Tag Archives: unsafe in any station

August 7, 2023 · 5:36 am

Why yes, there are limits to the First Amendment

The Washington Post recently published an article looking at doctors who’ve prescribed quack cures for covid such as ivermectin (an extremely profitable line of bullshit). Very few doctors have paid any penalty for so doing which doesn’t surprise me: doctors have a long history of not policing their own. Nor is it surprising that Republican states want to make it even harder to discipline anti-vaxx doctors; Ron DeSantis is clearly cool letting people die of covid if it convinces anti-vax Republicans that he’s on their side.

What did strike me about the article, though, is that some of the doctors spreading misinformation (masks don’t work! The vaccine is death!) or pushing quack cures go with the First Amendment as a defense: refusing to let them prescribe what lines their pockets (they don’t phrase it that way) violates their right of free speech! It’s “viewpoint discrimination!”

This is a common cry on the right: any criticism of them for being anti-trans, misogynist or whatever is oppression. They have a right to judge trans people, working women, rape victims, etc. because Free Speech but if conservatives get judged in return, that’s not Free Speech, it’s anti-Free Speech. They can punch down (or what they imagine is down) but nobody has the right to punch back up.

(The same is true of the fight over public libraries: I’m sure Moms for Liberty and similar groups would be outraged if liberals started filing to ban books the banners liked (for the record, I do not think “if you ban our books, we’ll ban yours” is a good tactic). Take this WaPo story about conservative Catholics demanding their community library take books out that offend them; Delores Oates, a local politician running for higher office, posted to a Catholic online group that they need supervisors “who care about the well-being of children.” I’m betting if someone pointed out the Catholic Church has done anything but protect children (some pedophilia cases are still being prosecuted) they’d be outraged.)

As for “viewpoint discrimination,” it’s perfectly reasonable to discriminate against some viewpoints, particularly in a scientific/medical setting. Sure, there’s a subjective element in medicine (as the excellent book Untreated says): at what point should someone with pneumonia go into the hospital? Does an injury need surgery or will it recover after rest? When do you send a patient to a specialist? And no, doctors should be free to make their best judgment call even if there’s room for disagreement.

But in the covid case we have doctors spewing bullshit and false facts, either because they’re crackpots or because there’s money in it. Telling doctors not to spread lies about covid, vaccines or ivermectin is entirely appropriate. Patients trust doctors; doctors shouldn’t be allowed to abuse that trust, whether for profit or personal ideology. As I said of Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vax claims, there’s no scientific controversy here, purely a political one (as witness DeSantis proposing Kennedy as head of the CDC).

There are lots of situations the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Conspiracy to commit a crime (“All I said was, I’d pay him $5,000 to kill my wife. Free speech!”). Slander. Harassment. Shakezula presents a couple of examples. I think regulating medical speech is one more.

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March 9, 2023 · 5:10 am

Marketing snake oil doesn’t mean you’re cleverer than your customers

Helaine Olen looks at the career of Glenn W. Turner, who popularized the phrase “fake it until you make it.” Great advice if you need a shot of confidence — but not so much if you’re scamming your customers, which Olen argues has become increasingly prevalent since the 1980s began to exult that “greed is good”: “As we transitioned from a society that manufactured things to one whose products were intangible, reality was increasingly in the eye of the beholder — or the pitchman.”

That kind of thinking could explain bald-faced lies such as Keebler claiming a cookie made with high fructose corn syrup has no high-fructose corn syrup, but it’s often bigger in scope than that kind of old-school snake oil. Case in point, the way the Sackler’s opioid empire relentlessly pushed oxycontin and willfully pretended they were helping people in pain, not catering to millions of addicts. More recently, some doctors made bank by prescribing ivermectin to treat covid; now that fear of covid is, however unreasonably, fading (it’s still killing a lot of people), they’ve discovered it’s also wonderful for treating the flu.

Or Marc Tessier-Levigne, now Stanford University president. In his former life as a Genentech executive he authored a paper that proclaimed a breakthrough in identifying the genetic roots of Alzheimer’s. The Stanford Daily reports the research was bogus.

Or consider the NYT is willing to write about Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto conman, and discuss how lots of people in the Bahamas like him.

Part of the problem is that snake oil is horribly easy to sell. It’s not just mountebank doctors selling fake cures to gullible targets; J.P. Morgan gave $175 million for access to a company’s non-existent client email lists. Charlie Javice founded the company, Frank, which supposedly helped five million students at 6,000 colleges negotiate the financial-aid maze. That shouldn’t have passed the smell test given there aren’t that many colleges that receive financial aid. Yet it did.

One of the commenters on this LGM post suggested that both Javice and Elizabeth Holmes benefited from the same classism that creates the glass floor: they come from white, upper-class backgrounds which meant they grew up learning to present themselves as someone you can trust to run a business (see Pedigree for more discussion of this). Much like British traitor Kim Philby, they could present themselves as the “right sort” which goes a long way to ensuring success. Lest you think I’m singling out women, you can say the same about Jared Kushner’s undistinguished business career.

I’m reminded of one prominent economist — I can’t remember which one — who lobbied hard to loosen the restrictions in the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banks’ commercial and investment branches. When the government loosened regulations banks promptly started making very unwise decisions. Said economist insisted that had never occurred to him. That was idiotic. As I’ve quoted before, “The only security which we can have that men will be honest, is to make it their interest to be honest; and the best defence which we can have against their being knaves, is to make it terrible to them to be knaves.” Or as someone put it in comments here, ” without regulation there are often zero adults in the room.” Maybe J.P. Morgan was no different from any victim of the big con: they thought they saw a chance for a big, big score and turned off their brain.

I’ll end with an other quote from the same thread about the nature of business, that Henry Ford and the other automotive pioneers “may have been scumbags but they were actually interested in making and selling cars. The people who want to be in the business world for the sake of being in the business world are suspect in every possible way: there is literally nothing anchoring them but greed.

To use two modern examples Steve Jobs was AFAICT a piece of shit, but he really did have a vision about the future of computing and some of his attention was actually spent trying to accomplish that vision. Elon Musk doesn’t actually care about electric cars, as can be seen by decision after decision he’s made to do what he wants (play edgelord on the Twits, for example) rather than devote R&D money to Tesla.”

Not unsafe enough

“This is not the sort of life Rebecca Grossman was supposed to be living. The 58-year-old former flight attendant turned socialite was meant to be spending her middle years enjoying the bounties of upper-class privilege [but instead] the Hidden Hills socialite became a pariah after her speeding Mercedes struck and killed two school-aged kids.” And your objection would be?

According to the LA Magazine profile at the link, just that, in Grossman’s husband’s words, “she is in an emotional prison that she may never be able to get out of.” As LGM says, the article reads like a cancel-culture — how can people turn their back on her just because she zigzagged eighty miles through a residential neighborhood street? Sure, she’s out on $2 million bail but life is so hard! It’s hard to imagine someone who’s black and poor in the same vote getting such a sympathetic portrait, even if they were stuck in jail because they couldn’t raise bail.

The resistance to punishing rich, prominent people runs deep. It’s equivalent to himpathy for male misogynists: men are more important than women so they get cut slack. The more important they are, the more slack: writer Heather MacDonald has argued Placido Domingo’s history of harassment doesn’t matter because he’s a great opera star — how can we derail his career because he felt up a few nonentities?

Or consider that New York Magazine profile from earlier this year: a popular, good-looking boy showed off naked photos of his girlfriend and his classmates stopped speaking to him (good for them!). The article takes a sympathetic view of the poor guy — just because he did something shitty to his girlfriend, he’s now an outcast, waaah! As LGM pointed out at the time, if teenage cancel culture is an issue, lots of teens get canceled for considerably less valid reasons; some kids spend their whole high school lives as outcasts. But nobody’s going to profile them — it’s the guys who are popular and goodlooking and cool enough to supposedly deserve being in the in-crowd whose cancellation raises eyebrows.

We’ve seen the same thing regarding the Trump administration. The Washington Post profiles Trump’s surgeon general who’s not having the usual smooth transition from White House position to lucrative private or academic gigs: “he would receive polite rejections from university officials who worried that someone who served in the administration of the former president would be badly received by their left-leaning student bodies. They felt it when corporations decided he was too tainted to employ.”

As Roy Edroso says, nobody’s entitled to a good-paying post-government position, and there’s no reason working for a corrupt, incompetent, fascist and parroting his talking points shouldn’t cost you: “Eichmann, Mengele – you know they’re bitching in hell that no one gave them this kind of treatment.”

Donald Trump once bragged that if he shot someone in public, he’d get away with it. I’m not sure he’s the only one. Rather than making “wickedness unsafe in any station” we’re making it perfectly safe, as long as the station can be described as white, male, and/or rich.

Unsafe in any station? I wish!

(No election thoughts yet other than “Woot, no red wave!”)

Back when #metoo was news and multiple women were standing up and saying Me, Too, I blogged about what would happen next. Would we make serious efforts to take down the harassers? Or better yet, stop harassment before it starts? Or as Echidne of the Snakes speculates, would it become like mass shootings: we gasp in shock at each new account but somehow we never do anything.

“Some of the most galvanizing early #MeToo cases suggested that a thorough and eternal discrediting would be the fate of every accused man,” the WaPo says, but it didn’t happen. Many men suffered nothing but a few uncomfortable articles. Others were deemed tainted for a while, then they bounced back. The women they harassed who quit their professions? Nobody cares. As witness the article (and this blog post) focus on the men.

Harvey Weinstein went down. Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Lester Moonves and Roy Moore have had their careers destroyed though Roy Moore, at least, still has his defenders. And while Weinstein’s in prison, the others are free and wealthy enough that they won’t suffer, other than being out of work. Louis CK is touring again; allegations of inappropriate touching against Morgan Freeman got no traction (which is not to say they’re not true). Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations didn’t affect Brett Kavanaugh’s rise to the highest court in the land, and brought out odious defenses of assault. Or consider this account.

Then there’s Johnny Depp, whose response to Amber Heard accusing him of abuse was to sue her for libel. It’s a tactic several pastors accused of harassment or assault have also used. They won’t be the last. And as LGM says, in no way does making accusations benefit the women.

I’m not suggesting that harassers have to be pariahs forever but redemption is something you have to earn — and simply waiting till the fuss dies down is not earning it. Louis CK apologized, which is good, but is it enough? Has he apologized to the individuals rather than to his public (which gets us into reputation management rather than repentance)? Has he done anything to help him resist the temptation to do it again (here’s an example of someone falling back into old patterns)? In his apology he talks about stepping back and listening but he was performing again less than a year later. Other harassers haven’t even done that much, or they came out with a faux apology. For example Joss Whedon blaming “beautiful, needy, aggressive women” for his on-set harassment issues.

The trouble is, our society is not good at thinking about redemption: how it works, when it’s been earned, who needs it. Many convicts who’ve served their time still walk around under a cloud of suspicion. Unless of course, they’re rich, in which case time at a minimum security prison represents unspeakable suffering (they lost their freedom, dammit!) — haven’t they suffered enough? Or for an actor or TV personality, they’ve been out of work for a year, can we condemn them to exile forever?

It also requires organizations to change, as Marti Noxon said last year. If the system allowed harassers to get away with it, organizations need to fix the weaknesses. If HR did nothing because “hey, it’s only one time, maybe it won’t happen again” they need to start thinking “what if it keeps happening? What if it blows up in the company’s face?” Changing organizations is not easy — there’s a reason it’s been compared to teaching an elephant to dance. In an already sexist world, it’s even harder.

As I said at the first link in this post (paraphrasing Cato’s letter), “the only security which we can have that men will not harass, is to make it their interest not to harass; and the best defense which we can have against their being predators, is to make it terrible to them to be predators. As there are many men predatory in some stations, who would be innocent in others; the best way is to make predation unsafe in any station.” We still have a long way to go.

I write more about haraassment in Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holder.

The right-wing, risk and safety

According to some conservatives the important thing about capitalism is not freedom or the positive benefits it brings (e.g., the incredible array of vegetarian products out there compared to when I graduated college) but that it places everyone under the Sword of Damocles: ““The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. ” — David Frum. If there was no safety net, for example, life as a single parent would be too hazardous, forcing families to stay together.

This is a common thought. David Brooks has argued that when the economy tanks, that forces employees to stay loyal to one employer instead of switching jobs for better pay; he considers this a good thing. Odious right-wing economist Walter Williams once argued that if there was no Social Security this would be great for families: kids would have to assume responsibility for caring for their aged parents, who would therefore demand their kids get serious college degrees that lead to good-paying job, not bullshit like women’s studies (as someone whose parents hated him becoming a writer I guarantee you this approach will not bring families closer together).

It’s reflected in Sen. Rick Scott’s claim that people who aren’t millionaires don’t have skin in the game so they need their taxes raised. He is aggressively sticking with this platform, though also lying that saying he wants to increase taxes is just a Democratic talking point (I sincerely hope it will be a talking point, but it’s definitely part of his plan). Or one Texas poll asserting during the 2021 snowpocalypse that only the strong survive so his constituents should stop asking for help.

All of which is bullshit. The poor pay in plenty of taxes: sales taxes eat up much more of their income than for the rich, for instance. As Echidne of the Snakes says, American business has told employees not to expect loyalty from employers; job-hopping is a logical response (for many employers the obvious solution — pay them better, treat them better — is too outlandish to even consider). And as noted at my first link, even if you live on a tight budget, stick with one employer and do good work, there’s no guarantee your job won’t be axed or outsized so that the owners can see bigger dividends. What conservatives are proposing isn’t a plan for surviving, let alone thriving, it’s demanding that the lowly working class stay suitably submissive. Don’t inconvenience your bosses by changing jobs; don’t indulge yourself by spending money on anything fun. It won’t save your job or guarantee keeping a roof over your head but you won’t inconvenience the rich and powerful which is what really counts.

This brings me back to one of my favorite quotes, from Cato’s letter: “the best defence which we can have against their being knaves, is to make it terrible to them to be knaves. As there are many men wicked in some stations, who would be innocent in others; the best way is to make wickedness unsafe in any station.” Because the right-wingers who embrace the Risk and Suffering Are Good For You bilge never think this should apply to people in higher stations: business owners, politicians, millionaires.

For all Frum’s talk about business being at risk in capitalism, the risks are much less for them. Only one banker went to jail for all the insane risks and sometimes outright fraud that caused the 2008 financial collapse. Filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy allows many businesses to wriggle out of paying their debts, even if they have the money. Insider trading is rife on Wall Street, even when it hurts the stockbrokers’ clients. Money and power bring immunity.

A number of people have been convicted for their actions on 1/6 but nobody in the Republican Party leadership as yet. Ginni Thomas was an active participant in the 1/6 insurrection, which should mean Clarence Thomas recuses himself on related rulings. If he decides not to, there’s no legal constraint forcing him (Rep. Jim Jordan claims Thomas was simply acting on her political beliefs as if that’s an excuse; dude, so did Pol Pot, Timothy McVeigh and Osama binLadin). And Donald Trump, of course, has devoted most of his life to avoiding consequences for his actions, whether by lying, threatening to sue people, or launching a coup to prevent the legal transfer of power.

And of course, sexual harassers time and again get a free pass. Mark Galli at Christianity Today engaged in two decades (at least) of harassment without consequences. The Southern Baptist Church turned a blind eye to predators in the pulpit and church hierarchy.

Very few right-wingers who think the average American should live frugally and in fear really think the upper classes should do the same. And in practice, very few do. This is a problem because when wickedness in a given station is safe to get away with, wickedness will inevitably flourish. Just like Frum says, if bankers can see greater profits and bonuses by cheating customers, some of them will. And when people see that behavior is consequence free or worse, rewarded, it will spread.

There are ways to fix this, of course, but they all require the will to take action rather than fold. Without that will, I’m not sure there is a solution. I’ll take some small comfort from knowing that Alex Jones, at least, looks to be headed for a reckoning.

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November 7, 2019 · 5:10 am

So even Harvey Weinstein isn’t as awful as Harvey Weinstein

One of the standard complaints about the #metoo movement is that it treats ordinary men, men who may have said or done something inappropriate but clearly aren’t bad people, like they were Harvey Weinstein, destroying their careers and crushing their lives. They do not, however, offer much in the way of examples, and the examples are usually wrong: an in-depth investigation by the employer gets treated as a he said/she said situation (more here). I’m beginning to think “he’s being treated like Harvey Weinstein!” means something along the lines of “he got fired, Weinstein got fired, ergo they’re treating him like Weinstein!”

Now it turns out even Weinstein, the poster boy for absolute rock bottom, has his defenders too. Weinstein recently showed up at Actors’ Hour, an event in NYC for young performers (there’s some debate whether he was invited or just showed). Comedian Kelly Bachman cracked jokes (“I didn’t know we’d have to bring our own Mace and rape whistles.”); some audience members booed. A male comic got up and mocked her. Another woman confronted Weinstein at his table, with profanity hurled on both sides (not by Weinstein but by some of his entourage); the woman was asked to leave.

So why not ask Weinstein to leave? I’s a private space and the organizers could certainly have told Weinstein he wasn’t welcome. The organizer said she protected the women by letting them have “freedom of speech” — the comics were free to mock him — but then why ask the one woman to leave?

Partly it may just be that Weinstein wasn’t actually doing anything other than being there. Admittedly with his record that’s pretty alarming but it wouldn’t surprise me if the event organizers just didn’t want any confrontations. A lot of us (myself included) tend to be confrontation averse. Though that’s not a good reason: women have good reason to scream at a guy who preys on them.

And part of it, undoubtedly, is that we seem to have a reflex to forgive sexual harassers. They’ve suffered enough by being criticized and shunned for a while; surely we should forgive and move on. As Weinstein’s spokesperson put it, he was at Actors’ Hour “trying to find some solace in his life that has been turned upside down. This scene was uncalled for, downright rude and an example of how due process today is being squashed by the public.” Of course it ain’t an issue of due process; it’s true he hasn’t been convicted of anything, but private citizens outside the jury box are free to believe the victims. And if his life has been turned upside down — well, given the reasons, why should we feel sympathy for him? Yet somehow people do, far more than for the many women he allegedly assaulted, or whose careers he ruined for refusing him.

Similarly we have one Heather Mac Donald arguing that Placido Domingo’s alleged history of sexual assault (apparently one of those open secrets in the opera world) should be forgiven because Domingo’s that awesome. We cannot punish a singer of such caliber merely because he assaulted a bunch of nobodies! Which is not a new thought: Rebecca Traister has written about being told “That’s just Harvey being Harvey” when she heard stories about his behavior; simply being a powerful man is held up as an excuse.

Of course, we don’t know what the women whose careers Weinstein allegedly destroyed (I believe the women, but I think sticking with “alleged” covers my butt) might have accomplished without his interference. Or how good the women who left opera rather than stay around Domingo and people who supported him might have been. We’ll never know. But somehow their careers dead-ending, their lives turning upside down, isn’t as important as the suffering of powerful men.

We have a long way to go.

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September 24, 2018 · 5:10 am

Rape, predators and prey

As several bloggers and pundits have pointed out, it’s creepy that the response to Brett Kavanaugh saying he totally did not assault Christine Bresley Ford is to declare that even if he did, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Given the chance to pretend they don’t tolerate predators, that they protect human prey — something that’s part of government’s police function — the right wing picks the predator’s side. When a second accuser spoke up against Kavanaugh, the Republican response was to speed up the vote.

And we’re not talking incels and other creeps venting online, we’re talking the Republican mainstream. Of course, they’re not always pro-predator: if the predation is black-on-white, or hispanic on white, then they want the hammer dropped. Even after the Central Park Five were cleared, Trump kept insisting they were guilty. But white man praying on woman? No big!

This isn’t unique. Communities shit on rape victims. The religious defends in-church predators just like the Catholic Church. Paige Patterson, the former Southern Baptist leader who told women to stay with their abusers, is preaching again; some supporters say firing him for not reporting a students’ rape wasn’t Biblical. At this point, part of Kavanaugh’s appeal is that appointing him is a triumph for sexism: ” It has to be this guy, now, because he has been accused, credibly, of attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl in 1982—moreover because people believe this should be considered a disqualifying blight on his record. The thing that must happen is that those people must be defeated.” It’s a nastier version of owning the liberals, but it’s also about reinforcing male supremacy: men can do whatever they damn well please to women without consequences.

As I’ve said before, that’s the nature of patriarchy. I suspect it’s one reason court evangelicals are comfortable supporting Trump (or Roy Moore). Men are free to do what they want with women, it’s up to the women to find a way to restrain them. If not, the men are entitled to prey. Those who aren’t comfortable saying that aloud just lie: Bible-thumper Franklin Graham’s response to the allegations has been to lie that Kavanaugh stopped as soon as Ford said no. The stuff about him covering her mouth, turning the music up loud? Look, crickets!

Dennis Prager explains it’s taking the charges seriously that will damage “America’s moral compass” and the proper way to deal with sexual assault at work is to hide: “When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.” No, it’s survival. I’m sorry your wife is married to you, dude.

A White House lawyer says that if Kavanaugh can be brought down by these accusations — “brought down” meaning going back to his current job as a lifetime-appointed federal judge — “every man should certainly be worried.” Well, no, only men who’ve held a woman down and covered her mouth to prevent her screaming. As Lili Loufbourow says, the underlying message is that boys do evil things and we should just accept that’s the way of the world (not a new right-wing insight).

An alternative theory is that it happened but Ford misidentified the attacker. Right-wing think-tanker Ed Whelan actually accused another man by name; Kathleen Parker tried the same tack without naming anyone. This seems like a split-the-difference tactic (nobody’s lying, someone’s just wrong!) but as noted at the first link, it’s not getting any traction. And possibly Whelan came up with it after talking with Kavanaugh.

Law professor Amy Chua, who knows and supports Kavanaugh’s nomination, also told female students who wanted to clerk for him that “it was no accident” his female clerks look like models.

By the time you read this, I may already be a couple of developments behind. So to end on something a little more upbeat, here’s advice on consent: don’t make people drink tea.

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September 10, 2018 · 5:29 am

Unsafe in any station, Part Two of infinity

Back when the “me too” movement kicked off, I posted on FB that line from Cato’s letter that “The only security which we can have that men will be honest, is to make it their interest to be honest; and the best defence which we can have against their being knaves, is to make it terrible to them to be knaves. As there are many men wicked in some stations, who would be innocent in others; the best way is to make wickedness unsafe in any station.” A friend of mine replied that this is exactly what was happening: predators were finally finding their position unsafe.

The story of Louis CK returning to stand-up for an impromptu set despite sexual harassment charges he admits were true makes me wonder how unsafe these stations really are. Fans gave his appearance on stage a standing ovation. Some pundits are arguing being off-stage a few months is more than enough suffering; Michael Ian Black, for instance, argues Louis has “served his time” — he’s trying to find redemption, aren’t we obligated to give it to him? If there’s no redemption, why should he (or any man) even try to be better (a line of thinking beautifully mocked here)?

I agree there needs to be a path for redemption, but this ain’t redemption. It’s the comic’s fans not giving a crap about what he’s done, or what he might do in the future. Will we see the same if Matt Lauer successfully works on a comeback (or for that matter Trump’s racist ally Steve Bannon almost getting a platform again) As Rebecca Traister puts it “these men can return to their industries, with the expectation that their reentry might be near the top.” The women who backed away from projects because Louis CK or Lauer were involved? Had their careers wrecked by Harvey Weinstein? Had to deal with the alleged climate of harassment and Who Cares Who Grabbed You under Les Moonves at CBS? The men’s defenders don’t seem worried these women might not be able to find a path back, or concerned about fairness for Janet Jackson (at the link it details how Moonves allegedly trashed her career). As Abigail Nussbaum says, Louis CK returning unrepentant and unredeemed is a workplace safety issue.Harassment’s not just about sex, it’s about women (in some cases, men) becoming unable to work in their profession, do their job, earn a living because of the risk.

CK taking a few months time out is not redemption: “Louis CK” says Nussbaum, “has done absolutely nothing to indicate that he is seeking redemption. He clearly wants his career back, but there has been absolutely no indication that he regrets his past behavior (except inasmuch as he regrets what it eventually cost him), much less any attempt to make restitution to his victims, or work on himself to try to become a better, less toxic person. But because he is a famous, rich white man, Black automatically assumes the existence of his regret.”

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg points out the difference between forgiveness (given, voluntarily, by the victim, if they so choose), atonement for sin (granted by God) and redemption, which requires actual work: Acknowledge the wrong you’ve done, preferably publicly. Become a person who won’t do it again. Make restitution. Apologize “in whatever way will make it as right as possible with the victim.” And when the opportunity arises to do it again, don’t. Samantha Field discusses the same process from a Christian perspective (her point that restoring someone to their old position does not redeem them seems relevant to the CK mess). John Scalzi suggests, though I don’t have the link handy, that ten years away from the limelight/political office should be a minimum.

We have a long way to go yet before unsafety for the wicked is the norm.

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July 23, 2018 · 5:01 am

Unsafe in any station

The only security which we can have that men will be honest, is to make it their interest to be honest; and the best defence which we can have against their being knaves, is to make it terrible to them to be knaves. As there are many men wicked in some stations, who would be innocent in others; the best way is to make wickedness unsafe in any station.”—Cato’s letter

This is one of the great challenges of imposing the rule of law: holding powerful people accountable. As a Vox article pointed out this week, it’s possible Trump won’t pay any penalty for colluding with Russia to rig the election. President Ford pardoned Nixon’s crimes. Obama refused to prosecute American torturers. Like the song says, if you’re rich you can buy immunity, if you’re poor better write your eulogy.

It’s not just the government of course. Fox News spent millions ensuring Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were safe in their station. Churches cover up for religious leaders. Michigan University covered up allegations against gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. The most anyone usually suffers is to lose their job; massive falls such as Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein are rare.

And it’s not just sex. The GOP has denounced a lot of the neo-Nazis crawling out of the woodwork to run on their ticket, but it’s staying mum about veteran legislator Steve King’s white supremacist tweeting.

This isn’t new. In the Skinner case that ended the eugenics movement (though lots of states continued sterilizing people they didn’t want reproducing), what led the Supreme Court to rule against Oklahoma was that the mandatory sterilization of criminals exempted the kind of white-collar crime the state legislature or its poker buddies might be found doing (bribery, corruption). It was for the lower classes, not them.

It’s one reason why law is important: it doesn’t completely stop people breaking it, but it does draw a line in the sand they have to cross. Alan Greenspan actively pushed for loosening controls on banks, which contributed to the disastrous financial meltdown of a decade ago. In the aftermath, Greenspan said it had never occurred to him that the banks would make such terrible decisions if they weren’t constrained.

But of course, if people don’t prosecute those who break the law, the law has its limits. And there’s lots of reasons not to go after powerful people: they have money, influence, voters won’t like it.

What do we do to make them more accountable? And to make breaking the law something that will actually cost them? Trump is an extreme example, but he’s not unique.

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