What an astonishing coincidence!
Sometimes strange things happen that may seem to have some sort of causal relationship with one’s actions, but are really just pure coincidence. The classic example would be "street light interference phenomenon" — people who believe that, when they approach street lights, those street lights are disproportionately more likely to turn off. While boring reality suggests that, actually, the mysterious phenomenon is primarily a product of confirmation bias, to one experiencing it, the effect can seem pretty profound. Similarly, while it’s no doubt purely coincidental, it can certainly seem suspicious that John Ashe, former president of the United Nations General Assembly, accidentally crushed his own throat two days before he was set to testify against Hillary Clinton. Man, what are the chances?
The New York Post’s Page Six reported that after Ashe was found dead Wednesday, the U.N. claimed that he had died from a heart attack. Local police officers in Dobbs Ferry, New York, later disputed that claim, saying instead that he died from a workout accident that crushed his throat. [Lack of italics original]
I suppose I’m not a coroner, so what do I know, but is it very easy to mistake a crushed throat for a heart attack? What another astonishing coincidence! If I didn’t know any better, I might think this was an obvious murder and sloppy cover-up. It must get lonely being Hillary Clinton, what with everybody close to her mysteriously dying all the time. At least this guy had the decency not to write two suicide notes and then shoot himself with two different guns like Admiral Jeremy Boorda did, which made things look even more awkward for the poor, put-upon victim of institutional patriarchy.
Objection!
Your humble narrator never ceases to be amazed at the way innovations on the free market end-run people’s expectations. Whether it’s Uber or Airbnb, the iPhone or those K-cup coffee makers, it seems like somebody’s always inventing something that seems obvious in retrospect, but blows people away when it’s first introduced. So too have the 80s just had their expectations subverted. Back in the 80s, everybody assumed that robots were the future, and that, before long, we’d have robot police that can fight crime. Well, welcome to the year 2016, where we have the world’s first robot lawyer fighting the police.
DoNotPay uses a simple chat-based interface to guide users through a range of basic questions to establish if an appeal on their parking ticket is possible.
These include queries on whether there were any visible parking signs at the location where the ticket was given.
The AI lawyer then guides the user through the lengthy appeals process.
That is awesome. I’ll be honest with you, though; I’m only writing this line so I can build some dramatic tension before the next thing I’m going to quote:
The chatbot is the brainchild of 19-year-old British student and self-taught coder Joshua Browder.[Italics added]
It’s not that I regret being a famous internet pundit and all, but I’m beginning to think I’ve wasted my entire life; when I was nineteen, I failed to invent any robot lawyers at all, to say nothing of inventing one that’s saved a hundred and sixty thousand people from the government’s traffic extortion scam. I also wasn’t awesome enough to say anything like this:
I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society. These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.
Joshua Browder, you’re my hero.
I don’t see how this plan could fail
It’s fairly well-known — and thoroughly denied by all the respectable sorts — that the wave of refugees flooding through Europe have a bit of a problem conforming to European standards of social conduct, propriety, and non-raping-ness. Don’t worry, though, the Swedish police have a plan: they’re issuing wristbands to girls that have "don’t touch me" printed on them. No, that’s true.
The press release announced that police intend to equip young women with wristbands with the slogan "don’t touch me". This will happen over the summer, at festivals and other events for young people. "By wearing these wristbands," Sweden’s police chief said, "young women will be able to make a stand".
It is unclear how effective the wristbands, which read "don’t touch me" in Swedish, will be in preventing attacks, as the majority of sex attack perpetrators are thought to be recent migrants who are unlikely to be able to read them.
Mr. Eliasson suggested that by wearing these accessories, women would also be able to "draw attention to the issue [of sexual assault], and urge those affected to report".
I think I speak for the entire internet when I say that this "raising awareness" nonsense has clearly gone entirely too far. Never mind Breitbart’s bizarre contention that the trouble is that immigrants may not be able to read the bracelets — clearly the key problem is that potential rapists are in no way going to care what the bracelet says. Expecting that one can prevent rape with "don’t touch me" wristbands is of a piece with believing that "gun-free zones" will somehow prevent shootings.
It’s about time
I’ve written several times in these pages about the undeniable fact that every single campus hate crime turns out to be a hoax. Well, this week I’m pleased to report two campus hate crimes that appear to be true! First, there’s the astonishingly evil act committed by a nine-year-old boy, who was overheard using insensitive racist hate words like "brownies." Never mind that he was clearly, obviously referring to the ubiquitous fudge cookie bars beloved by children everywhere and also Alice B. Toklas — he could have been saying derogatory things about black people, and this was all the excuse necessary to call the police on him. Why on Earth would they do that?
It was decided that any incident that could be deemed criminal should be reported to authorities, even something "as minor as a simple name-calling incident that the school would typically handle internally," Police Chief Kevin Carey said.
A "simple name-calling incident" is now truly criminal behavior? It’s somewhat astonishing to me that literally everybody I knew when I was in grade school was such a hardened repeat felon. Let’s not, of course, lose sight of the fact that the traumatized child in question didn’t even call anybody a name in the first place before the government schools loosed the government attack dogs on him. I suppose it’s all just because of his unquestionable horrible intolerable white privilege, which I assume he inherited from his mother: Stacy dos Santos.
In case that’s not hateful enough for one week, it doesn’t even hold a candle to the hate crime perpetrated on the campus of Skidmore College, where not one but two female professors — one of whom has "immigrant parentage" — were subjected to the horrible hate terror assault of students writing "make America great again" on their whiteboards.
The interesting thing, of course, is that petty tyrants who want to crush the freedom of speech often fall back on the tired old phony shibboleth that the First Amendment was never intended to protect any sort of nasty or rude thing one might say, but was in fact only designed to protect "political" speech. It’s difficult to apprehend how speech could be more political than endorsing a candidate running for public office by reprinting — verbatim — that candidate’s official campaign slogan, with no editorial content whatsoever, but apparently the magical fairies of Social Justice Land have figured this one out too:
These seemingly connected reports suggest a pattern of using the idea of political speech to target specific members of the Skidmore community with biased messaging.
As such, the BRG does not interpret these messages as political speech but as racialized, targeted attacks. BRG has asked Campus Safety to document all similar messaging while patrolling Campus.
You heard it here, folks: the actual things spoken are no longer relevant to "hate speech" status; all that matters is some feckless bureaucrat’s personal judgment of the speaker’s internal thoughts. If it’s possible to be more officially through the looking glass than this, it escapes me how.
All of which, of course, shouldn’t be taken as an indication that there are no longer any prohibited words. Fortunately for all of us, we have the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill spending money mulcted from taxpayers to produce utter idiocy like guides to understanding microaggressions. The new list of microaggressions includes such horrible, uncivilized behavior as telling a woman you like her shoes, taking a Christmas vacation, golfing, and having a "husband" or a "wife."
The two lady authors of the UNC Chapel Hill microagressions guide are Sharbari Dey, an assistant director of multicultural affairs, and Krista Prince, a dorm life coordinator.
In order to counter the multitude of microagressions listed in their document, Dey and Prince advise students to respond by interrupting and aggressively asking, "What did you mean by that?"
So according to these two nitwits, the appropriate response to imaginary microaggression is regular aggression. Awesome. To its credit, as of press time, UNC Chapel Hill appears to have removed the ridiculous guide from its web site, but that doesn’t change the takeaway lesson here: if you or somebody you love is in one of these incubators of insanity, get out now before every single one of your brains leaks out through your nose and stains your gender-neutral multicultural wardrobe.