Law Prof gets how to teach millenials – hilarious and surely effective

Prof Adam McLeod of the Jones School of Law, Montgomery, Alabama, has learned that to teach his first-year students legal reasoning hilarious , they need to be disabused of the nasty habits and conditioned reflexes of unreasoning they were taught as undergraduates. So here are his ukases for his Foundations of Law course:

So, here are three ground rules for the rest of the semester.

1.  The only “ism” I ever want to come out your mouth is a syllogism. If I catch you using an “ism” or its analogous “ist” — racist, classist, etc. — then you will not be permitted to continue speaking until you have first identified which “ism” you are guilty of at that very moment. You are not allowed to fault others for being biased or privileged until you have first identified and examined your own biases and privileges.

2.  If I catch you this semester using the words “fair,” “diversity,” or “equality,” or a variation on those terms, and you do not stop immediately to explain what you mean, you will lose your privilege to express any further opinions in class until you first demonstrate that you understand three things about the view that you are criticizing.

3.  If you ever begin a statement with the words “I feel,” before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable animal sound.

So far, he says, only two students have been obliged to utter clucking sounds – much to the amusement of the class, I suspect.

You can read his whole account, Undoing the Dis-Education of Millenials here.   

Troglo (L. H. Kevil)

Ferguson, Missouri: the path forward

A few facts about Mike Brown and Officer Wilson.

That fateful day Brown, having robbed a convenience store, was deliberately violating the unwritten compact between the police and the community that jaywalking would be tolerated, but not walking in the center of the street.

• When told by Officer Wilson to move to the sidewalk, Mr. Brown reacted violently, slamming the police car door shut so Officer Wilson could not get out
• He then punched the officer in the head and reached for his service weapon
• The officer managed to fire two shots inside the car
• Brown was intoxicated on marijuana, with an elevated concentration of 12 ng/ml in his blood. This may help explain his rage and self-destructive behavior
• Brown ran away, but then turned around charging the officer as if to make a football tackle or wrestling takedown
• In a fight Mr. Brown could easily have overwhelmed the much smaller Officer Wilson
• Brown was shot when he was dangerously close, less than 10 feet from the officer
• If Officer Wilson had not fired, he would have suffered severe bodily injury, possibly death
• Wounding in the leg or arm was not an option; police training emphasizes that multiple torso shots are sometimes needed to neutralize the threat of an enraged criminal
• In these situations Missouri law authorizes the use of deadly force
• In the ordinary course of events this open-and-shut case would not have been brought to a grand jury

Liberals and radicals will not be persuaded by facts. For them somehow Mike Brown must be declared innocent and someone or something else guilty of his death. Thus the emphasis on non-issues such as that Mike did not deserve to die. (The issue is not deserving death, but that his own actions put him in jeopardy of death.) Thus the Brown family is pursuing a wrongful death civil lawsuit against Officer Wilson. Thus the President is calling this a matter of civil rights. Liberals are accustomed to conservatives cowering at the threat of being labelled ‘racist,’ but react with bullying outrage when their ‘facts’ are challenged.

Are we not permitted to be as blunt as the liberals and the protestors? Responsibility for his death belongs to Mr. Brown himself and responsibility for the riots belongs to the black community and its supporters. Pointing out self-inflicted wounds is not blaming the victim. Rewarding bad behavior (see here) leads to more of it, just as paying ransom for a kidnapping leads to many more.

Justice for Mike Brown? What injustice has he suffered? There was no injustice. He is responsible for his death. Nor is there anything relating to civil rights. The Eric Holder investigation is a sham. It is a truism that prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. Civil rights laws have been stretched to the point at which they are used to coerce behavior that the government desires, under threat of prosecution by hundreds of ‘Justice’ Department attorneys. If Officer Wilson is indicted, it would be a violation his civil rights, the consequence of black racism and the crime of policing while white.

LGBTQ ‘training’ in our public schools

One more compelling reason for school choice, private schools, or home schooling

The Columbia Daily Tribune of April 5, 2003 published a disturbing story about a recent day of training for all teachers and staff at Rock Bridge High School (Columbia, Missouri.) The training materials were provided by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, an activist group seeking “to empower educators as partners to ensure every student can fully participate in school life.” The group’s goal is to enlist teachers as “allies” in the fight to stamp out “anti-gay biases.” Rock Bridge has sponsored training of this sort in the past. This time it was more thoroughgoing.

The results? Teaching should not be gender-specific, said Rock Bridge’s guidance director. (Will references to husbands and wives be permitted?) One teacher stressed the importance of “developing school culture.” The principal spoke of “awareness,” echoing the guidance director’s goal of raising “awareness about issues our LGBTQ (see note below) students experience.” The staff adviser to the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance wanted to make “sure the school environment is very sensitive to everybody’s feelings.”

All this is couched in language designed to make the program goals sound reasonable and neutral, even desirable. In our view this is far from the case.