The Future is Here
This 1967 Philco-Ford video was, all things considered, reasonably accurate about what life in 1999 would be like.
~Randy
I Spoke Too Soon.
A few posts ago I wrote,
The part of Sotomayor’s remarks that annoys me most isn’t mentioned much: her *nudge nudge wink wink* tone when she says “Yeah, yeah, I know, we don’t make law, ha ha,” like you and I know better. That’s where she seems to me to give away a weakness for judicial activism. Her self-correction sounds insincere. It’s also so brazenly in-groupy and parochial — subtext, “we right-thinking folks all get it.”
Wrong. It has been noticed. In a mailing from Human Events (OK, so we’re both wrong that no one else noticed :) ):
But what no one seems to be pointing out is that Sotomayor was playing to this crowd of Duke University law students and moved them to laughter and as she concluded her statement, she smirked… she actually smirked.
That telling wink-wink-nudge-nudge moment, caught forever on video… her smirk… the laughter. Sotomayor is not just a left-wing activist judge who is willing to occasionally legislate from the bench.
She’s proud of her judicial activism; so much so, that she wears it on her sleeve and has no problem yukking it up with young impressionable law students when discussing the matter – even when the cameras are rolling.
The Human Events mailing is essentially a call to go to war over Sotomayor’s nomination, because
If conservatives don’t draw a line in the sand and take the fight to Obama over this nomination, Obama will know that he will be able to steamroll his extreme agenda of government-backed corporate takeovers, socialized health care, wealth redistribution and the advancement of so-called “social justice” down the throats of the American people virtually unopposed.
Read the whole thing. No, actually, don’t. I didn’t. Just take a look. Comments?
To GM, Thanks for Everything, Trouble Funk
Trouble Funk’s got the song for this moment in General Motors’ history:
(no actual video, unfortunately)
~ Maxwell
“Too Clever by Half”
Is my initial reaction to this bit of enthusiasm at Mother Jones on architect Edward Mazria and his “14X plan.” What it involves is using stimulus funding to incentivize banks to incentivize homeowners to retrofit their homes for energy efficiency. But that said, I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it at first glance.
So have at it, folks. I’m sure there’s a bunch of unintentional consequences that I’m missing here.
~ Maxwell
Reading Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” Speech
Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote . . .While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law.
Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address.
Blacks are “sun people,” Jeffries explains, and whites are “ice people.” New York Newsday quoted Jeffries as telling his students last year, “Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world history.” Jeffries believes melanin, the dark skin pigment, gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites.
Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives – no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration . . . [emphasis added]
The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. . . . I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise.
Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. . . .Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. [OK, but tricky balance to be struck — you can’t aspire if you’re too quick to accept.] I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench.
Subversive Sotomayor Thought
I’ve been trying to explain something devilishly paradoxical on Twitter. Either I’ve just run up against the limitations of Twitter, or I just haven’t mastered the medium yet.
What I’ve been trying to say is that while I am repelled by Sonia Sotomayor’s fatuous and politically-correct suggestion that a “wise Latina woman” would necessarily make “better” decisions than a white man, and while I certainly don’t believe two wrongs make a right, or that it’s okay to punish young white males for past preferences they don’t remotely benefit from, there are a couple of things about the “empathy” and “affirmative action” arguments that I understand. I don’t endorse them, because I don’t think reverse discrimination is any kind of solution — fair and category-blind competition is, and rather than “the soft bigotry of low expectations” we need minorities to seize their opportunities to prepare and compete — but I can understand those arguments, and I think that just dismissing them with scorn betrays a huge blind spot.
For over two hundred years it was fine to restrict voting rights and many other kinds of civic, educational, and economic opportunity to white males. Now, it’s no longer okay. We’ve seen the light: discrimination is wrong. Good! But now, suddenly — now that it could go the other way — we’re piously shocked, shocked, by any form of discrimination.
Isn’t this a little like opposing the Vietnam war and laying claim to high principle when a major unspoken factor was that you could be drafted to fight in it?
It’s true: reverse discrimination, as in the New Haven firefighters’ case, is as unjust to individuals as the original kind, and it doesn’t do individuals in the favored groups any favors, either. That to me is uncontroversial. What gets under my skin, though, is conservatives’ lofty moral disapproval of some minority politicians’ liking for racial preferences. What was standard operating procedure for 200+ years but a great big racial preference? Minorities are to be sternly held to a higher standard than our own ancestors, because . . . our ancestors didn’t know any better? Because having suffered from discrimination yourself should make you a better, nobler person? How reverse-racist is that?
Minority politicians like Al Sharpton are just humans who see their chance and their communities’ to “get some.” Given that chance, they’re venal and willing to work any angle. Poor things, they don’t have the benefit of a long patrician tradition of dignified, civilized discrimination. They’re crass and shameless. They don’t have a huge grey institutional Puritan rock to do the discriminating discreetly for them.
By the same token, I’d like to know from the context whether Sotomayor was claiming that her stereotyped “wise Latina female” would make better decisions across the board because of her life experiences, or only that she would make fairer decisions specifically in cases concerning “that life,” the life lived by poor and minority people. The law may not and must not excuse lawbreaking on the excuse of disadvantage (“Gee, Officer Krupke! We’re depraved because we’re deprived!”). On the other hand, it’s a question whether a judge like John Roberts is purely unbiased or whether he does identify with the “power structure” and make decisions that are blind to the realities of a life he hasn’t lived. Bias becomes invisible when you assume that the way you see things is the way they are for everyone.
“Empathy,” however, means imagination if it means anything. It means striving to imagine your way into circumstances different from your own as part of the process of applying the law, a part that may color the application of the law while it must not trump it. That kind of perspective-broadening empathy would be required of a Sotomayor, too, and you’d have to look for it in her decisions on a wide range of cases.
Ambiance 