I make homemade chicken broth for Ian yesterday, as he recovered from wisdom teeth extraction. Here’s more blog posts about chicken soup and here.
I’m feeling bummed out about journalism today. Pacific Standard (I’ve written for them) shut its doors. A freelancer for NPR was fired for a political tweet. So many people that I know are jumping ship. What happens when journalism dies?
This article about Roman cooking in the New York Times reminds me of my husband.
Did #MeToo go too far on the college campus?
OK, now I’m fascinated with Tardigrades.
Image is from a 1920s architecture textbook.
Apt. 11d 
“Did #MeToo go too far on the college campus” Of course it did, and everywhere else, too. Years and years of failure to address the problem and then whap-flash any accusation can ruin someone’s life. Every clumsy swain is suddenly Epstein/Weinstein. It’s a general problem in our society that we have howling mobs for whatever is in style.
Now, as to broth. Yes, Benjamin Franklin said that beer is evidence that God loves us and wants us to be happy, I think the same of chicken broth. The Latin market near our house sells over-aged hens and packages of necks and the Instapot makes broth right quick.
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“Did #MeToo go too far on the college campus? ”
No. But people thinking it did is what the poker players call a “tell.”
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The extremists Suk Gerson is resisting will do just fine as examples of the howling mob, and her discussion of the moral difficulties she found in prosecuting certainly shows the life-ruining effects of bad prosecutorial incentives.
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Ooh, what is Prof. Gersen hiding?
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Doug said,
“No. But people thinking it did is what the poker players call a “tell.””
People never want to believe this, but it’s possible for the following to be true:
a) there are a lot of people getting away with rape or sexual harassment to this day
but
b) some of the people being accused and treated as guilty are in fact innocent.
Case in point, the Innocence Project.
https://www.innocenceproject.org/
It’s possible for there to simultaneously be both false positives and false negatives.
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It is true that college Title IX cases are not the same thing as criminal rape cases.
However, if it is true that quite a number of people have been unjustly convicted and imprisoned for rape, it is a fortiori going to be the case that a large number of men accused in Title IX cases are innocent, given that Title IX has operated with a much laxer standard of proof than the criminal justice system.
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What would it actually mean for #MeToo to have gone too far?
If such a thing were even possible, it would mean that Amy’s a) had gone to practically zero and b) would have to have climbed to the vast majority of reports. Further, there would have to have been something like a comprehensive reckoning with past harassers. I don’t think that any of those conditions is remotely close to being met.
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The traditional common law rule is that in criminal law cases, it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man be convicted, and in civil cases, judgments should be based on the preponderance of the evidence. So in a just criminal system, false negatives should outnumber false positives by ten to one, and in a just civil system, the two should be about equal. I’ve never encountered a jurisprudential theorist who suggested that false positives should greatly outnumber false negatives. Until now.
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It seems to me that there is another axis in play with regards to #MeToo, and that is power, power that some people have in a racist and classist society, amplified by the cult of celebrity. The Innocence Project isn’t out there working on behalf of rich white men, are they?
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Colleges work hard to conceal this information, but such information as there is suggests that those punished by campus sexual harassment policies are disproportionately not rich white men.
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y81 said,
“Colleges work hard to conceal this information, but such information as there is suggests that those punished by campus sexual harassment policies are disproportionately not rich white men.”
Right.
Unless it’s demonstrated otherwise, we have to assume that an opaque system without representation is going to disproportionately impact accused persons without good family and personal resources.
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I wrote, “Unless it’s demonstrated otherwise, we have to assume that an opaque system without representation is going to disproportionately impact accused persons without good family and personal resources.”
Come to think of it, that’s equally true of college debt horror stories.
The opaque college funding system is going to disproportionately impact people without good family and personal resources. (The really scary student loan stories never involve kids with well-informed, involved parents.)
In whatever context, the need to deal with a large, confusing, opague institution is very likely to amplify pre-existing inequalities.
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In whatever context, the need to deal with a large, confusing, opague institution is very likely to amplify pre-existing inequalities.
Such as those between men and women. Yet another reason to be skeptical about claims that #MeToo has gone too far.
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Re: Tardigrades. I think we’ve seen this movie. This will not end well.
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The architecture illustrations (or part of it) would make an awesome tea towel or tote bag design
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I found out about Governing magazine going under within 5 minutes of hearing that PS is done too. As a state politics person, I am crushed – Governing does really excellent work on larger trends in state and local government. All of these announcements are bad not just for journalism, but also for the health of our democracy.
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