversation and professional networking. It was an attempt to alleviate the systemic under­representation of women in just about every aspect of American journalism and literature, and many members initially greeted the group as a welcome and even exhilarating source of social comfort and professional opportunity. “Suddenly you had the most powerful women in journalism and media all on the same page,” one former member, a liberal journalist in her 30s, recalls.

Binders, however, soon found itself frequently distracted by bitter identity-­politics recriminations, endlessly litigating the fraught requirements of p.c. discourse. “This was the first time I had felt this new kind of militancy,” says the same member, who requested anonymity for fear that her opinions would make her employer uncomfortable. Another sent me excerpts of the types of discussions that can make the group a kind of virtual mental prison.

On July 10, for instance, one member in Los Angeles started a conversation urging all participants to practice higher levels of racial awareness. “Without calling anyone out specifically, I’m going to note that if you’re discussing a contentious thread, and shooting the breeze … take a look at the faces in the user icons in that discussion,” she wrote. “Binders is pretty diverse, but if you’re not seeing many WOC/non-binary POC in your discussion, it’s quite possible that there are problematic assumptions being stated without being challenged.” (“POC” stands for “people of color.” “WOC” means “women of color.” “Non-binary” describes people who are either transgender or identify as a gender other than traditionally male or female.)

Two members responded lightly, one suggesting that such “call-outs” be addressed in private conversation and another joking that she was a “gluten free Jewish WWC” — or Woman Without Color. This set off more jokes and a vicious backlash. “It seems appropriate to hijack my suggestion with jokes. I see,” the Los Angeles member replied. “Apparently whatever WOC have to say is good for snark and jokes,” wrote another. Others continued: “The level of belittling, derailing, crappy jokes, and all around insensitivity here is astounding and also makes me feel very unsafe in this Big Binder.” “It is literally fucking insane. I am appalled and embarrassed.”

The suggestion that a call-out be communicated privately met with even deeper rage. A poet in Texas: “I’m not about to private message folks who have problematic racist, transphobic, anti-immigrant, and/or sexist language.” The L.A. member: “Because when POC speak on these conversations with snark and upset, we get Tone Argumented at, and I don’t really want to deal with the potential harm to me and mine.” Another writer: “You see people suggesting that PMs are a better way to handle racism? That’s telling us we are too vocal and we should pipe down.” A white Toronto member, sensing the group had dramatically underreacted, moved to rectify the situation: “JESUS FUCK, LIKE SERIOUSLY FUCK, I SEE MORE WHITE BINDERS POLICING WOC AND DEMANDING TO BE EDUCATED/UNEDUCATED AS IF IT’S A FUCKING NOBLE MISSION RATHER THAN I DUNNO SPEND TIME SHUTTING DOWN AND SHITTING ON RACIST DOUCHE CANOE BEHAVIOUR; WHAT ARE YOU GAINING BY THIS? WHAT ARE YOU DETRACTING? YOU NEED SCREENCAPS OF BURNING CROSSES TO BELIEVE RACIST SHIT IS HAPPENING? THIS THREAD IS PAINFUL. HUGS TO ALL THE WOC DURING THIS THREAD”

Every free society, facing the challenge of balancing freedom of expression against other values such as societal cohesion and tolerance, creates its own imperfect solution. France’s is especially convoluted and difficult to parse: It allows for satire and even blasphemy (like cartoons that run in Charlie Hebdo) but not for speech that incites violence toward individuals (like provocative comments made by the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala). This may appear to Americans as a distinction without a difference, but our distinctions are also confused, as is our way of talking about free speech as it overlaps with our politics.

The right wing in the United States is unusually strong compared with other industrialized democracies, and it has spent two generations turning liberal into a feared buzzword with radical connotations. This long propaganda campaign has implanted the misperception — not only among conservatives but even many liberals — that liberals and “the left” stand for the same things.

It is true that liberals and leftists both want to make society more economically and socially egalitarian. But liberals still hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of a kind of free political marketplace. (So, for that matter, do most conservatives.)

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

Political correctness appeals to liberals because it claims to represent a more authentic and strident opposition to their shared enemy of race and gender bias. And of course liberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz, recently wrote an essay commemorating the Berkeley Free Speech movement, in which she participated as a student in 1964. She now expressed a newfound skepticism in the merits of free speech. “Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social cartography,” she wrote. “We [Free Speech movement] veterans … were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.”

These ideas have more than theoretical power. Last March at University of ­California–Santa Barbara, in, ironically, a “free-speech zone,” a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and her 21-year-old sister Joan displayed a sign arrayed with graphic images of aborted fetuses. They caught the attention of Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies. Miller-Young, angered by the sign, demanded that they take it down. When they refused, Miller-Young snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters on the way.

Speaking to police after the altercation, Miller-Young told them that the images of the fetuses had “triggered” her and violated her “personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” A Facebook group called “UCSB Microaggressions” declared themselves “in solidarity” with Miller-Young and urged the campus “to provide as much support as possible.”

By the prevailing standards of the American criminal-justice system, Miller-Young had engaged in vandalism, battery, and robbery. By the logic of the p.c. movement, she was the victim of a trigger and had acted in the righteous cause of social justice. Her colleagues across the country wrote letters to the sentencing judge pleading for leniency. Jennifer Morgan, an NYU professor, blamed the anti-­abortion protesters for instigating the confrontation through their exercise of free speech. “Miller-Young’s actions should be mitigated both by her history as an educator as well as by her conviction that the [anti-abortion] images were an assault on her students,” Morgan wrote. Again, the mere expression of opposing ideas, in the form of a poster, is presented as a threatening act.

The website The Feminist Wire mounted an even more rousing defense of Miller-Young’s behavior. The whole idea that the professor committed a crime by stealing a sign and shoving away its owner turns out to be an ideological construct. “The ease with which privileged white, and particularly young white gender and sexually normative appearing women, make claims to ‘victimhood’ and ‘violation of property,’ is not a neutral move,” its authors argued. It concluded, “We issue a radical call for accountability to questions of history, representation, and the racialized gendering of tropes of ‘culpability’ and ‘innocence’ when considering Dr. Miller-Young’s case.”

These are extreme ideas, but they are neither isolated nor marginal. A widely cited column by a Harvard Crimson editorial writer last year demanded an end to academic freedom if freedom extended to objectionable ideas. “If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism,” asked the author, “why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom’?” After the Nation’s Michelle Goldberg denounced a “growing left-wing tendency toward censoriousness and hair-trigger offense,” Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper replied in Salon: “The demand to be reasonable is a disingenuous demand. Black folks have been reasoning with white people forever. Racism is unreasonable, and that means reason has limited currency in the fight against it.”

The most probable cause of death of the first political-correctness movement was the 1992 presidential election. That event mobilized left-of-center politics around national issues like health care and the economy, and away from the introspective suppression of dissent within the academy. Bill Clinton’s campaign frontally attacked left-wing racial politics, famously using inflammatory comments by Sister Souljah to distance him from Jesse Jackson. Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from a southern state elected to the House of Representatives, attacked political correctness in her keynote speech. (“We honor cultural identity. We always have; we always will. But separatism is not allowed. Separatism is not the American way. We must not allow ideas like political correctness to divide us and cause us to reverse hard-won achievements in human rights and civil rights.”)

Yet it is possible to imagine that, as the next Clinton presidential campaign gets under way, p.c. culture may not dissolve so easily. The internet has shrunk the distance between p.c. culture and mainstream liberal politics, and the two are now hopelessly entangled. During the 2008 primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the modern politics of grievance had already begun to play out, as each side’s supporters patrolled the other for any comment that might indicate gender or racial bias. It dissipated in the general election, but that was partly because Obama’s supporters worried about whether America really was ready to accept its first president who was not a white male. Clinton enters the 2016 race in a much stronger position than any other candidate, and her supporters may find it irresistible to amplify p.c. culture’s habit of interrogating the hidden gender biases in every word and gesture against their side.

Or maybe not. The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America. The movement’s dour puritanism can move people to outrage, but it may prove ill suited to the hopeful mood required of mass politics. Nor does it bode well for the movement’s longevity that many of its allies are worn out. “It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing,” confessed the progressive writer Freddie deBoer. “There are so many ways to step on a land mine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks.” Goldberg wrote recently about people “who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in [online feminism] — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.” Former Feministing editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay told her, “Everyone is so scared to speak right now.”

That the new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence is a triumph, but one of limited use. Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.

Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money

byAimee Groth

We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business schools are choosing startup life over Wall Street.

But what often gets lost in these conversations is that the most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability. While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks.

And this is a key advantage: When basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative; when you know you have a safety net, you are more willing to take risks. “Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” University of Warwick professor Andrew Oswald tells Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”

University of California, Berkeley economists Ross Levine and Rona Rubenstein analyzed the shared traits of entrepreneurs in a 2013 paper, and found that most were white, male, and highly educated. “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” Levine tells Quartz.

New research out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research (paywall) looked at risk-taking in the stock market and found that environmental factors (not genetic) most influenced behavior, pointing to the fact that risk tolerance is conditioned over time (dispelling the myth of an elusive “entrepreneurship gene“).

Resilience is undoubtably a necessary trait for success; many notable entrepreneurs experienced success only after leading failed ventures. But the barrier to entry is very high.

For creative professions, starting a new venture is the ultimate privilege. Many startup founders do not take a salary for some time. The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

“Following your dreams is dangerous,” a 31-year-old woman who runs in social entrepreneurship circles in New York, and asked not to be named, told Quartz. “This whole bulk of the population is being seduced into thinking that they can just go out and pursue their dream anytime, but it’s not true.” So while yes, there’s certainly a lot of hard work that goes into building something, there’s also a lot of privilege involved—a factor that is often underestimated.

Judge Kozinski: There's Very Little Justice In Our So-Called 'Justice System'

Judge Alex Kozinski has long been one of the few judges willing to speak up against our nation's thoroughly corrupted justice system. It's not the normal form of corruption, where juries and judges are openly bought and sold. It's corrupted, as in bastardized. Or debased. What was set up to provide citizens with a fighting chance against accusations brought by those with vastly more power has instead become exactly the sort of system these checks and balances were meant to prevent. In many cases, prosecutions more resemble railroading than actual due process.

A few years back, Kozinski pointed out one of these contributing factors to this corruption: the deliberate withholding of exonerating evidence from defense lawyers.

There is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land. Only judges can put a stop to it.

This is the damning opening sentence of his dissent in a case where the government pursued a "thoughtcrime" prosecution. At the center of it were Google searches the government claimed supported its accusations that the accused had intended to use the ricin he'd developed in his lab as a biological weapon. Along the way, actual physical evidence was mishandled by investigators, leading to an investigation of the police lab -- an investigation that was never disclosed to the defense team. But the panel let the prosecution walk away from its misdeeds and Kozinski called them out for it.

The panel’s ruling is not just wrong, it is dangerously broad, carrying far-reaching implications for the administration of criminal justice. It effectively announces that the prosecution need not produce exculpatory or impeaching evidence so long as it’s possible the defendant would’ve been convicted anyway. This will send a clear signal to prosecutors that, when a case is close, it’s best to hide evidence helpful to the defense, as there will be a fair chance reviewing courts will look the other way, as happened here. A robust and rigorously enforced Brady rule is imperative because all the incentives prosecutors confront encourage them not to discover or disclose exculpatory evidence.

Due to the nature of a Brady violation, it’s highly unlikely wrongdoing will ever come to light in the first place. This creates a serious moral hazard for those prosecutors who are more interested in winning a conviction than serving justice. In the rare event that the suppressed evidence does surface, the consequences usually leave the prosecution no worse than had it complied with Brady from the outset.

Professional discipline is rare, and violations seldom give rise to liability for money damages. Criminal liability for causing an innocent man to lose decades of his life behind bars is practically unheard of. If the violation is found to be material (a standard that will almost never be met under the panel’s construction), the prosecution gets a do-over, making it no worse off than if it had disclosed the evidence in the first place.

He has now published a new paper that attacks the weaknesses of the system, point-by-point, starting off with a harrowing opening paragraph:

Though we pretend otherwise, much of what we do in the law is guesswork. For example, we like to boast that our criminal justice system is heavily tilted in favor of criminal defendants because we’d rather that ten guilty men go free than an innocent man be convicted. There is reason to doubt it, because very few criminal defendants actually go free after trial. Does this mean that many guilty men are never charged because the prosecution is daunted by its heavy burden of proof? Or is it because jurors almost always start with a strong presumption that someone wouldn’t be charged with a crime unless the police and the prosecutor were firmly convinced of his guilt? We tell ourselves and the public that it’s the former and not the latter, but we have no way of knowing. They say that any prosecutor worth his salt can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. It may be that a decent prosecutor could get a petit jury to convict a eunuch of rape.

Kozinski points to several false assumptions jurors (and judges) make -- unfounded beliefs that have been encouraged over the years by law enforcement and prosecutors.

The government tells us that eyewitnesses (at least, its eyewitnesses) are reliable. Any person with two eyes who can "corroborate" the prosecution's narrative is treated as somewhere between George Washington and Jesus Christ in terms of reliability and honesty. (This deference suddenly disappears when the defense introduces its eyewitnesses. This hypocrisy extends to confidential informants -- criminals whose honesty is always questioned by law enforcement unless their statements help them advance their investigations, in which case they're suddenly upstanding citizens wholly unmotivated by the desire to remain unincarcerated.)

This belief is so much part of our culture that one often hears talk of a “mere” circumstantial case as contrasted to a solid case based on eyewitness testimony. In fact, research shows that eyewitness identifications are highly unreliable, especially where the witness and the perpetrator are of different races… In fact, mistaken eyewitness testimony was a factor in more than a third of wrongful conviction cases… Few, if any, courts instruct juries on the pitfalls of eyewitness identification or caution them to be skeptical of eyewitness testimony.

Other long-held assumptions are equally questionable. Every juror who has ever watched a TV crime procedural is having his or her head filled with questionable assertions about the trustworthiness of certain forms of evidence. This would be fine if it were limited to fictional representations of police work. But it isn't. Prosecutors and courts remain equally credulous of this evidence, even after multiple issues with both have proven them more fallible than they're portrayed.

Identifying fingerprints taken in controlled situations (i.e., bookings) can provide fairly decent ID matches. But those recovered in the field -- latent prints found at crime scenes -- are far less accurate. The same goes for DNA. While it can provide very close matches in controlled situations, most DNA evidence is recovered in less-than-ideal circumstances, and is far too often subject to speculative conclusions that are often guided by what investigators want to find, rather than what they've actually found. Just because a method is "scientific" doesn't mean it isn't subject to bias.

DNA comparison, when properly conducted by an honest, trained professional will invariably reach the correct result. But the integrity of the result depends on a variety of factors that are, unfortunately, not nearly so foolproof: the evidence must be gathered and preserved so as to avoid contamination; the testing itself must be conducted so that the two samples being compared do not contaminate each other; the examiner must be competent and honest. As numerous scandals involving DNA testing labs have shown, these conditions cannot be taken for granted, and DNA evidence is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.

The same goes for almost every piece of forensic evidence the public and the courts have long accepted as being near-infallible.

Spectrographic voice identification error rates are as high as 63%, depending on the type of voice sample tested. Handwriting error rates average around 40% and sometimes approach 100%. False-positive error rates for bite marks run as high as 64%. Those for microscopic hair comparisons are about 12% (using results of mitochondrial DNA testing as the criterion).

Far too often, these forensic methods are treated as incorruptible science when they're actually far from it.

Some fields of forensic expertise are built on nothing but guesswork and false common sense. Many defendants have been convicted and spent countless years in prison based on evidence by arson experts who were later shown to be little better than witch doctors. Cameron Todd Willingham may have lost his life over it.

And so it goes. A calamity of errors. A full-blown catastrophe masquerading as an equitable system. Human memories are particularly fallible but human testimony under oath is considered sacrosanct. Judges act as though juries are decent human beings who will follow specific instructions, rather than act like ordinary human beings and act on their preconceptions and biases instead. Prosecutors will supposedly follow the rules, even though they're working from a supposed disadvantage (the presumption of innocence), rather than do whatever they can to rack up another "win."

And the "presumption of innocence" is a joke. Far too many people still believe an indictment is an indicator of guilt. Defense lawyers are actually the ones working uphill, because the presumption of innocence is the ideal, rather than the baseline. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't much of a hurdle when jurors (and even some judges) view the accused as guilty before anyone even starts presenting evidence.

Human minds are terrible things and yet the justice system continues to operate on the fallacy that they're efficient machines capable of determining innocence or guilt. Kozinski points out that something as far removed from the verdict as the opening statement can influence the entire trial.

Even more troubling are doubts raised by psychological research showing that “whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later.” The tendency is more pronounced for older people than for younger ones, and increases the longer the time-lapse between assertion and denial. So is it better to stand mute rather than deny an accusation? Apparently not, because “when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true.”

To the extent this psychological research is applicable to trials, it tends to refute the notion that the prosecution pulls the heavy oar in criminal cases. We believe that it does because we assume juries go about deciding cases by accurately remembering all the testimony and weighing each piece of evidence in a linear fashion, selecting which to believe based on assessment of its credibility or plausibility. The reality may be quite different. It may be that jurors start forming a mental picture of the events in question as soon as they first hear about them from the prosecution witnesses. Later-introduced evidence, even if pointing in the opposite direction, may not be capable of fundamentally altering that picture and may, in fact, reinforce it. And the effect may be worse the longer the prosecution’s case lasts and, thus, the longer it takes to bring the contrary evidence before the jury.

Trials in general, and longer trials in particular, may be heavily loaded in favor of whichever party gets to present its case first—the prosecution in a criminal case and the plaintiff in a civil case. If this is so, it substantially undermines the notion that we seldom convict an innocent man because guilt must be proven to a sufficient certainty.

So, the system is broken. And there is no easy remedy. The problem can only be made worse, if the system continues to operate as it has been. And every "tough on crime" initiative only adds to the flaws. Take mandatory sentencing, for example. What is meant to curb future criminal activity has really only insured that the government can wrongfully imprison innocent people for longer periods of time. Every exoneration stemming from these multiple systemic flaws is treated dismissively as some sort of fluke. Even as more evidence mounts that the system is openly abused, the level of credulity granted the abusers has remained relatively steady. And if you're wrongfully imprisoned, you're pretty much screwed. The logistical and legal obstacles standing between you and a reexamination of your case are close to insurmountable.

To begin with, they are in prison and thus unable to pursue leads the police might have missed; they have to rely on someone on the outside to do it, and that’s often difficult or impossible to accomplish. A prisoner’s access even to his counsel is severely restricted once he’s incarcerated. A loyal friend or relative might do it, but friends and even relatives often abandon defendants who are convicted, no matter how much they may protest their innocence. A few prisoners may obtain the help of an innocence project, but the work is labor-intensive, resources are scarce and manpower is limited, so innocence projects engage in triage, focusing on the most promising cases. Of course, it’s often difficult to tell whether a case is promising until you look closely at it, so a promising case can easily be overlooked.

But the biggest problem is that new evidence is hard—and often impossible—to find. If it’s a physical crime, police secure the crime scene and seize anything that looks like it could be relevant. The chance of going back years later and picking up new clues is vanishingly small. The trick then is to get whatever evidence the police have, assuming they didn’t destroy it or release it once it was clear that it wouldn’t be used at trial. If the crime is non-physical, such as fraud, child pornography or computer hacking, the police seize all the relevant computers, hard drives and paper records (including any exculpatory evidence the suspect may have there) and may well discard them after the conviction becomes final…

I think it’s fair to assume—though there is no way of knowing—that the number of exculpations in recent years understates the actual number of innocent prisoners by an order, and probably two orders, of magnitude.

Kozinski doesn't just offer up problems, though. He has a long list of suggested solutions. Juries need to be handled better throughout the course of the case, rather than mostly ignored until it's time to reach a verdict. Jury instructions should be clear, concise and in print. Jurors should be allowed to take notes and discuss the trial with other jurors while the case is ongoing.

Prosecutors should be subject to open file discovery. Every police interrogation should be video recorded. Eyewitness testimony needs to face more scrutiny and to be subjected to standardized examination. The same goes for other evidence entered by the prosecution. The government should start funding "Integrity Units" -- independent bodies that examine questionable convictions, as well as questionable prosecutorial behavior.

Prosecutors should be held to new Brady (exculpatory evidence) standards to ensure all possible info makes its way to the defense. This needs to be followed up by the deployment of sanctions and meaningful punishments for violations. The first good faith effort the government can make is to strip away the secrecy surrounding accusations of prosecutorial misconduct and allow the public to see which of its public officials are abusing an already-badly abused system. Along with this, prosecutorial immunity protections need to be scaled back severely. In addition, Kozinski proposes treating prosecutorial misconduct as a civil rights violation, which would open these offices up to DOJ investigations and consent agreements, as well as give the wrongly-accused a more efficient route to redress their grievances.

Another way to ensure the justice system serves the public rather than itself is to remove the process of electing judges. Incumbent legislators have done very little to ensure they leave their office in better shape than when they first arrived. The same goes for judges, who can often turn a little public support into a lifelong career of playing to the crowd, rather than ensuring justice is done.

The system is broken. I'm not sure it can even be fixed. But some of its worse aspects can be mitigated. I do appreciate the fact that someone inside the system is willing to not only point out its extensive flaws, but also offer guidance on how it can be improved. What we really haven't seen though is someone from the prosecutorial end call out colleagues for their ritualistic abuse of the system, and I think that needs to happen before we start to see any meaningful improvements. And that's almost impossible to do in an area where you're only as good as your conviction rate.