"I have no information to share" is what we lawyers ALWAYS say in court, especially when cornered by the judge on something as sensitive as "do you know where your fugitive client is right now?" You cannot get into the habit of alternating between "I don't know" or "due to attorney-client privilege I am unable to disclose" because those answers on their own give the game away (especially the latter). A consistent and unyielding adherence to "I have no information to share" is our version of the Glomar response.
Some of the conservative response to the rape abortion story bugs me for the same reason that progressive skepticism about the WI Spa flasher bugged me--they are saying it didn’t happen to avoid saying that if it did happen its perfectly fine. At least when Jesse and Katie criticize the story, I know its not so they don’t have to confront the real and inevitable consequences of an abortion ban.
Ten year olds get raped. Sometimes they get pregnant. Its not going to happen every day, but 50 abortions under 15 means about one a week. Multiply that by how many states had a trigger ban, and I am absolutely not surprised we saw this horror already.
We need a term similar to “the banality of evil” to describe people’s tendency to express outrage on social media and then quickly get on with their day. Can we bring “the banality of outrage” into common usage?
RE SCHOOLS: I wish the unspoken underbelly of all of this were more frequently expressed so everyone is on the same page. The unspoken part about kids being in locker rooms or bunking for school trips is 1) the danger of sexual predation from the biological male who, while claiming to be trans, is still predatory and 2) that some biological females will be made to feel uncomfortable even if they are safe, because of the typical lifelong intake of the social dynamics between the sexes: objectification, harassment, predation, or actual sexual abuse.
Or, for a biological female who is trans-male, the danger of being put into biological male spaces.
We don't want to demonize men, but we also have to acknowledge the clear imbalance of "power" that is ever-present. Biological women tend not to be sexually predatory. Biological men tend to be. It is one of the most robust trends in the history of civilization.
If this is not spelled out, people don't get what the problem is. They get distracted by the need to protect trans people, even though half the population is biologically female and they are NOT the ones who trend as predators.
This is all a perfect parallel (on the surface) with the concept that the police are the danger to Black citizens in bad neighborhoods when actually their chances of getting murdered by a neighbor are so, so, so much higher, and that removing police presence increases that danger. It is missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, we need to protect trans people. Yes, we need to reform the police. But to ignore the more common realities on the ground is at the expense of exponentially greater tragedy.
I have a public professional email address because my job involves legislative testimony. Anyone willing to dig into the public record can email me to grill me on things I said publicly about my employers' policy positions, or to grill me for details about private people I helped line up to testify. When you're public-facing in that way, you have to have a standard response to everyone who reaches out to you for information you can't give them, whether they're a legislator or a random busybody - and it has to be bland, respectful, and impossible for someone to get a toehold in to grill you further. "Let me talk to my boss" implies "My boss has an answer for you," which may or may not be true. So the journalist's brick-wall response made perfect sense to me.
...And, not to be that guy, but related: I just published a post on my substack about how to evaluate state legislative news, centered on legislative efforts in the wake of the Dobbs decision leak. https://weirdemails.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-reading-state-legislative Check it out if you're interested.
I love these episodes where you guys get way into the weeds of local policy - that extended segment on the LGBT policy in the Florida school system was such a perfect example of how mind-numbingly intricate these supposedly-straightforward culture war issues are when you get down to the individuals trying to deal with them in daily life.
On BARpod and other outlets the last few days, I've repeatedly seen a comment along these lines: "Child sexual abuse occurs on a regular basis; therefore, how can anyone have the audacity to question the veracity of the Ohio abortion story."
The fallacious thinking on display is the assumption that because a general phenomenon occurs, we should never question the details of any specific story.
Someone can tell me, "my car flipped over six times, caught fire and I walked away without a scratch". Does the fact that in general, car accidents occur every single day everywhere preclude me from questioning the veracity of the account I was told?
Glenn Kessler never questioned the prevalence of child sexual assault; he questioned a specific story that had rather sensational details. While the story turned out to be true, there is no reason to abandon healthy skepticism, as K&J note.
Are there any ob/gyn or pediatricians on this board who can give solid stats on the probability of a 10 year old becoming pregnant? I'm curious if this story truly is a unicorn. Telling us that 10 year olds get assaulted tells us nothing about the size of the subset who get pregnant.
Some commenters keep throwing around a stat about the number of Ohio girls under 15 getting abortions. But I haven't seen a breakdown of the ages: maybe 48 out of 50 girls are at least 13-14 and the 10 year old is anomaly.
Aside from all the posturing on both sides, let's hope the child recovers and can lead a normal life
One think that I think is getting ignored here is the long shadow the murder of Dr. George Tiller has cast over how abortion providers think about the personal risk they're running. The way the right-wing media (and government) has made Dr. Bernard the center of attacks is fairly scary for that reason, and even before this she, like many public abortion providers, faced personal threats. In that context, I think a reluctance to share more information than strictly necessary with the media is understandable.
I'm also not sure I understand the reaction to the story's confirmation in the same way Katie does. Perhaps some media people were insensitive (I didn't personally see it), but saying that the vindication shouldn't be emphatically pointed out because we should be allowing the traumatized patient privacy seems to miss the point that this entire situation is political. This girl's right to an abortion in her home state was eliminated, and publicizing the situation is necessary to pointing out the horrific consequences of abortion restrictions.
I used to say I wanted more local media, but then I look at Seattle's local media and.... do I? Seattle has fantastic wall to wall coverage of anything transit and bike trails but not much else. There is only one crime reporter! And the people covering homelessness are hopeless ideologues (usually Stranger alumni). I stopped listening to KUOW during the Trump years because to say the jumped the shark, I mean they jumped to the pool with the shark.
Please do an episode about Erica C Barnett. The world deserves to know.
This episode has to be the thinnest media criticism from Jessie and Katie that I have ever heard. They end up bitching back and forth about whether some people did or didn’t say things in they way that they would have. Not really compelling arguments, you two.
How has neither of you ever spackled?! It’s when you’ve got a small hole in the wall and you fill it with that white putty stuff. (Which is called, wait for it, spackle.)
At the 12 minute mark, both hosts describe the rape story as “horrible” (which it is), and it’s the perfect distillation of east coast vs west coast accents.
This whole sordid story is one of the saddest I’ve ever heard. Eventually this kid will grow up and be a spokeswoman for one side or the other and on and on it churns and grinds. Poor kid. Anybody else just want to scoop her up in a big hug and run away?
Speaking from what might be a more pro-life perspective than Jesse and Katie, it is self-evidently true that Republican state legislatures make everything worse and can’t seem to draft a sensible law to save their lives, much less their electoral fortunes.
I fear that this is a subset of a general case, that all state legislatures have been pretty powerless and irrelevant to an increasingly nationalized culture warry politics that they were free to just be the JV team for performative virtue signaling BS.
If such institutions are going to continue to exist, I worry that we’re going to have to endure a lot of shitty lawmaking that leads to people being thrown out in outrage.
"I have no information to share" is what we lawyers ALWAYS say in court, especially when cornered by the judge on something as sensitive as "do you know where your fugitive client is right now?" You cannot get into the habit of alternating between "I don't know" or "due to attorney-client privilege I am unable to disclose" because those answers on their own give the game away (especially the latter). A consistent and unyielding adherence to "I have no information to share" is our version of the Glomar response.
Some of the conservative response to the rape abortion story bugs me for the same reason that progressive skepticism about the WI Spa flasher bugged me--they are saying it didn’t happen to avoid saying that if it did happen its perfectly fine. At least when Jesse and Katie criticize the story, I know its not so they don’t have to confront the real and inevitable consequences of an abortion ban.
Ten year olds get raped. Sometimes they get pregnant. Its not going to happen every day, but 50 abortions under 15 means about one a week. Multiply that by how many states had a trigger ban, and I am absolutely not surprised we saw this horror already.
Wondering if anyone’s read Megan McArdle’s piece on Josh Hawley vs Khiara Bridges https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/berkeley-law-professors-senate-testimony-didnt-go-how-left-thinks-it-did/
And, now I’m reading this one by Jacob Siegel that’s really interesting https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/the-evil-of-banality
We need a term similar to “the banality of evil” to describe people’s tendency to express outrage on social media and then quickly get on with their day. Can we bring “the banality of outrage” into common usage?
RE SCHOOLS: I wish the unspoken underbelly of all of this were more frequently expressed so everyone is on the same page. The unspoken part about kids being in locker rooms or bunking for school trips is 1) the danger of sexual predation from the biological male who, while claiming to be trans, is still predatory and 2) that some biological females will be made to feel uncomfortable even if they are safe, because of the typical lifelong intake of the social dynamics between the sexes: objectification, harassment, predation, or actual sexual abuse.
Or, for a biological female who is trans-male, the danger of being put into biological male spaces.
We don't want to demonize men, but we also have to acknowledge the clear imbalance of "power" that is ever-present. Biological women tend not to be sexually predatory. Biological men tend to be. It is one of the most robust trends in the history of civilization.
If this is not spelled out, people don't get what the problem is. They get distracted by the need to protect trans people, even though half the population is biologically female and they are NOT the ones who trend as predators.
This is all a perfect parallel (on the surface) with the concept that the police are the danger to Black citizens in bad neighborhoods when actually their chances of getting murdered by a neighbor are so, so, so much higher, and that removing police presence increases that danger. It is missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, we need to protect trans people. Yes, we need to reform the police. But to ignore the more common realities on the ground is at the expense of exponentially greater tragedy.
I have a public professional email address because my job involves legislative testimony. Anyone willing to dig into the public record can email me to grill me on things I said publicly about my employers' policy positions, or to grill me for details about private people I helped line up to testify. When you're public-facing in that way, you have to have a standard response to everyone who reaches out to you for information you can't give them, whether they're a legislator or a random busybody - and it has to be bland, respectful, and impossible for someone to get a toehold in to grill you further. "Let me talk to my boss" implies "My boss has an answer for you," which may or may not be true. So the journalist's brick-wall response made perfect sense to me.
...And, not to be that guy, but related: I just published a post on my substack about how to evaluate state legislative news, centered on legislative efforts in the wake of the Dobbs decision leak. https://weirdemails.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-reading-state-legislative Check it out if you're interested.
I love these episodes where you guys get way into the weeds of local policy - that extended segment on the LGBT policy in the Florida school system was such a perfect example of how mind-numbingly intricate these supposedly-straightforward culture war issues are when you get down to the individuals trying to deal with them in daily life.
On BARpod and other outlets the last few days, I've repeatedly seen a comment along these lines: "Child sexual abuse occurs on a regular basis; therefore, how can anyone have the audacity to question the veracity of the Ohio abortion story."
The fallacious thinking on display is the assumption that because a general phenomenon occurs, we should never question the details of any specific story.
Someone can tell me, "my car flipped over six times, caught fire and I walked away without a scratch". Does the fact that in general, car accidents occur every single day everywhere preclude me from questioning the veracity of the account I was told?
Glenn Kessler never questioned the prevalence of child sexual assault; he questioned a specific story that had rather sensational details. While the story turned out to be true, there is no reason to abandon healthy skepticism, as K&J note.
Are there any ob/gyn or pediatricians on this board who can give solid stats on the probability of a 10 year old becoming pregnant? I'm curious if this story truly is a unicorn. Telling us that 10 year olds get assaulted tells us nothing about the size of the subset who get pregnant.
Some commenters keep throwing around a stat about the number of Ohio girls under 15 getting abortions. But I haven't seen a breakdown of the ages: maybe 48 out of 50 girls are at least 13-14 and the 10 year old is anomaly.
Aside from all the posturing on both sides, let's hope the child recovers and can lead a normal life
One think that I think is getting ignored here is the long shadow the murder of Dr. George Tiller has cast over how abortion providers think about the personal risk they're running. The way the right-wing media (and government) has made Dr. Bernard the center of attacks is fairly scary for that reason, and even before this she, like many public abortion providers, faced personal threats. In that context, I think a reluctance to share more information than strictly necessary with the media is understandable.
I'm also not sure I understand the reaction to the story's confirmation in the same way Katie does. Perhaps some media people were insensitive (I didn't personally see it), but saying that the vindication shouldn't be emphatically pointed out because we should be allowing the traumatized patient privacy seems to miss the point that this entire situation is political. This girl's right to an abortion in her home state was eliminated, and publicizing the situation is necessary to pointing out the horrific consequences of abortion restrictions.
I used to say I wanted more local media, but then I look at Seattle's local media and.... do I? Seattle has fantastic wall to wall coverage of anything transit and bike trails but not much else. There is only one crime reporter! And the people covering homelessness are hopeless ideologues (usually Stranger alumni). I stopped listening to KUOW during the Trump years because to say the jumped the shark, I mean they jumped to the pool with the shark.
Please do an episode about Erica C Barnett. The world deserves to know.
This episode has to be the thinnest media criticism from Jessie and Katie that I have ever heard. They end up bitching back and forth about whether some people did or didn’t say things in they way that they would have. Not really compelling arguments, you two.
How has neither of you ever spackled?! It’s when you’ve got a small hole in the wall and you fill it with that white putty stuff. (Which is called, wait for it, spackle.)
At the 12 minute mark, both hosts describe the rape story as “horrible” (which it is), and it’s the perfect distillation of east coast vs west coast accents.
Katie, if you encounter a WSJ or NYT paywall, you should be able to find the story via your local WA library (e.g., here: https://ezproxy.krl.org/login?url=https://proquest.com/wallstreetjournal?accountid=1165). You've already paid for it with your taxes!
I used to compulsively pick my face. Now I compulsively pick apart panic tweets of internet "journalists". While also picking my face.
This whole sordid story is one of the saddest I’ve ever heard. Eventually this kid will grow up and be a spokeswoman for one side or the other and on and on it churns and grinds. Poor kid. Anybody else just want to scoop her up in a big hug and run away?
Speaking from what might be a more pro-life perspective than Jesse and Katie, it is self-evidently true that Republican state legislatures make everything worse and can’t seem to draft a sensible law to save their lives, much less their electoral fortunes.
I fear that this is a subset of a general case, that all state legislatures have been pretty powerless and irrelevant to an increasingly nationalized culture warry politics that they were free to just be the JV team for performative virtue signaling BS.
If such institutions are going to continue to exist, I worry that we’re going to have to endure a lot of shitty lawmaking that leads to people being thrown out in outrage.