#humans regularly rally around and support bad people

[aninkwellofnectar]

If I wasn't already blackpilled knowing that the person who's been stalking and harassing me for over half a year is still happily cultivating a platform on the basis of calling me a violent racist (without naming me outright) would sure do it!

[ruminativerabbi]

Vulnerability

Vulnerability has a bad rep in our world. In fact, what we all long for is precisely the opposite: to feel invulnerable, impervious to incoming danger, safe and secure not only when we hide under our beds in the dark of night but when we are out and about in the world. But we—speaking of society as a whole but also of us ourselves as individuals—we may have moved a bit quickly in that regard and not sufficiently thoughtfully. Being paralyzed with fear about dangers that are highly unlikely to come our way—that kind of vulnerability is definitely something negative that all who can should avoid. But owning up to the vulnerability that inheres in the human condition itself is in a different category entirely. As this last pandemic year has taught us all too well, it is only a sign of maturity and self-awareness to own up to the degree to which we can fall prey to a virus so tiny that you’d need an electron microscope to see it at all and to behave accordingly. And waving away that danger as fake news because you don’t choose to acknowledge your own vulnerability is not a sign of courage or valor, but of lunacy born of a witch’s brew of foolishness, naiveté, and arrogance.

As I prepared myself for surgery last week, I was feeling exceedingly vulnerable. I lay in bed at night talking to my heart, asking why it wasn’t just doing its thing properly on its own, why it was intent on betraying me after all these years of me not burdening it by smoking cigarettes or consuming huge quantities of trans fat. Didn’t I deserve better? I certainly thought I did! But now that the whole procedure is behind me and I’m feeling healthy and fortunate to live in an age of miracles (and if having a non-functioning valve in your heart replaced without them having to open your chest and then being sent home the next day to recuperate doesn’t qualify as a miracle, then what would?)—now that all that is behind me, I see that intense vulnerability that I was feeling in the days leading up to last Thursday in a much less negative light. Yes, there are people who live in terror of an asteroid colliding with the Earth. (For NASA’s own statement about the likelihood of that happening, click here. We’re apparently good for at least the next couple of centuries.) But that’s not the kind of slightly obsessive vulnerability I want to promote as healthy and sane, but rather the kind that speaks not to fantasy but to reality. To the fact that our hearts are not made of steel and that our bones really do crack quite easily. To the fact that, despite all we do to suggest that the opposite is true, we are mortal beings lucky to be gifted with a few score years to wander the earth, to do whatever good we can, to leave behind some sort of legacy for our descendants to contemplate positively once we ourselves are no longer around to be contemplated in person. Feeling vulnerable because the human condition is vulnerability itself—that isn’t craziness or obsessivity, just an honest appraisal of how things are in this world we all share for as long as we do.

These were the thoughts I had in mind as I read the report in the paper the other day about people coming to shul last Shabbat on 16th Avenue in Boro Park last week only to be greeted by men gathered in front of the synagogue screaming “Kill the Jews” and “Free Palestine.” Which kind of vulnerable did those people feel, I wonder—the silly kind (because there weren’t that many hooligans in front of the synagogue, because the cops showed up almost instantly, because the bad guys didn’t actually have guns with them or bombs, and because they fled the scene once they realized how completely outnumbered they were about to become) or the wise kind rooted in a fully rational appraisal of how things are in this world we share with so many who seem to feel entirely justified in their bigotry and prejudice and who appear mostly to have no problem putting both on full display for all to admire? (For an account of the Boro Park incident, click here.) I’m hardly an alarmist who sees a pogrom around every corner. But, of course, it’s hardly an example of alarmism to be alarmed when truly alarming things happen. Maybe I’ve read too many books about Germany in the 1930s. Or maybe not.

We have entered into a new stage, a dangerous and upsetting one. At first, the stories appeared random. A twenty-nine-year-old man wearing a kippah was beat up in Times Square as he tried to make his way to a pro-Israel rally. Then, a day or two later, a group of thugs wearing keffiyehs invaded a restaurant on 40th Street and started spitting on patrons they suspected of being Jewish. Next we heard about people being attacked in the Diamond District on 47th Street, where it isn’t ever hard to come across some Jewish businesspeople or shoppers.  Two days later we were back in Times Square, this time watching footage of a Jewish man being knocked to the ground and beaten in front of the TKTS buttke where they used to sell last-minute tickets to unsold-out Broadway shows when the theaters were open.  Nor is this just a New York thing: the police in L.A. are currently investigating an attack on outside diners at a Japanese restaurant as an anti-Semitic hate crime that occurred the same day that a family of four was terrorized in Bal Harbour, Florida, by a group of men threatening to rape the wife and daughter and yelling “Die Jews” and “Free Palestine” at them. I could go on. There have been similar incidents in New Jersey, Illinois, Utah, Arizona, and several other states. And although I’m focused here mostly on American incidents, the rise in this kind of hate crime is not specifically an American phenomenon: we’ve read of similar, even worse, incidents just lately in London, in Germany, and in Italy.

The question is how to respond, not whether we should. The fantasy that complaining only makes things worse needs to be laid to rest permanently and irrevocably. (The Jewish community could learn a good lesson in that regard from Black America, where it was once also imagined that responding publicly to racism would only make things worse. It’s hard to imagine any Black citizens putting that argument forth today, yet I hear it from Jewish Americans regularly.) Nor can we allow ourselves the luxury of imagining that this dramatic uptick in anti-Jewish violence is “about” Israel. Israel’s recent war with Hamas was, in my opinion, entirely justified. I can see how people might feel otherwise, and even strongly so. But I know too much history—and specifically too much Jewish history—to indulge in the fantasy that anti-Semitism is “about” anything other than the hatred of Jewish people, Judaism, and Jewishness itself. No matter how many shows an actor appears in, he’s the same person under all of the costumes he gets paid to wear on stage.

I myself have lived a blessed life. Born just eight and a half years after the Nazis were murdering up to twelve thousand people a day at Auschwitz, I have hardly ever encountered real anti-Semitism directed directly at me personally. (And I speak as someone who spent several years living in Germany in the 1980s.) Nonetheless, sensitivity to anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence is the hallmark of my Jewishness, the foundation upon which my eager willingness to live my life as a public, fully-identified, and unambiguously-identifiable Jewish person rests. And that is why I am disinclined to wave away the latest series of anti-Semitic incidents in New York and elsewhere as a random set of creepy one-time events—nor would anyone describe that way who has ever read a book about the history of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. For people eager to dine at my table, I recommend Walter Laqueurs’s The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day  as your appetizer, Léon Poliakov’s four-volume History of Anti-Semitism as your main course with a side serving of David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. For dessert, I  recommend Deborah Lipstadt’s Antisemitism: Here and Now. I can promise you that you won’t be hungry when you’re done.

There have been encouraging signs too, of course. President Biden has spoken out sharply and strongly against the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents, calling them despicable and condemning them unequivocally as “hateful behavior.” We have heard similarly supportive rhetoric from Governor Cuomo, Mayor Di Blasio, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. So that’s good. But will any of the actual sonim out to harm Jews hold back because of a presidential tweet or a senatorial press release?  On the other hand, there were seventeen thousand tweets disseminated by Twitter last week that contained some version of the words “Hitler was right.” Just wait until they find out that the President considers them despicable!

I don’t mean to sound unhappy that supportive, unambiguous language denouncing anti-Semitism has emanated from the highest offices in the land. Just to the contrary, I am thrilled that our leadership has spoken out so boldly and clearly. But I also don’t imagine it will matter until it is deemed just as unacceptable to speak disparagingly about Jews in public as it is—at least in all places that decent people gather and live—to espouse hate-fueled violence against Black people or Asian-Americans, or any other American minority. And that will take—at least in some quarters—a sea change of attitude that can only be accomplished through the kind of ongoing educative process capable of moving society forward. How to do that, I’m not sure. But I am sure that that is the challenge the new normal has laid at our feet. And I am as sure about that as I am that these recent incidents, for all they come dressed up as part of the Israeli-Palestinian controversy, have nothing at all to do with Middle Eastern politics and everything to do with the unique place anti-Jewishness continues to occupy in Western culture as the one remaining version of bigotry to which otherwise normal and nice people can still openly subscribe without suffering much for their views. Or at all.

[theculturedmarxist]

By Anis Shivani, whose recent political books include Why Did Trump Win?, Confronting American Fascism, and A Radical Human Rights Solution to the Immigration Problem. He is the author of many critically-acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including, most recently, A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less

Forcing the March 17 primaries in Florida, Arizona and Illinois to go forward, despite reports of exceedingly low turnout throughout the day (which miraculously and quite expectedly turned into higher turnouts than 2016 in both Florida and Arizona by the time the final reporting came in), was the last straw. This farce occurred despite the Ohio governor postponing their primary on the same day. This slap in the face of voters was then compounded by the even worse parody of the April 7 Wisconsin primary being allowed to go ahead at the peak of the pandemic, with polling stations vastly reduced (from 180 to just 5 in Milwaukee alone) and absentee ballots often not received or recorded, while maintaining the pretense that somehow all of this constituted a legitimate election.

In the middle of the pandemic, with the entire nation considering a de facto lockdown and many communities already there, the DNC was hell-bent on driving the final nail in the coffin of the youth movement, even though the Sanders campaign had suspended GOTV efforts, for obvious reasons, and even if Biden never really had a presence in any of the latest round of states.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, where many polling stations were shut down, in-person turnout was reportedly higher by 10,000 people than in 2016! And that’s just one representative example from the March 17 primary states. Furthermore, the DNC threatened the remaining primary states against postponing their elections for health reasons, preempting moves similar to those made by Louisiana, Georgia and others. The stage is being set for a virtual convention, followed by the possible resurgence of the illness in the fall to orchestrate a virtual general election. Social distancing has come in handily as the most convenient antidote to political solidarity. Biden has already made it clear that he’s not the least bit interested in making any real overtures toward bereft progressives, just as Hillary wasn’t after her forceful seizure of the nomination in 2016.

When they stopped counting the vote in Iowa, depriving the leading candidate of essential momentum, it was a clear indication that once again the party establishment would do everything to manipulate results in favor of yet another neoliberal avatar bound to lose to Trump in an ignominious landslide—which is actually what the Democratic party establishment wants, four more years of their demonized opponent rather than the tiniest return toward social decency. Nothing about the coronavirus changes this essential dynamic.

That’s how bad the Democratic party has become, blatantly tipping the scales toward their favored outcome in order to maintain oligarchic control, and they expect us to Vote Blue No Matter Who?

We’re asked to believe that the candidate who supported ordinary people at the grassroots level all across the country, by lending crucial support to strikesand direct action, spawning innumerable viable candidacies at the local and state levels, and regularly summoning many thousands of people to populist rallies calling for basic human decency, was easily defeated by a cognitively challenged Wall Street shill who has backed every economic and foreign policy barbarity of the last 50 years, and who cannot be put in a small gym with a few dozen people without descending into furious spittles of verbal aggression.

We’re supposed to trust that the candidate with a pervasive national presence for the last five years was suddenly, in a matter of 72 hours, annihilated by the geezer who had zero volunteers, staff or advertising in any of the states he miraculously turned around by 20, 30 or 40 points.

It’s time to put an end to this sham, because we can’t accede to this level of duplicity without ourselves becoming complicit in the madness. Trump essentially terminated the neoliberal Republican party in one election cycle, but because the Democratic party establishment is more entrenched and dangerous, the prime carrier of the neoliberal virus to which the Republicans are just accessories, it is the more difficult enemy to beat.

To recap some of what we have seen from the great minds trying to herd us all into submission toward Hillary 2.0, the dementia version:

·        Herd 29 Trojan horses into the race, all pretending to be some version of or alternative to the clear ideological victor from 2016, and all of them unmasking themselves at appropriate stages of the race (three of them at the last moment before South Carolina) in order to maximize damage to one candidate alone.

·        Insist on a series of parodic debates orchestrating various degrees of hostility toward the lone populist, and focusing outlandish attention on marginal candidates rather than giving the front-runner his due.

·        Engineer the Iowa vote-counting catastrophe without anyone taking responsibility, and DNC chair Tom Perez not only not resigning but feeling empowered to engender further chaos.

·        Repeat all the instances of voter suppression in close simulation of all the 2016 states, as if to thumb their noses at any semblance of voting integrity.

·        Be part of closely coordinated media campaigns harping on electability, centrism and moderation, to the point where the liberal media (the Times, CNN, MSNBC) become indistinguishable from campaign opponents and the party apparatus. For the first three months of the year, the New York Times turned into a chorus of single-minded “Never Bernie” propaganda, exceeding even their “Never Trump” loathing of four years ago.

·        Recruit Barack Obama to save Biden’s hide when he remained the last one standing, with the same ominous figures from 2016 (Jim “there will be no free education” Clyburn, Harry “get the culinary workers to caucus for Hillary” Reid, and others) reprising to the finest detail the same walk-on bits they played last time.

·        Keep changing debate rules, by permitting entry to a last-minute white knight in the form of Michael Bloomberg, and the more recent rule change to prevent Tulsi Gabbard the opportunity of taking down Biden.

·        Keep the option of cheating the delegate leader at the convention alive throughout the campaign, rather than stamping it out as a no-go in order to preserve the credibility of primary voting.

·        Express no displeasure at clear voter suppression in Texas and California, or curiosity about strange exit poll versus final results in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine and Minnesota, which showed unprecedented swings toward Biden.

Is this enough manipulation for you?

Sanders more than abided by party decorum for the last four years. Ever since he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later yielded to Chuck Schumer’s request to join the senate leadership, he has been the most faithful of team players, observing every nicety and going along with the party line to the extent that there is no direct contradiction with his principles. The least he could have expected in return was a token amount of fair play, to let his social welfare philosophy compete on equal grounds with neoliberalism, yet this was vehemently denied.

At this point, is he obligated to play by the rules? Are we, if we are to draw obvious conclusions from the evidence at hand?

The Democratic party would much rather see Trump reelected by nominating a flawed neoliberal candidate with as much baggage and who is as associated with the recent Clinton failure as is Biden. Think about it: the party we’re supposed to get behind actually prefers fascism over the mildest concessions to social democracy, in order that the entire power structure might persist unchanged. For the sake of denying the slightest help to poor, debt-burdened, sick and unemployed people, this party would rather have untrammeled white nationalism, immigrants in concentration camps, and accelerated income inequality, as though we could sustain any more of it than we already have.

To defeat a handful of broadly popular proposals to address economic inequality, the Democratic party facilitated the entry of a former Republican mayor who administered the harassment of Muslims and minorities after 9/11, who gave over his city to unaccountable developers and oligarchs, and who happens to be the world’s ninth-richest person—not just a billionaire, of the kind Sanders is railing against, but one 60 times over.

And when that didn’t fly, because of said plutocrat’s manifest misogyny, racism and class privilege, they went back to their original choice, the freewheeling politico Wall Street loves to love, the senator from MBNA, the secret manipulator behind every bad trade deal and Wall Street giveaway and incarceration mania and war of choice of the last 50 years. The party Sanders has chosen to be loyal to knows that either of those candidates, the Manhattan multi-billionaire or the Delaware political enabler, would handily lose to Trump, but the idea is to keep playing the game, to engage us all in a performance that pretends to be even-handed. We wait patiently for health care and public education and a living wage, while we die in the meantime.

The party of death has demonstrated again and again in this primary campaign that its sole objective is to discredit left populism, even if it means abetting the growing dominance of fascist populism. The party we’re supposed to fall behind is the real facilitator, not the Republican party, because it is actively preventing an electable alternative to Trump, as shown in all the polls of the last five years.

The “woke” wing of the Democratic party—which is identical to the neoliberal wing in acting all high-and-mighty toward working-class folks, otherwise known as deplorables—precisely duplicated its machinations from 2016, when Hillary Clinton was said to be the victim of the angry Bernie Bros, a more ridiculous myth than which was never heard in a presidential campaign.

The woke crowd, who universally refused to support Sanders (whose campaign is a sincere homage to the Poor People’s Campaign run by Martin Luther King, Jr., or FDR’s economic bill of rights, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program), got behind a series of identity politics-driven candidates, culminating in the last one to leave the race, who immediately got busy gaslighting the Sanders movement for its alleged misogyny. The woke wing was a fraud all along, they never did care to help actual working people with actual debilities. We knew it in 2016 and we know it even better now.

All the fallacies the Democratic party has exploited over five decades reached an extreme form of hypocrisy in the 2020 campaign. The least electable candidates were professionally sold as the most electable ones. Extremism on behalf of inequality and deprivation of basic human rights was packaged as moderate centrism. Sustained media campaigns were run against anyone questioning these straitjackets of thought, labeling us enemies of the people for wanting to help the people.

Emerging from his year-long sloth, Biden made it his mission to trash every element of Sanders’s “political revolution,” even in its most benign demands for a level playing field, which was the sum of the political gangsterism he so adeptly deployed at the March 15 debate, knowing he had the full backing of the party in shunning any move toward the kind of universal programs young voters demand.

Would Sanders supporters not be justified in abandoning this zombie party once and for all, if we do not end up with a fair electoral outcome, as it looks like we’re not going to while this primary fizzles out to an uncertain close? Are we not morally obligated to look for an alternative beyond, past and around this failed shell of a party?

In 2004 and again in 2016 they ran empty, fake, invisible campaigns once the primaries were over, with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton literally disappearing from the campaign trail for weeks at a time. They’d rather have Bush reelected then, and Trump reelected now, than raise the minimum wage to $15, make public college free again, or do something to save the planet from its runaway environmental crisis. While Sanders was responding like FDR II to address the public health emergency, Biden was nowhere to be seen.

We learned during this campaign that the all-time great woke candidate beloved of the wine cave class, namely the president upon whose nostalgic fumes we wish to resurrect a ghostly figure, is more willing than anyone else to stop the first stirrings of social democracy and do everything he can to maintain the chokehold of neoliberalism or neofascism.

The clarion call issued by the “Democratic” president of surveillance, wars, deportation and budget cuts appealed to the lowest instincts of career politicians in South Carolina and across the country as they  forcefully jerked us back to where we were supposed to stay. This former president, like the recent troop of candidates, is explicitly against Medicare for All, and every other basic demand this moment of social distress cries out for. Biden and his cronies in the party are willing to go no further than trying to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act; even after the virus escalation, universal programs of the kind Sanders’s movement calls for are nowhere within range of their consideration.

The Democratic party wants to crush the joy and life out of youth, pretending that they don’t come out to vote, and that the entire machinery of politics should be aimed at keeping the country delicately balanced between one half meritocrats and one half deplorables, appealing to a minute number of antiquated voters in Ohio and Florida in order to maintain policy stasis. They gaslight us into thinking that actual social justice aspirants of diverse races and backgrounds, rather than the fake white woke influencers, are the real problem because of our hostility. They impose “party unity” and discipline in the service of continuing the very power structure that has given us unsustainable debt and unaffordability of basic human conveniences. When confronted by enthusiastic participation in Democratic primaries, mainly the responsibility of one Bernard Sanders of Vermont, they counter with the embodiment of the darkest hells of plutocracy, namely Michael Bloomberg. As expected, they have already used the coronavirus crisis to shut down any remaining trace of political idealism, because in this moment of emergency we cannot expect anything better than to bow down to the former president’s faithful old lapdog.

The Democratic party of 2020, after more than 50 years of succumbing to a murderous form of capitalism, is not just a flawed vehicle for any sort of political renaissance. Why should we legitimize them by leaping around their phantom carousel, wearing colorful costumes and clown hats on the fairgrounds, when they won’t give us a ticket, when they tear it up if we do have one, and when there’s always a guard hanging around to bash our skulls in case we utter a cry of joy at some little win?

They are all but compelling us to leave the party. Will we have the imagination to do so at last in a mass exodus?

[orbemnews]

Elon Musk, GameStop and the C.E.O. as Internet Troll Just weeks before Elon Musk became the richest person in the world thanks to the soaring value of Tesla shares, the eccentric billionaire reflected on the fickle nature of the public markets. “The stock market is a strange thing,” Mr. Musk said in an interview with Business Insider in December. “It’s like having a manic depressive who’s constantly telling you how much your company’s worth. And sometimes they have a good day, and sometimes they have a bad day, but the company is basically the same. The public markets are crazy.” A month later, Mr. Musk has inserted himself into one of the most confounding stock market dramas in years — the multibillion-dollar battle over GameStop being waged between elite hedge funds and retail investors communicating on Reddit. On Tuesday, as GameStop shares skyrocketed, Mr. Musk weighed in with a one-word tweet — “Gamestonk!!” — and a link to the Reddit forum where much of the discussion has unfolded. Mr. Musk’s message was seen as an endorsement of sorts from one of the most powerful figures on the web, and in the days that followed, investors bid up the price of GameStop to new highs. It is a spectacle tailor-made for Mr. Musk’s live-wire online persona. He is at once a capitalist hero, a glossy magazine celebrity and a bomb-throwing troll with 44 million Twitter followers, inhabiting his role as the chief executive of two major companies with a bravado that most corporate leaders wouldn’t dream of. The richest man in the world is also, somehow, a hero to the anti-establishment crowd, riling up the digital masses one tweet at a time. A master of self-promotion, Mr. Musk regularly posts earnest messages about Tesla, his electric car company, and SpaceX, his private spaceflight company. At the same time, he hangs out with Kanye West, dates a pop star, and named his most recent child X AE A-Xii. And he seems to have the internet coursing through his veins — he is fluent in meme culture, attuned to the neuroses of the web’s hive-mind, quick to reply to almost anyone and happy to throw digital haymakers at his detractors. The jarring mix of highbrow success and a willingness to bash around on the fringes of the web has made him the consummate insider outsider. On Wednesday, Mr. Musk, who is worth some $180 billion, tweeted that Discord, a freewheeling communications app that shut down a forum popular with GameStop traders for offensive language, was going “corpo,” or corporate. “In many ways he reminds me of Steve Jobs,” said Walter Isaacson, who wrote a book about Mr. Jobs, the outspoken Apple co-founder. “He’s got an absolute passion for his products, and he’s very unvarnished. He doesn’t polish himself for public consumption, especially when he’s communicating on the web.” The GameStop saga is a generational clash and a referendum on who controls the markets, pitting an army of retail investors — many of them young digital natives — against hedge fund short-sellers, who had bet that GameStop stock would fall. And in this war, Mr. Musk is most assuredly not rooting for Wall Street. A self-made billionaire, Mr. Musk has a particular animus for short sellers. For years, powerful investors bet that Tesla stock would fall. In 2018, that pressure, combined with production glitches at Tesla and a personal life in tumult, pushed Mr. Musk to the brink. He said on Twitter that he was considering taking Tesla private for $420 a share, and railed against short sellers in an emotional interview with The New York Times. On Thursday, as some trading platforms restricted investors from buying GameStop shares — a move that helped short sellers — Mr. Musk tweeted that “shorting is a scam legal only for vestigial reasons.” A representative for Mr. Musk declined to make him available for an interview. In other tweets, he supported calls to make short selling illegal, and got behind Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s calls for an inquiry into Robinhood, one of the apps that restricted investors from buying GameStop stock. “Here come the shorty apologists,” he wrote in yet another message. “Give them no respect Get Shorty.” It was hardly the polished prose preferred by most chief executives, but Mr. Musk speaks the language of the web. “Twitter’s algorithms love one-word responses that inspire a lot of rage or affection,” said Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University. “Elon Musk is sort of the master of that.” His penchant for spouting off online has landed him in legal trouble. After his tweet about taking Tesla private, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued him, and as part of a settlement, he agreed to have his tweets vetted by communications professionals. Months later, Mr. Musk was sending unsupervised tweets about material information once more, and the S.E.C. asked him to be held in contempt of court. In another episode, Mr. Musk was sued for $190 million by a cave explorer who Mr. Musk labeled a “pedo guy” on Twitter, after the diver, who helped save Thai schoolboys trapped in a cave, was critical of Mr. Musk’s plan to use a submarine as part of the rescue effort. Mr. Musk testified, and was found not to have defamed the explorer. And at times, Mr. Musk has railed against the media, prompting his followers to attack his adversaries. In 2018, he used Twitter to disparage several outlets including Reuters and CNBC, and leveled personal attacks at a Business Insider reporter, who was then harassed by legions of Mr. Musk’s followers. “He revels in shocking people and saying things that are outrageous,” said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor. “And at least as of today, he has demonstrated that these outrageous actions can pay off, so he clearly feels emboldened.” Mr. Musk does not appear to be one of the traders bidding up GameStop. He told Business Insider that the only public company stock he owns is Tesla, and that he plans to use his wealth to colonize the cosmos. “I think it is important for humanity to become a space-faring civilization and a multiplanet species,” he said. “I want to be able to contribute as much as possible to the city on Mars. That means just a lot of capital.” Mr. Musk has more capital these days. The value of Tesla stock has ballooned in recent months, with the company’s market capitalization seemingly divorced from its modest financial performance in the real world, a dynamic not unlike what is happening at GameStop. Mr. Musk himself in May tweeted that Tesla stock was “too high.” And while shares dipped lower upon those remarks, they have risen steadily since then, allowing Mr. Musk to eclipse Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, as the richest man alive. (The two men now toggle back and forth for that spot.) The run-up in Tesla stock had another impact too: Last year, short sellers who bet against Tesla lost an estimated $38 billion. As the Tesla rally gained steam in July, Mr. Musk could not contain his glee, lashing out at his doubters and his chief regulator in the same breath. “Tesla will make fabulous short shorts in radiant red satin with gold trim,” he tweeted, announcing a limited edition garment from the electric carmaker. “Will send some to the Shortseller Enrichment Commission to comfort them through these difficult times.” Source link Orbem News #CEO #Elon #GameStop #Internet #Musk #troll

[bluewatsons]

Morris Hoffman, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Neo-Rehabilitationism, and Judicial Collectivism: The Least Dangerous Branch Becomes The Most Dangerous, 29 Fordham Urb L J 2063 (2002)

Introduction

The movement that calls itself "therapeutic jurisprudence"' is both ineffective and dangerous, in almost the same way that its predecessor—the rehabilitative movement that became popular in the 1930s and was abandoned in the 1970s—was both ineffective and dangerous. Drug use, shoplifting, and graffiti are no more treatable today than juvenile delinquency was treatable in the 1930s. The renewed fiction that complex human behaviors can be dealt with as if they are simple diseases gives the judicial branch the same kind of unchecked and ineffective powers that led to the abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1970s. In fact, this new strain of rehabilitationism has produced a judiciary more intrusive, more institutionally insensitive and therefore more dangerous than the critics of the rehabilitative ideal could ever have imagined.

I. The Real Face of Therapeutic Jurisprudence

In a drug court in Washington, D.C., the judge roams around the courtroom like a daytime TV talk show host, complete with microphone in hand.' Her drug treatment methods include showing movies to the predominantly African-American defendants, including a movie called White Man's Birth.3 She often begins her drug court sessions by talking to the "clients"4 about the movies, and then focusing the discussion on topics like "racism, justice, and equality."5 The judge explains her cinemagraphic approach to jurisprudence this way:

Obviously they need to talk about their own problems and what leads to them, but I also think that it's good to have distractions in life. I've found out that if there are periods of your life when you are unhappy, sometimes going out to see an interesting movie or going out with a friend and talking about something else, or going to the gym to work out, these kinds of things can help you through a bad day.6

After the film discussion, the session begins in earnest. Defendants who are not doing well are scolded and sometimes told stories, often apocryphal, about the fates that have befallen other uncooperative defendants or the drug court judge's own friends and family members.7 Some defendants are jailed for short periods of time and/or regressed to stricter treatment regimens, and eventually some are sentenced to prison.8 The audience applauds defendants who are doing well, and the judge hands out mugs and pens to the compliant. The judge regularly gives motivational speeches that are part mantra and part pep rally. Here is a typical example:

Judge: Where is Mr. Stevens? Mr. Stevens is moving right along too. Right?

Stevens: Yep.

Judge: How come? How come it is going so great?

Stevens: I made a choice.

Judge: You made a choice. Why did you do that? Why did you make that choice? What helped you to make up your mind to do it?

Stevens: There had to be a better way than the way I was doing it.

Judge: What was wrong with the way you were living? What didn't you like about it?

Stevens: It was wild.

Judge: It was wild, like too dangerous? Is that what you mean by wild?

Stevens: Dangerous.

Judge: Too dangerous, for you personally, like a bad roller coaster ride. So, what do you think? Is this new life boring?

Stevens: No, not at all.

Judge: Not at all. What do you like about the new life? Stevens: I like it better than the old.

Judge: Even though the old one was wild, the wild was kind of not a good wild. You like this way.

Stevens: I love it.

Judge: You love it. Well, we're glad that you love it. We're very proud of you. In addition to your certificate, you're getting a pen which says, "I made it to level four, almost out the door."9

This is the real face of therapeutic jurisprudence. It is not a caricature. Except for the movie reviews, this Washington, D.C. drug court is typical of the manner in which this particular kind of therapeutic court is operating all over the country. Defendants are "clients"; judges are a bizarre amalgam of untrained psychiatrists, parental figures, storytellers, and confessors; sentencing decisions are made off-the-record by a therapeutic team10 or by "community leaders";11 and court proceedings are unabashed theater.12 Successful defendants-that is, defendants who demonstrate that they can navigate the re-education process and speak the therapeutic language13—are "graduated" from the system in festive ceremonies that typically include graduation cake, balloons, the distribution of mementos like pens, mugs, or T-shirts, parting speeches by the graduates and the judge, and often the piece de resistance—a big hug from the judge.14

Drug courts are the most visible, but by no means the only, judicial expression of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement. The idea that judges should be in the business of treating the psyches of the people who appear before them is taking hold not only in drug courts but in a host of other criminal and even civil settings. Some therapeutic jurists see bad parenting, domestic violence, petty theft, and prostitution as curable diseases, akin to drug addiction, and argue that divorcing parents, wife-beaters, thieves, and prostitutes should therefore be handled in specialized treatment-based courts.15 The objects of the treatment efforts include not only the litigants in civil cases, and the criminals and victims in criminal cases, but also the "community" that is "injured" by the miscreant. Petty criminals in many so-called "community-based courts" are in effect sentenced by panels of community members, typically to perform various community services as deemed necessary by the panels, in order to "heal" the damage done to the "community.”16

It is curious that the existing scope of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, with the exception of drug offenses, is limited to relatively minor petty and misdemeanor criminal offenses.17 We might ask ourselves why the movement ignores the entire spectrum of violent felonies, so many of which have an apparent psychiatric component. We don't have specialized child molester courts in which "clients" are hugged and pampered and cajoled into right-thinking. Why not? My suspicion, as discussed in more detail below,18 is that what much of therapeutic jurisprudence is really about, at least in the criminal arena, is a de facto decriminalization of certain minor offenses which the mavens of the movement do not think should be punished, but which our Puritan ethos commands cannot be ignored. Supporters of the movement recognize that as a political matter they cannot go too far blurring the distinction between acts and excuses.19

True to their New Age pedigree, therapeutic courts are remarkably anti-intellectual and often proudly so. For example, the drug court variant is grounded on a wholly uncritical acceptance of the disease model of addiction, a model that is extremely controversial in the medical, psychiatric, and biological communities.20 All of the therapeutic jurisprudence variants presume that the underlying problem in virtually all kinds of cases—drug abuse, domestic violence, delinquency, dependency, divorce, petty crimes—is low self esteem, despite the fact that many psychological studies have shown that violent criminals tend to have high self esteem.21

The question asked in these new therapeutic courts is not whether the state has proved that a crime has been committed, or whether the social contract has otherwise been breached in a fashion that requires state intervention, but rather how the state can heal the psyches of criminals, victims, families, dysfunctional civil litigants, and the community. The goal is state-sponsored treatment, not adjudication, and the adjudicative process is often seen as an unnecessary and disruptive impediment to treatment.22 Because the very object is treatment, rehabilitated criminals deserve no punishment beyond what is necessary to restore them, their victims, and the community to their prior state.23

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement is not only anti-intellectual, it is wholly ineffective. The treatment is a strange combination of Freud, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Amway, whose apparent object is not really to change behaviors so much as to change feelings.24 Drug courts are a perfect example. The success of drug-court treatment programs is measured more by a defendant's professed attitude adjustment than by the sort of concrete measures one might expect of such programs, such as whether the defendant stops using drugs. As long as defendants are compliant with treatment ("buying into the program," as addiction counselors say), they are moved from treatment phase to treatment phase, often irrespective of whether the treatment is actually working. As James Nolan puts it, drug court success "is evaluated in large mea- sure by whether or not clients adopt a particular perspective.25

The particular perspective required is the disease model of addiction. Compliance is almost always measured by a defendant's willingness to admit that his or her drug use is a disease. Any resistance to the disease model is reported as "denial," a crime apparently much worse than continued drug use.26

The therapeutic jurisprudence literature is almost completely devoid of any empirical discussion of whether litigants, defendants, and victims, let alone "communities," are actually being helped by all this perspective-changing treatment, and understandably so. The imprecise words common to the therapeutic language—words like "healed," "restored," and "cured"—are simply incapable of being subjected to rigorous testing.

When investigators have looked at less imprecise measures of success-like recidivism rates-the therapeutic promise has proved wholly ineffective.27 For example, the very first effectiveness study performed on the very first modern drug court—in Dade County, Florida—showed that drug defendants treated in the drug court and drug defendants processed in the traditional courts suffered statistically identical rearrest rates.28 Virtually every serious study of drug court effectiveness has reached similarly sobering results,29 leading the General Accounting Office to declare in 1997 that there is simply no firm evidence that drug courts are effective in reducing either recidivism or relapse.30

Drug courts not only do not reduce recidivism or relapse, they have the unintended consequence of dramatically increasing the number of drug defendants sent to prison. The reason is massive net-widening, that is, the phenomenon whereby new programs targeted for a limited population end up serving much wider populations and thereby losing their effectiveness. In Denver, Colorado, for example, the number of drug cases nearly tripled two years after the implementation of its drug court.31 That fact, coupled with typically dismal recidivism rates, led to the entirely predictable result that Denver judges sent more than twice the number of drug defendants to prison in 1997, two years after the implementation of the drug court, than they did in 1993, the last year before the implementation of the drug court.32

If therapeutic jurisprudence were just a trendy idea that did not work, we could let it die a natural death. But it is not just trendy and ineffective, it is profoundly dangerous. Its very axioms depend on the rejection of fundamental constitutional principles that have protected us for 200 years. Those constitutional principles, based on our founders' profound mistrust of government, and including the commands that judges must be fiercely independent, and that the three branches of government remain scrupulously separate, are being jettisoned for what we are led to believe is an entirely new approach to punishment. In fact, this new approach-state mandated treatment-turns out to be a strangely out-of-touch return to rehabilitative ideals that gained popularity in the 1930s, but were abandoned in the 1970s because they not only did not work but, in the bargain, armed the state with therapeutic powers inimical to a free society.

There are four main reasons why the new therapeutic judges are most dangerous: 1) they are amateur therapists but have the powers of real judges; 2) they act in concert with each other, their communities, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and the self-interested therapeutic cottage industry, contrary to the fundamental principle of judicial independence; 3) they impinge on the executive branch's prosecutorial and correctional functions; and 4) they impinge on the legislative function by making drug policy.

Before I address these four dangers, let me briefly review the history of punishment and the scant theoretical underpinnings of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement in the context of this history.

II. A Brief History of Punishment

The idea of punishment as moral retribution may have its roots in what some anthropologists have called "defilement," the process by which primitive societies interpreted and explained human suffering as punishment by the gods.33 Such an explanation for otherwise inexplicable suffering can be deeply comforting. It means that our suffering is not meaningless and, more practically, that if we abide by the laws of the gods we will be protected from their wrath.34

As humans began to imitate the laws of gods with the laws of men, we also imitated defilement. Punishment became one of the methods by which we not only enforced our common codes of conduct but also comforted one another with the idea that no one would have to endure man-inflicted suffering so long as the codes of conduct were honored. Indeed, in its most profound sense, the rule of law necessarily requires the tyranny of gods over man, or of the many over the few, and that tyranny in turn requires some form of theocratic or group disapproval when norms are violated.

Interestingly, imprisonment as a form of punishment is a relatively recent invention, in contrast to custodial detention pending trial. In the ancient world, most crimes were punished either by banishment, various forms of corporal punishment such as beating or mutilation, or, most often, death.36 Imprisonment was reserved as punishment only for disobedient slaves, whose execution was uneconomic; political criminals, whose execution risked martyrdom; and petty criminals, whose execution was unwarranted.37 Even as late as the 1780s, in a society as fully touched by the Enlightenment as England, death was the sanction for virtually every crime, including crimes that we would today deem misdemeanors.38

There were many precursors to the modern prison: jails for pretrial detention and short sentences; workhouses for debtors; almshouses for the poor; reformatories for minors; convict ships for banishment; and the gallows for most other crimes.39

In fact, the prison-that is, a jail for serving long sentences after conviction—is a uniquely American invention. Prisons were first used by Pennsylvania Quakers in the late 1700s, primarily as a humane alternative to corporal punishment and execution.40 The first prison was Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail, which the Quakers opened in 1790 as a "penitentiary" for criminals convicted in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.41 The Quaker notion of a penitentiary was the product of the fortuitous confluence of the Quakers' theological beliefs and their knowledge of Cesare Beccaria's retributionist monograph On Crimes and Punishment.42 The Quakers hoped that long periods of isolation, which provided an opportunity for reflection and solitary Bible study, would ultimately lead to repentance.43 New York adopted this system in 1796, and prisons soon flourished across America and Europe.44

The modern debate about punishment revolves around the primacy of four components: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.45 In the late 1700s-precisely at the time when the Quakers were experimenting with prisons and, more importantly, when our founders were debating our form of government—the German philosopher Immanuel Kant constructed a philosophy of retribution, giving a rational foundation to what had been the retributional basis of all punishment since the dawn of civilization.46 He argued that the preeminent goal of criminal law must be retribution, and that punishment should be an end in itself.47 Kant's view was that to punish the criminal defendant as a means to any other utilitarian goal-deterrence or rehabilitation, for example—was to de-humanize him by reducing him to an object.48 Moreover, Kant viewed punishment as a purely retributive reaction to the crime itself, therefore, the punishment had to be proportionate to the crime.49

Georg Hegel concurred with Kant's retributionist ideal, adding the notion that punishment annulled the crime.50 In Hegel's construct, crime is the negation of moral law, and punishment is necessary to negate that negation to restore the moral right.51 Hegel continued the Kantian view that criminals themselves are moral beings, entitled to have their crimes negated by proportionate punishment. As Hegel stated:

[P]unishment is regarded as containing the criminal's right and hence by being punished he is honoured as a rational being. He does not receive this due of honour unless the concept and measure of his punishment are derived from his own act. Still less does he receive it if he is treated either as a harmful animal who has to be made harmless, or with a view to deterring and reforming him.52

Cesare Beccaria is generally credited with the first systematic exposition of proportionality.53 His version, much heralded in Western Europe and the American colonies, took a decidedly political view. Beccaria believed that requiring criminal sentences to be proportionate to the crime was an important limitation on the powers of government.54

Thus, retribution not only survived the Enlightenment, it achieved an important philosophical structure, both in its own right and as the basis for proportionality. It continued to flourish in both Europe and America and was consistent with the spread of the Quaker penitentiaries. People were sentenced to penitentiaries to be punished; there was nothing "rehabilitative" about them, except the repentance that was expected to come from enduring the punishment.

The retributionist paradigm lasted thousands of years and did not come under serious philosophical attack until the early 1800s, when a group of English utilitarians led by Jeremy Bentham began to challenge it.55 For the utilitarians, the only purpose of punishment was to prevent crime, that is, to be a deterrent.56 Bentham, and in America, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., saw the prospective criminal as a rational bad man, who weighed the benefits of his crime against the risks of detection and the costs of punishment.57 The purpose of punishment under the deterrence model was simply to make the costs of crime so high that they outweighed the benefits.58

The utilitarians believed that morality has nothing to with punishment. Bentham argued that if he could be assured that a particular criminal would never commit another crime, any punishment of him would be unjust.59 Richard Posner has argued that aside from the problem of judgment-proof criminals, all criminal sanctions could be replaced with a system of fines.60

Naturally, if punishment is viewed as a utilitarian tool to deter future illegal behavior of potential criminals, then it can also be used, though less efficiently, to shape the behavior of the particular defendant being punished. Not only would punishment deter him from engaging in future crimes, but it could also change him. The early beginnings of what became known as the "rehabilitative ideal" thus started, on their face, as a rather simple extension of the deterrence model.

But it was hardly a simple extension. It represented a profound change in the way human behavior was viewed. Criminals were no longer ordinary people, cursed like all of us with original sin, whose own humanity demanded that their crimes against moral consensus be purged with proportionate punishment.61 Rather, they were morally diseased, quite different from us, and they needed to be cured.

By the end of World War I, this rehabilitative perspective was becoming dominant in American penology, and it remained dominant until after World War II. It is probably no coincidence that the rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal coincided roughly with the rise and fall of the welfare state.62 Among the state's increasing New Deal responsibilities toward its citizens was the responsibility to cure all the social ills that were believed to lead to crime, and to treat criminals whose as-yet unreformed social circumstances led them to crime. There was a distinct moral fervor in the early rehabilitationists, as there is in its current devotees, similar to the tenor of the temperance movement: There is a right way and a wrong way to live, and lost souls who choose the path of crime, whether as a result of social circumstance or not, must be shown the right way.

The attacks on the rehabilitative ideal came primarily from the political left, beginning with the jewel of the rehabilitative ideal—the American juvenile court system. With its progressive origins in Chicago in 1899, the juvenile court movement was based on the belief that young offenders were not only ripe for rehabilitation, and needed a more individualized and sensitive justice system in order to maximize rehabilitative efforts, but also that, unlike adult criminals, they suffered from the curable sociological disease of "delinquency.”63 The function of juvenile courts was not to punish or to deter, but to cure delinquency. The juvenile court movement took the nation by storm, not at all unlike today's drug court movement.64 By 1920—just twenty years after their invention—juvenile courts were in place in all but three states.

But the sensitive paternalism of the juvenile court movement had an ugly statist face. Commentators began to write about a system in which gentle persuasion was giving way to unchecked judicial powers, and where an abject lack of basic due process "helped to create a system that subjected more and more juveniles to arbitrary and degrading punishments.66 Even the Supreme Court entered the fray, ruling in 1967 that juvenile defendants are entitled to the protections of the Sixth Amendment's guaranty of counsel.67

Critics of both the juvenile and adult rehabilitative ideal also began to express concerns about a governmental regime in which defendants are simultaneously treated and punished. In 1971, the American Friends Service Committee published a scathing attack on rehabilitative penology, and included in their criticisms a fundamental objection to coerced treatment: "When we punish the person and simultaneously try to treat him, we hurt the individual more profoundly and more permanently than if we merely imprison him for a specific length of time."68 The Quakers' recantation of the rehabilitative ideal was particularly influential, given their seminal role in the invention of the American penitentiary.

By 1970, forty years after its ascension, the rehabilitative ideal was in theoretical and empirical shambles.69 Uncoupled to any concept of proportionality, its primary theoretical failure was that it gave the state unchecked powers to "cure" that were unrelated to any notions of criminal responsibility and fundamental justice. If it takes ten years of prison, or any other form of state-imposed therapy or re-education, to cure Jean Valjean of shoplifting, then ten years is what must be imposed. This threat to individual liberty, acceptable to pro-government progressives of the 1930s, was decidedly unacceptable to a post-World War II, post-Nazi, cold war generation becoming increasingly wary of state power. As Norval Morris put it: "[T]he concept of just desert remains an essential link between crime and punishment. Punishment in excess of what is seen by that society at that time as a deserved punishment is tyranny.”70 He further stated: "We cage criminals for what they have done; it is an injustice to cage them also for what they are in order to change them, to attempt to cure them coercively."71

The real death knell to the rehabilitative ideal, both in general and in its juvenile incarnation, came not from the theoreticians but from the empiricists. Rehabilitation simply did not work. Crime was mysteriously immune to the entire liberal regimen, from anti-poverty programs to prison reform.72 After four decades of experimentation, the studies rather dramatically illustrated that all of our idealistic efforts to rehabilitate had virtually no effect on the propensity of juveniles or adults to commit crime.73

The fiction that imprisonment, even in its most rehabilitation- friendly form, has ever been successful in rehabilitating inmates has come to be called "the noble lie" by some critics.74 David Rothman, who coined the term, argued in 1973 that it was long past time to abandon the noble lie:

The most serious problem is that the concept of rehabilitation simply legitimates too much. The dangerous uses to which it can be put are already apparent in several court opinions, particularly those in which the judiciary has approved of indeterminate sentences . . . . Moreover, it is the rehabilitation concept that provides a backdrop for the unusual problems we are about to confront on the issues of chemotherapy and psychosurgery .... This is not the right time to expand the sanctioning power of rehabilitation.75

With a swiftness rarely seen in complex institutions, the American penal system dropped rehabilitation almost overnight. What had, as late as 1972, been described in the criminal law treatises as the central justification for punishment,76 was by 1986, being described in the past tense.77 This was much more than a theoretical rejection by academics and textbook writers. Correctional officials across America were also abandoning rehabilitation in their day-to-day operations.78

The extraordinarily sudden abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal gave way to a kind of fusion of retribution and incapacitation, dubbed by some as "neo-retributionism.”79 The modest goals of punishment as a just dessert, and prevention as the simple act of taking criminals out of society, replaced rehabilitation as the dominant penal theory.80 These ideas ultimately resulted in the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing schemes and eventually to the controversial Federal Sentencing Guidelines.81

Almost all modern criminologists acknowledge that each of the four traditional justifications for punishment—retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation—must continue to play some role in the criminal justice system.82 However, integrating them into a coherent and sensible system has not been easy, in no small part because they represent incompatible goals.83 If deterrence and incapacitation were the only considerations, then perhaps all crimes should be punishable by life sentences or death.84 If rehabilitation were the only consideration, then all crime could be considered forms of social disease, treatable in hospital-like settings, never in prisons.

Only retribution connects the crime with the punishment, treats criminals as moral beings rather than diseased subjects in a utilitarian social experiment, and imposes proportionality limitations on the government's right to punish. As a result, despite all their machinations about a synthesis, most modern criminologists have found their way back to retribution as the pole star of punishment.85

In 1979, Francis Allen delivered the Storrs Lecture at Yale Law School on the topic of the demise of the rehabilitative ideal. That lecture was published in 1981, and it has become a kind of obituary for rehabilitation.86 Allen impressively documented both the theoretical and empirical failings of rehabilitation. He concluded his lectures with this prediction:

[A]ttitudes toward [the rehabilitative ideal] are likely to be wary in the closing years of this century. A statement made by Lionel Trilling over a generation ago still possesses acute relevance to the present: "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the object of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then our wisdom, ultimately our coercion. ... " Given the history through which American society has recently passed, it is hardly possible that the total benevolence of governmental interventions into persons' lives will be unthinkingly assumed .... It is just as well. For modern citizens of the world have learned that the interests of individuals and society are frequently adverse and that the assumption of their identity supplies the predicate for despotism.87

Sadly, Professor Allen's prediction could not have been more wrong. Less than ten years after rehabilitation's obituary, the gurus of rehabilitation were back, this time with a vengeance, fueled by a zeal to treat the psychiatrically less fortunate, and in particular to win the war on drugs. These neo-rehabilitationists are pushing judges into unprecedented extremes that Professor Allen could not have imagined. In the flash of an eye judges have become intrusive, coercive, and unqualified state psychiatrists and behavioral policemen, charged with curing all manner of social and quasi-social diseases, from truancy to domestic violence to drug use. By forgetting the most profound lesson of the twentieth century—that the state can be a dangerous repository of collective evil—therapeutic jurisprudence poses a serious risk to the kind of individualism and libertarianism upon which our republic was founded.

III. The Theory Behind Therapeutic Jurisprudence

Although therapeutic jurisprudence descends directly from the long-rejected rehabilitative ideal, its proponents rarely talk about its theoretical heritage. The movement is almost devoid of anything resembling serious theoretical self-examination. The questions that have plagued philosophers and criminologists for a thousand years, and whose answers have come to define all major schools of criminology, are questions therapeutic jurisprudence devotees seldom ask.88 But the movement does have a short history, if not a terribly satisfying theoretical one.

It owes its beginnings to mental health law, where, by definition, the current and prospective mental states of the participants are the primary inquiry. Its initial insights were neither terribly profound nor particularly original: in a system whose very function is to judge the mental state of its subjects, we should think about the mental health effects of the actions we as judges take. Thus, for example, when we remand a criminal defendant for a competency evaluation, we should think about the effects the remand and evaluation might have on the defendant's competence.

These initial formulations about a therapeutic judicial perspective were limited in several important respects. First, they were focused on empirical questions: what effects are our rulings having on the mental health of the chronically mentally ill, insane or in- competent? Proponents, at least initially, never suggested that we should begin to change our rulings or the way we make them in anticipation of effects before we measure what those effects might actually be.

More importantly, these therapeutic ideas were originally proposed exclusively for application to mental health law, where the state has already crossed that thorny boundary of paternalism and already has its hands uncomfortably inside the heads of the unfortunate participants. Of course, many aspects of mental health law involve the judiciary's positive obligation to ensure treatment of the mental conditions of the people appearing in court as a precondition to moving into its more traditional truth-finding role. By expanding the therapeutic model into nonmental health areas, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement not only intrudes without any basis for intrusion, it profoundly changes the judicial function. Trials are no longer processes to investigate factual guilt and discover truth, they are mere opportunities to treat.

This therapeutic perspective is completely inimical to the judicial function. We should conduct trials guided by the rules of procedure and evidence that have been crafted over centuries to maximize the reliability of the result, not to ensure that the litigants have a meaningful mental health experience. We should impose sentences and assess damages guided by well-settled principles of responsibility, not by fretting about whose feelings will be hurt or how the community can be healed.

The profound and dangerous expansion of the judicial role represented by the therapeutic jurisprudence movement is just a small part of a broad therapeutic trend in all aspects of government and indeed across the entire spectrum of our culture. James Nolan has labeled this trend "the therapeutic ethos."89 Government's new role is to treat, not to enforce norms. Its success is measured by how it makes us feel, not by what it actually does. And because the couch of State needs patients, citizens are no longer individual participants in a free republic, but sets of victims with complicated diseases in dire need of state-sponsored treatment.

In this "postmodern moral order," as Nolan calls it, suffering is no longer viewed as a part of the human condition, but rather as the inevitable consequence of some disease or injury. Almost all of human behavior has become pathologized. We speak of "addictions" to all manner of behaviors that we would have called "choices" just thirty years ago.90 Today, cancer and alcoholism are both "diseases"; heroin use now shares an addictive moral equivalence with things like gambling and eating chocolate. Of course, this externalization of behavior is just a new version of our old friend defilement: once we blamed phantom gods for our suffering;91 now we blame phantom diseases.92

In the particular context of drug courts, James Nolan has called this process of pathologization the "eradication of guilt":

The drug court's eradication of guilt has been a subtle and insidious process. Guilt is not so much challenged as ignored. It is not so much disputed as it is made irrelevant. But it is the making irrelevant of something that has long been regarded as the crux of criminal justice.... The jettisoning of guilt may well represent the most important, albeit rarely reflected upon, consequence of the drug court. If, as Philip Rieff argued, culture is not possible without guilt, one wonders what will become of a criminal justice system bereft of what was once its defining quality.93

Blaming the pathogens has become the raison d'etre for the judicial system, both in criminal and civil cases. An African man who murders his wife blames his anti-divorce culture;94 a fired employee blames "chronic lateness syndrome."95 Of course, the judiciary takes its cases as it finds them, and judges cannot be blamed entirely for acting like psychiatrists when the parties insist on it. But the therapeutic jurisprudence movement requires us to act like psychiatrists even when no litigant is insisting on it, and indeed even when all the litigants object (that is, they are in "denial"). It is this aspect of mandated judicial intrusion that makes therapeutic jurisprudence so dangerous and so utterly unacceptable in our constitutional scheme.

IV. The Most Dangerous Branch

The judicial branch was specifically designed to be the least dangerous of the three branches. Hamilton coined that famous phrase in this classic description of the circumscribed powers of the federal judiciary:

[T]he judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.... The judiciary ...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE NOR WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.96

Federal judges are not elected, but appointed for life, helping to decrease the chances they will be influenced either by corrupt forces or, often more subtly, the vagaries of popular will.97 The case or controversy requirement helps decrease the chances that judges will make abstract law (that is, policy) in the guise of deciding a case.98 The very architecture of the federal and state systems leaves the judicial branches without the power either to make or enforce laws and further dissipates federal judicial power by imbedding it in a system in which individual states continue to operate in their own spheres of sovereignty.

One might ask why the founders were so keen on such a comprehensive institutional clipping of the judiciary's powers. The answer is that they appreciated, from their own English history, that unchecked judicial power is an evil to avoid at almost any cost. Both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were acutely aware of the failings of the English system, in which all judges were appointed by the Crown and served at the Crown's pleasure, and in which Parliament was invested with supreme appellate jurisdiction in all cases.99

The founders were even more acutely aware of the failings of the Confederation, under which there was no federal judiciary at all.100 Hamilton wrote extensively about the need for an independent judiciary to house judges capable of defending the new federal Constitution against incursions by the other two branches.101 Madison's expositions on the separation of powers doctrine were designed to allay the fears of the anti-Federalists that the existing constitutional plan did not do enough to separate the three branches.102

Our commitment to judicial restraint is not limited to the constitutional design. The mootness103 and ripeness104 doctrines give meaning to the case or controversy requirement, and help insure that decisions by judges will be a recourse of last resort. Indeed, the whole paradigm of the common law is built around the notion that precisely because judges have extraordinary powers in single cases—the power to incarcerate and the power to bankrupt—those powers must be limited to single cases and will operate beyond single cases only after surviving the judgment of judicial history.105

Along with these structural limitations, judges have developed a powerful ethos of restraint. Although some might say the ring of that ethos has become rather hollow in the years following the New Deal and Warren Courts, the restraining rules have for the most part remained quite vigorous, especially in trial courts. Deference to appellate court precedent effectively constrains even the most independent-minded trial judge, as it does the appellate courts themselves, though of course to a lesser degree. At all levels, we are loath to decide issues we need not decide, are generally committed to deciding cases on the narrowest grounds, and will almost always follow controlling precedent.

All of these constitutional, common law, and normative principles have blended together to create a profound commitment to restraint in responsible judges. We are unrepresentative, mostly unelected, independent magistrates whose function is to decide no more than the necessary issues in the single cases thrust upon us, in accordance with laws and established rules of evidence and procedure with which we may or may not agree. Juries tell us the facts, appellate courts may tell us we were wrong on the law, and legislatures may avoid most effects of our decisions by changing the laws. We have no more valid insight into public policy than the members of any other particular occupation.106

Yet it seems to be an occupational hazard for judges and other members of the public to confuse our simple role as gatekeepers of the truth-finding function with anything at all having to do with the will of the governed. We do not make public policy; we do not even enforce it. We are, as Madison put it, only the "remote choice of the people.”107 That very remoteness is what both prevents us from becoming, and tempts us to become, the most dangerous of the three branches.

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement requires us to become the kind of involved, hands-on, right-thinking, sure-footed activists that the judicial branch was specifically designed to exclude. It requires us to accept, in a collective fashion entirely inconsistent with the fierce independence of the judiciary, a therapeutic paradigm that is not only a matter of public policy, but about which reasonable public policy makers differ. It is forcing us to collaborate with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists in a fashion that is entirely inconsistent with our adjudicative role. In its most virulent drug court form it requires us to send people to prison not because they violated the law (since the real engine of drug courts is the unstated belief that possession should not be a crime), but rather because they resisted our enlightened treatment efforts. In short, therapeutic jurisprudence is a code phrase for a kind of one-stop shopping system populated by judges who believe that they have such powerful insights into public policy (insights that have apparently escaped mere legislators) that they cheerfully act as parents, best friends, doctors, psychotherapists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, legislators and then, only if all of that fails, judges. I cannot imagine a more dangerous, or sanctimonious, branch.

A. Real Judges as Amateur Psychiatrists: Acts Versus Excuses and the Paradox of Reverse Moral Screening

One the most disturbing consequences of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement is that while therapeutic judges get to play amateur psychiatrist, in the end the command of the law requires them to punish the patients they cannot cure. Imagine going to see a doctor about a disease, knowing that the doctor might not only be unable to cure you, but will be required to send you to prison if you are not cured. Now imagine a whole system of justice based on that notion, and you will have captured the essence of therapeutic jurisprudence.

State-coerced treatment does not work,108 and even if it did, it is simply immoral for the state to treat and then punish acts it claims have a disease component, as the critics of the rehabilitative ideal demonstrated thirty years ago.109 The "diseases" to be treated are not diseases at all, but rather complex behaviors that fall within a broad continuum between "voluntary" and "involuntary" behaviors. If we really believed that all human behavior is the product of the relentless and involuntary spasm of genes and experience, and that free will is a quaint mirage, then the state would have no moral right to punish anyone for any crime. The disease of "chronic armed robbery syndrome" would merit no more punishment than cancer. But of course we don't believe that.

The very existence of law is a reflection of deep-seated and shared notions of free will and individual responsibility. That is not to say, of course, that the retribution demanded of crimes cannot take into consideration all of the specific circumstances of the crime, including the criminal's complete background. Indeed, we must take all those circumstances into consideration to fulfill the requirement that retribution be proportional, and therefore just. But it is one thing to say we will consider an armed robber's I.Q. and childhood in crafting the amount of retribution, and quite another thing to say that the disease of chronic armed robbery syndrome should be treated rather than punished. Therapeutic jurisprudence blurs, and is intended to blur, this fundamental moral distinction between act and excuse.

Even if treatment worked, and could be justly combined with punishment, the therapeutic paradigm punishes the wrong people. For example, if drug addiction really is a disease, then the most diseased addicts are precisely the ones most likely to fail many, if not all, attempts at treatment. Drug courts are thus performing a kind of "reverse moral screening."110 Truly diseased addicts end up going to prison, while those who respond well to treatment, and whose use of drugs may thus have been purely voluntary, escape punishment.

B. Judicial Collectivism

Therapeutic judges not only act ineffectively and immorally as amateur psychiatrists, they also act in a dangerous collective, wholly inconsistent with fundamental axioms of judicial independence. They act in concert with, and therefore abrogate their independence to, each other, their "communities," prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists.

One of the starkest examples of the kind of group action that dominates the therapeutic model can be found in the intense political machinations undertaken to create and sustain drug courts. Unlike other legal reform movements, that began with a handful of individual decisions, commentaries, or experiments, and then spread through the power of their own persuasion, the drug court movement has a decidedly top-down pedigree. Though they began as a single experiment in Miami, drug courts spread because of centralized federal funding, not because they were effective. Drug courts exhibit a remarkable uniformity because they must now meet a host of specific federal criteria in order to qualify for federal funds."' What once was an opportunity for state and local governments to experiment with drug court reforms has, to a great extent, turned into a lockstep ersatz federal program.

Drug court workshops across the country are "heavily scripted and staged events," designed to give drug court officials an opportunity to "strategize with each other and educate those new to the scene about how best to present the program to sometimes skeptical audiences for the purpose of garnering public support and financial resources to further the movement."112 There is a five-part liturgy to the drug court movement's rigid political doctrine: 1) convince prosecutors that drug courts are not soft on crime; 2) start off with only low-level drug offenses while building public support; 3) cultivate relationships with the media; 4) hold graduation ceremonies in open court as public relations events; and 5) constantly perform evaluation studies to justify continued funding.113 This is mindless public relations mantra, not creative judicial reform by independent-minded judges.

When the federal funds run out, as they inevitably seem to do, drug court judges then participate in lobbying legislatures, city councils, and even the private sector for funding. Their partisan enthusiasm crosses even the most forgiving boundaries of judicial propriety. A Las Vegas, Nevada drug court judge set up his own tax-exempt nonprofit organization through which to solicit private funds for his drug court.114 A Rochester, New York drug court judge used the local United Way to dispense the private funds he raised for his drug court."115 A 1997 Justice Department survey showed that nine drug courts had solicited a total of nearly half a million dollars from private sources.116 Therapeutic jurisprudence is turning some of us into embarrassing hucksters.

The development of so-called "community-based courts" is another example of judicial collectivism at its worst. Modeled after New York City's Midtown Community Court, these courts have been started in many urban areas to deal with what proponents call "quality of life crimes. '117 Generally, defendants convicted of crimes such as shoplifting, prostitution, and some low-level drug offenses are "treated" by being put on probation or given deferred sentences and by performing certain community service obligations. Typically, the precise community service obligations are determined in each individual case not by the judge but by a "community advisory board" consisting of various community leaders.118 This way, the criminals are not only cured of their rude behaviors by having to do the penance of community service, but the criminal tear in the fabric of the community is also healed. Two therapies for the price of one.

The community service options can be rather interesting. They include not only what one might expect from traditional community service, such as clean-up activities like graffiti removal and trash pickup, but also "stuffing envelopes for non-profit organizations."119 Through community courts, judges abdicate their sentencing authority to self-described community leaders and their pet projects, including their favorite charities.

In addition to the usual therapeutic misanthropy inherent in all therapeutic courts, community-based courts raise particularly disturbing problems about the role of judges and their place in the political firmament. Why are some crimes labeled "quality of life crimes" and others not? Surely a murder effects the "quality of life" of the victim, witnesses, and other members of the community more than shoplifting does. Why does the torn fabric of the community need to be repaired after a shoplifting, but not after a murder? The answer, of course, is not that the former is any more damaging than the latter, but rather that the former is more widespread than the latter. It is this widespread nature of "quality of life crimes" that makes community-based courts so politically attractive. They generate an army of involuntary servants to do free work pleasing to a maximum of community voters. Fundamentally, community-based courts are machines of political payoff, dressed in the garb of the judiciary.120

The most widespread, and in many ways, most disturbing, form of judicial collectivism occurs in all therapeutic courts, and is embodied in the very term "therapeutic jurisprudence"—the unholy and wholly unconstitutional washing out of the judge's role in an adversary system. All therapeutic courts presume factual guilt. What is called "the presumption of innocence" in traditional courts is called "denial" in therapeutic courts. The judge, prosecutor, therapist, and to a great extent, even the defense lawyer,121 join together to "help" the patient over his or her denial in order to concentrate on treatment.122 As a result, the judge, prosecutor, therapist, and defense lawyer thus form a kind of "treatment team," designed to do what is best for the reluctant patient, not to discover truth in the fires of advocacy.

This joining together is so critical that it is common advice to anyone contemplating the development of a drug court that it will not work without the "cooperation" of judges, prosecutors, police, sheriffs, and public defenders. When judges "cooperate" in the formation of drug courts, what is really happening is that they are agreeing to abandon their roles as neutral gatekeepers of the truth- finding process, and instead to join the therapeutic team for the good of the diseased defendants.

In many drug courts, the team participates in daily rituals euphemistically called "staffing sessions."123 At these staffing sessions, the judge, prosecutor, public defender, and some representative of the therapeutic community, but typically not private defense counsel, meet together in chambers to discuss that day's upcoming matters. The judge, after hearing from everyone, reaches presumptive decisions. Defendants are not present and the staffing sessions are not on the record. Apart from the obvious constitutional concerns,124 these staffing sessions symbolize what is wrong with having judges join with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists: substantive decisions are being made about a felony defendant by some inter-branch committee acting more like a support group than a court of law.

Judges are not psychiatrists, and psychiatrists are not judges. Whenever judges enter the therapeutic arena we must choose be- tween two unpalatable options: either act beyond our expertise or abdicate our judging to therapeutic experts. Most therapeutic courts are designed to do the latter. Although therapeutic judges typically put on a counseling show in open court,25 the real therapeutic decisions are often made out of court by members of the therapeutic community.126 This unelected and unaccountable "new priestly class," as James Nolan describes it,127 has destroyed what small vestige of independence therapeutic judges may have left after already doling out large chunks of it to one another, to prosecutors, and to defense lawyers. Judges may be comforted by pretending to function as a therapeutic team acting in the best interests of defendants, but what is really happening is that they have abdicated the judging role to the new therapeutic priests.

There may be an argument for sacrificing some judicial independence in minor cases to achieve significant therapeutic results, and indeed judges have been trying to do just that for a long time with things like safe driving classes and anger management programs.128 It may not be terribly troubling to expand these ideas to misdemeanor shoplifting, graffiti offenses, littering, and other kinds of minor offenses with which most community-based courts deal. But applying them to felony drug charges that can result in a defendant going to prison for decades should be wholly unacceptable. If we are going to continue to treat drug use as a crime, and some drug use as a felony, then we must treat felony drug cases seriously, not like parking tickets in a mill in which the judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, and therapist spend their days trying to push as many people through as possible.

C. Impinging on the Executive Function

Besides violating the doctrine of the separation of powers by forcing judges and prosecutors to work on treatment teams together, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement impinges on the executive function in two more direct and discrete ways-by demolishing prosecutorial discretion and by interfering with corrections.

It is the long-established privilege of prosecutors to decide what crimes to charge and what plea bargains to offer.129 Therapeutic courts, especially drug courts, substantially eliminate both of these jealously-guarded areas of prosecutorial discretion.

Before drug courts, prosecutors retained their broad discretion to charge or not charge small possession drug cases, and indeed the realities of our system drove many prosecutors, and even police, to ignore some low-level drug possession and even some drug dealing. But in the postmodern therapeutic world, drug offenders are not wrongdoers whose transgressions might be overlooked if they are sufficiently minor, but rather diseased citizens in need of treatment. Thus, we see massive increases in drug filings after the institution of drug courts,130 and those explosions correspond directly to police and prosecutors agreeing at the front end to arrest and prosecute every drug offender, regardless of circumstance, in order to meet the therapeutic demand for reluctant patients.

At the plea-bargaining end, prosecutors have likewise abdicated their traditional discretion. Most drug courts recognize only a few different kinds of cookie cutter plea bargains, and the decision to offer a particular plea bargain is driven entirely by a few objective criteria, and not by the exercise of any meaningful prosecutorial discretion.131 After all, this is treatment, not adjudication; triage, not prosecutorial discretion.

Therapeutic courts also impinge on the executive's corrections functions. Providing medical treatment to persons convicted of crimes, and even to persons in custody awaiting trial, is an executive function, not a judicial one. When therapeutic courts mechanically impose treatment conditions on all defendants, both before and after conviction, they blur the fundamental distinction between the accused and the convicted, and therefore between the judicial function of determining guilt and the executive function of carrying out sentences and treating prisoners.

It is entirely inappropriate and inimical to our adjudicative role for judges to be deciding whether defendants have been cured of their diseases and whether for that reason no punishment should be imposed. Criminal courts exist to determine whether the state has met its burden of proving that the defendant has committed a crime, and if so, to mete out appropriate and just punishment. The product of a criminal case should be a verdict and a sentence, not a decision whether John Smith should be treated at Acme House or Metropolis Hospital, or whether he truly suffers from borderline personality disorder or is just a jerk.

If we are really serious about treatment, we should direct our treatment resources to the executive branch's corrections facilities, both pre-conviction (jails) and post-conviction (jails and prisons). That is where the push for treatment, voluntary and semi-voluntary, belongs if it belongs anywhere. If we continue to believe that possession of some drugs is serious enough to warrant incarceration, then we should impose that incarceration without further therapeutic hand-wringing. Prisoners can then take advantage, or not take advantage, of intense in-custody drug treatment programs tied to parole eligibility.

D. Judges as Legislators

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement not only forces judges to act in concert with each other, with their "communities," with prosecutors, with defense lawyers, and with therapists, but it also profoundly subsumes the legislative function. By assuming all manner of human behavior is the product of some set of sociological pathogens, therapeutic courts ignore the principles of free will and individual responsibility upon which the criminal law rests. That is, it is for legislatures, and not self-described therapeutic judges, to decide not only whether certain behavior is a crime or a disease, but also in many circumstances to set a range of punishment. On these matters, the legislatures have spoken. We no longer punish adultery, but we do punish the possession of certain drugs. We no longer execute petty thieves, but shoplifting is still a crime.

In many respects, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, especially its embodiment in drug courts, is simply a judicial reaction to laws some judges do not like. Some judges do not believe certain crimes should be punished by incarceration, and in fact do not think certain crimes should be considered crimes at all. Thus, crimes become diseases, defendants become patients, judges be- come therapists, and laws are repealed by therapeutic judicial fiat. There may be good arguments for and against decriminalizing some existing crimes, including some drug crimes, but in the end that debate must be settled by elected legislatures and not by judges who think they have some special insight into either medicine or public policy.

Conclusion

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement is not being driven by evil judges thrilled at the prospect of exerting unwarranted and unprecedented control over the private lives of fellow citizens, or even entirely by naive judges suckered into the therapeutic newspeak. Instead, the therapeutic road we are running down has been paved with the good intentions of judges reacting to the flood of dysfunction we see every day in our courtrooms, hardened with a dash of the kind of judicial hubris that positions us to think that because we control our courtrooms we can control the lives of everyone who appears in them. The unprecedented and unwarranted powers assumed by judges in the name of doing psychological good will make us both profoundly dangerous in our own right and hopelessly incapable of protecting citizens from the therapeutic excesses of the other two branches, just as it did when we tried the more general rehabilitative experiment in the 1930s.

The next time a group of "problem solving" activists tries to set up one of these intrusive courts in your community, remember what the Quakers tried to teach us about the dangers of mixing well-intentioned rehabilitation with well-deserved punishment. Remember that we have met failure in a similar fashion in the past. When we tried to treat crime as if it were a disease, and criminals as if they were moral in-patients, the only thing we accomplished was to create a dangerous judiciary that felt authorized to exert power over these diseased patients for as long as it took to cure them. If we repeat these rehabilitative failures, we will continue to de-humanize the objects of our humanitarianism, to fill our penal system with our therapeutic failures, to short-circuit what should be the real legislative debate, and to devalue punishment as its own clear social object.

Footnotes

The term "therapeutic jurisprudence" is generally credited to David Wexler, a law professor at the University of Arizona, who, as discussed in the text accompanying notes 88-89 infra, originally defined the term in a paper first delivered in 1987, but not published until 1992, to mean the study of the therapeutic impacts of mental health law. David B. Wexler, Putting Mental Health into Mental Health Law: Therapeutic Jurisprudence,16 L. & HUM. BEHAV. 27 (1992). He and others subsequently expanded the idea beyond the mental health realm, arguing not only that virtually all court proceedings can have important therapeutic impacts on the participants, but that judges should craft their decisions with an eye toward those impacts. See, e.g., ESSAYS IN THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE (D. Wexler & B. Winnick eds., 1991); PRACTICING THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE: LAW AS A HELPING PROFESSION (D. Stolle, D. Wexler & B. Winnick eds., 2000); THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE: THE LAW As THERAPEUTIC AGENT (D. Wexler ed., 1990); David A. Wexler, New Directionsin Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Breaking the Bounds of Conventional Mental Health Law Scholarship,10 N.Y.L. SCH. J. HUM. RTS. 915 (1993). The phrase "restorative justice" is also sometimes used to connote what appears to be a similar constellation of ideas, though it tends to be used only in the criminal justice arena. See, e.g., John Braithewaite, Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts, 25 CRIME & JUST. 1 (1999); Robert F. Schopp, Therapeutic JurisprudenceForum: Integrating Restorative Justice and Therapeutic Jurisprudence,67 REV. JUR. U.P.R. 665 (1998); Comment, Repairing the Breach and Reconciling the Discordant: Mediation in Criminal Justice Systems, 72 N.C. L. REV. 1479 (1994). The phrase "collaborative law" is also used to describe the therapeutic approach in law, especially in divorce law. See generally Pauline H. Tesler, Collaborative Law: A New Paradigm for Divorce Lawyers, 5 PSYCHOL. PUB. POL. & L. 967 (1999). Finally, the phrase "problem-solving courts" seems to be the most recent way to describe various therapeutic courts, especially so-called "community-based courts." See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text. One cannot help but chuckle, and think of George Orwell's insights into the politicization of language, at a movement that describes intrusive judicial state action of an unprecedented magnitude as "problem solving."

JAMES L. NOLAN, JR., REINVENTING JUSTICE: THE AMERICAN DRUG COURT MOVEMENT 7 (2001).

Id.

It is de rigueur for judges and their staff in therapeutic jurisprudence courts to call parties "clients," even criminal defendants. This is not only consistent with the whole approach of therapeutic jurisprudence—to treat rather than to adjudicate-but is also a linguistic expression of the stunning mixing of roles between judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer. See infra notes 110-31 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 7.

Id.

For a summary of the astonishing storytelling aspects of drug courts, see NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 111-36.

For a general description of the organization, implementation, operation and sentencing models used in drug courts, see Morris B. Hoffman, The Drug Court Scandal, 78 N.C. L. REV. 1437, 1462-63 (2000). As discussed in the text accompanying notes 31 to 32 infra, drug courts are probably sending considerably more people to prison than traditional courts, because of a combination of net-widening and ineffective treatment.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 8-9.

See infra notes 123-24 and accompanying text; see also Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1524, discussing the off-the-record "staffing" ritual, at which neither the defendant nor private defense counsel is present, yet at which presumptive sentencing decisions are made.

See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text (discussing community-based courts).

Drug court proponents themselves acknowledge that drug courts are a kind of theater, whose audience includes not only the clients to be re-educated but also skeptical prosecutors, media, politicians, and other influential members of the non therapeutic community. "Drug courts, it has been said many times, are theater. And the judge is the stage director and one of the primary actors." NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 73 (quoting Baltimore drug court judge Jamey Weitzman). Indeed, the theatrical aspects of drug court—both as a therapeutic tool and as tightly scripted propaganda—are a focal point of national drug court training conferences. The titles of some of these conferences are telling: "Damage Control: Dealing with the Media," "Getting Local Government and the Community to 'Buy In' to a Drug Court," "Dealing with the Press/Politics." Id. at 62. See infra notes 112-113 and accompanying text (discussing particular points of propaganda spread at national conferences).

See infra note 25 (discussing the fact that therapeutic defendants are well aware that their "treatment" is an attitudinal game they must pretend to play in order to escape the clutches of the criminal justice system).

14. A Compton, California drug court judge's explanation is typical of the parent- child model by which many therapeutic judges see their relationship to their "clients": I let [the defendant] come into my chambers. . . . All she wanted was a hug.... So, I just gave her a hug. I mean, what would you do if your child came up to you, and said, "May I have a hug?" You wouldn't say, "Well, let me think about this now. You have been bad fifteen times." You would just do it. So, that is what I did. And yes, you should [give hugs]. You get a whole lot back. You really do. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 102.

Id. at 149.

See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text.

But see infra note 120 (discussing proposed extensions of community-based courts).

See infra Part IV.D.

See infra notes 107-09 and accompanying text.

See generally Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1469-73. Many drug court proponents express a certain ironic pride in the fact that they believe they are much more enlightened on the disease model of addiction than medical professionals: It's amazing listening to physicians say, "It's not a disease." It's almost done a reverse. We have people who are normally not trained in the medical field calling it a disease and those who are trained in the medical field saying, "It's not a disease," that it's just a lack of guts or lack of intestinal fortitude of the individual. It's a scary thought. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 137 (quoting unnamed director of treatment at one of the drug courts Professor Nolan visited). It is, indeed, a "scary thought," but not for the reasons this treatment director thinks.

See, e.g., ANDREW MECCA ET AL., THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM (1989); Roy F. Baumeister et al., Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of Self-Esteem, 5 PSYCHOL. REV. 101 (1995). See generally JOHN P. HEWITT, THE MYTH OF SELF-ESTEEM: FINDING HAPPINESS AND SOLVING PROBLEMS IN AMERICA (1998).

See, e.g., NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 141 (quoting Syracuse, New York drug court judge Langston McKinney): By volunteering in the drug court program the defendant has circumvented [the adjudicative] part of the judicial process. . . . "(W]e literally leave all that [judicial impartiality, presumption of innocence, etc.] at the doorstep." In the drug court context, "this issue of guilt/innocence is not of concern." See also infra notes 92-95 and accompanying text (discussing the drug court's eradication of the concept of guilt).

In one of the most telling expositions of the therapeutic paradigm, the appellate lawyer for Karla Faye Tucker argued that the state of Texas had no right to execute her because she was no longer the same person who had committed the multiple murders for which the prior Ms. Tucker had been convicted. The lawyer's argument, flush with therapeutic newspeak, was actually published in a law review after his client's execution. Walter C. Long, Karla Faye Tucker: A Case for RestorativeJustice,27 AM. J. CRIM. L. 117 (1999). Of course, that argument is precisely the same argument made by Bentham and the other utilitarians in the 1800s: if the only purpose of punishment is to deter the punished criminal, then no criminal may morally be punished beyond what it takes to rehabilitate him. See infra notes 55-60 and accompanying text. At least Bentham had the courage of his convictions, which is more than can be said for the current devotees of therapeutic jurisprudence, who are so worried that they will be seen as soft on crime that they would never apply their strange principles to serious crime. See supra notes 17-19 and accompanying text.

In fact, I suspect that it is the improved feelings of the treaters, and not of the treated, that is really driving judges' infatuation with therapeutic courts. The therapeutic jurisprudence movement in general, and the drug court movement in particular, is strewn with discussions of the positive effects therapeutic programs have on the treaters. See supra note 14 (reporting emotional benefits the drug court judge realizes from hugging a defendant).

Id. Nolan reports a stunning example of the extent to which compliance in therapeutic courts is measured more by what a defendant says than by what a defendant does. The Oakland probation department commended a drug court defendant for his compliance in treatment, and recommended that he be graduated from phase 2 to phase 3, even though the defendant had not had a single negative urinalysis in all of phase 2. JAMES L. NOLAN, JR., THE THERAPEUTIC STATE: JUSTIFYING GOVERNMENT AT CENTURY'S END 296 (1998). Defendants understand that they have to play the treatment game to pass through the criminal hoops. Nolan reports on a particularly embarrassing unraveling of a Washington, D.C. drug court session that was being televised live to a large convention of treatment providers. The session began in stock theatrical form, but at one point an uncooperative defendant began to depart from the script. When asked why his treatment program had been so difficult for him, he said "'Cause I had to come and sit here and listen to this crap." NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 69. The dam broke, and other defendants started to complain about the therapeutic game. At one point, laughter began to break out amongst the conventioneers. "When it became clear the judge was not going to be able to regain control of the performance, conference officials just cut the video feed. 'We have to stay on schedule,' an organizer deadpanned."' Id. at 70.

Id.; see also infra note 110 and accompanying text (discussing reverse moral screening). Dade County Drug Court officials report that they have had particular difficulty with the willingness of Hispanic clients to admit they have a disease and suggest that the difficulty may somehow be attributable to a cultural resistance to the disease model. NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 296.

The ineffectiveness of involuntary court-based therapy comes as no surprise to people familiar with the ineffectiveness of voluntary psychotherapy in general, especially in an addiction context. Peer-reviewed controlled studies—which are scandalously rare—are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that there is no evidence that twelve-step programs produce better results than clinical treatment or even better results than no treatment at all. See William R. Miller & Reid K. Hester, The Effectiveness of Alcoholism Treatment: What Research Reveals, in TREATING ADDICTIVE BEHAVIORS: PROCESSES OF CHANGE 121, 135-36 (W. Miller & N. Heather eds., 1986) (reviewing all controlled studies of alcohol treatment programs, finding only two on AA programs, and noting that both of those AA studies showed that members of AA got arrested more often and relapsed more frequently than the control group of untreated problem drinkers). Even clinical treatment seems ineffective. In a famous 1983 study of the effectiveness of inpatient alcohol treatment, the ability of treated patients to stop drinking and stay sober two years and eight years post-discharge was no better than that of the untreated control group. GEORGE VALLIANT, THE NATU- RAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOLISM 284-94 (1983). The data on the effectiveness of drug treatment is no more encouraging. See, e.g., Stanton Peele, How People'sValues Determine Whether They Become and Remain Addicts, in VISIONS OF ADDICTION 219-20 (S. Peele ed., 1988).

In particular, Dade County drug defendants entering the drug court program suffered a one-year re-arrest rate of 32%, compared to Dade County drug defendants in traditional courts, who suffered a re-arrest rate over the same period of 33%. BAR- BARA E. SMITH ET AL., STRATEGIES FOR COURTS TO COPE WITH THE CASELOAD PRESSURES OF DRUG CASES 7 (1991).

Here, for example, are the results from five major effectiveness studies done by independent outsiders in the mid- and late-1990s: See generally STEVEN BELENKO & TAMARA DUMANOVSKY, BUREAU OF JUSTICE ASSISTANCE, U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, SPECIAL DRUG COURTS: PROGRAM BRIEF 2 (1993); Steven Belenko, Research on Drug Courts: A Critical Review, 1 NAT'L DRUG CT. INST. REV. 1 (1998).

See U.S. GEN. ACCOUNTING OFFICE, DRUG COURTS: OVERVIEW OF GROWTH, CHARACTERISTICS, AND RESULTS 7-8 (1997).

Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1501-02.

Id. at 1510-11. These exploding prison populations were not the result of a general increase in criminal cases. On the contrary, since the Denver Drug Court began its operations, the percentage of drug cases filed in the court has exploded. Here are the complete figures for criminal cases with the Denver District Court from 1991 through 1998 (the drug court became operational in July 1994): Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1502 n.260.

See, e.g., PAUL RICOEUR, THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL 26-27 (1967).

The God of the Old Testament was, of course, very much a retributionist. One of the central issues in virtually every religion is how to explain man's discovery that God's retribution does not always appear just.

A few commentators contend that the roots of punishment were in fact restorative, rather than retributive, at least until the Norman Conquest. See, e.g., Braithewaite, supra note 1, at 2. This view stems from an overbroad, noncriminological use of the word "punishment." It goes without saying that humans have always recognized that some wrongdoers can change their ways, hoped that all wrongdoers could, and suspected that some wrongdoers cannot. Naturally, these views found their way into many human institutions, from families to churches. These views do not shed any real light on the question of criminological punishment-that is, what the state should do to a particular wrongdoer in response to a particular crime. Is the wrong-doer one of us, who must be punished to restore his moral standing? See infra notes 50-52 and accompanying text. Or is he diseased, and in need of some kind of treatment? In this sense, it is clear that civilization has always been retributive and not rehabilitative, at least until the 1920s and 1930s, when the confluence of Freud and the Progressives led us to a rehabilitative norm where all people are seen as the diseased products of their past, and therefore fundamentally not responsible for their actions. See infra notes 61-62 and accompanying text.

36. NORVAL MORRIS, THE FUTURE OF IMPRISONMENT 4 (1974).

Id.

4 WILLIAM A. BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND *98 (W.L. Dean ed., 1846). In a famous passage in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens laments that, as late as the French Revolution, English law imposed the death sentence for all manner of criminal offenses, including forgery, bad checks, unlawfully opening a letter addressed to another, stealing as little as forty shillings, and horse theft. CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF Two CITIES 50 (Oxford Univ. Press 1953) (1859).

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4.

Id. at 5.

Id. at 5. Some historians contend that the first true penitentiary was the so-called "People Pen" constructed by the Massachusetts Pilgrims in Boston in 1632. See, e.g., PHILIP D. JORDAN, FRONTIER LAW AND ORDER: TEN ESSAYS 140 (1970). In any event, it is clear that it was the Quaker's Walnut Street Jail, and not the Pilgrims' Boston People Pen, that became the model for the early American penitentiary. MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4-5.

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 5. See the discussion of Baccaria in the text accompanying infra notes 53-55.

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4.

Id. at 5.

Id. at 58.

IMMANUEL KANT, THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF JUSTICE 101 (Ladd trans., Bobbs-Merrill 1965) (1797).

Id.

Id.

Id.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT 71 (T.M. Knox trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1942) (1821).

Id.

Id.

Id.

Id.

JEREMY BENTHAM, THE RATIONALE OF PUNISHMENT (R. Heward & R. Smith et al. eds. and trans., 1830).

Id.

Bentham and Holmes were very much the progenitors of the University of Chicago-based law and economics movement, which extended these utilitarian principles to other areas of the law. Ironically, Holmes also spawned the left-wing "critical legal studies" movement, which is equally devoid of moral principles. See generally ALBERT W. ALSCHULER, LAW WITHOUT VALUES: THE LIFE, WORK AND LEGACY OF JUSTICE HOLMES (2000); Morris B. Hoffman, Book Review, 54 STAN. L. REV. 597 (2001). Holmes rejected not only the retributionists but also those utilitarians whose view of "prevention" included rehabilitation. Holmes's logic, as usual, was compel- ling: the criminal law will lose all of its deterrent purpose if bad men know they will be treated rather than punished. Indeed, Holmes's notion of the "bad man" was itself a rejection of the rehabilitative ideal. At the very least, Holmes argued that rehabilitation could never be the only purpose of punishment: ("If it were, every prisoner should be released as soon as it appears clear that he will never repeat his offence, and if he is incurable he should not be punished at all.") OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., THE COMMON LAW 42 (Little, Brown & Co. 1923) (1881). These observations take on an eerily modern significance when we talk about drug courts as devices for reverse moral screening. See infra note 110 and accompanying text.

HOLMES, supra note 57, at 42-43.

BENTHAM, supra note 55, at 41. "If we could consider an offense which has been committed as an isolated fact, the like of which would never recur, punishment would be useless. It would only be adding one evil to another." It seems to me that this conclusion follows only if one takes an unduly narrow view of deterrence. Deterrence is not only about discouraging the particular wrongdoer from committing additional wrongs in the future, but also discouraging other people by example. And, of course, this second kind of deterrence has the potential to be substantially more effective, because it acts on the population as a whole, rather than on a single criminal. For the very same reason, assuming equal rates of success, deterrence is far more efficient than rehabilitation.

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 85 COLUM. L. REV. 1193, 1203-04 (1985).

See supra notes 50-52 and accompanying text.

See, e.g., R.A. Duff & David Garland, Introduction: Thinking About Punishment, in A READER ON PUNISHMENT 1, 2-3 (R.A. Duff & D. Garland eds., 1994).

See generally ANTHONY M. PLATT, THE CHILD SAVERS: THE INVENTION OF DELINQUENCY (2d ed. 1977).

There are other striking similarities between the juvenile court movement and the drug court movement: both were initially led by charismatic judges; both are based on a fundamental therapeutic paternalism; both have liberal political origins but are quick to deny they are "soft" on crime; both rely heavily on pseudo-scientific social principles; both rely on informal proceedings; and both are designed to decrease the role of the defense lawyer and increase the activism and discretion of the judge. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 174 ("[S]o similar are the two forms of therapeutic jurisprudence that one is tempted to view the juvenile courts as the direct historical antecedent to drug courts."). Nolan also points out significant differences between the two movements, however, including the fact that juvenile courts relied much less on the therapeutic community and that juvenile judges were much less active in defendants' day-to-day treatment. Id. at 174-75; See generally Richard C. Boldt, Rehabilitative Punishment and the Drug Treatment Court Movement, 76 WASH. U. L. Q. 1206, 1269-77 (1998).

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 171.

PLATT, supra note 63, at 162; see also Janet E. Ainsworth, Re-Imagining Childhood and Reconstructing the Legal Order: The Case for Abolishing the Juvenile Court, 69 N.C. L. REV. 1083, 1120 (1991).

In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 61 (1967).

AM. FRIENDS SERVI. COMM., STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE: A REPORT ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA 147-48 (1971).

See generally FRANCIS A. ALLEN, THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILITATIVE IDEAL: PENAL POLICY AND SOCIAL PURPOSE (1981).

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 76.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 163 (quoting Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins, Letter to the President on Crime Control).

72. Ainsworth, supra note 66, at 1104 ("Despite several decades of experience with rehabilitative penology in the adult and juvenile systems, however, criminal recidivism stubbornly refused to whither away.")

Id. at 1105.

E.g., MORRIS, supra note 36, at 20-22 (discussing the "abandonment" of the reform of criminals as justification for imprisonment).

David J. Rothman, Deincarcerating Prisoners and Patients, 1973 C. L. REV. 8, 24 (1973).

See, e.g., WAYNE LAFAVE & AUSTIN W. SCOTT, CRIMINAL LAW 23 (1972) (noting that "there has been more of a commitment to the 'rehabilitative ideal' in recent years than to other theories of punishment").

See, e.g., WAYNE LAFAVE & AUSTIN W. SCOTT, CRIMINAL LAW 28-29 (2d ed. 1986) (discussing the dearth of criticism of rehabilitative theories beginning in the 1960s).

See, e.g., Michael Vitiello, Reconsidering Rehabilitation,65 TUL. L. REV. 1011, 1012-13 (1991) (discussing the abrupt rejection of the rehabilitative ideal of punishment).

See, Elizabeth Rapaport, Retribution and Redemption in the Operation of Executive Clemency, 74 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1501, 1502 (2000).

See generally MARVIN FRANKEL, CRIMINAL SENTENCES: LAW WITHOUT ORDER (1973); ANDREW VON HIRSCH, DOING JUSTICE: THE CHOICE OF PUNISHMENTS (1976); RICHARD G. SINGER, JUST DESERTS: SENTENCING BASED ON EQUALITY AND DESERT (1979) .

81. The Guidelines began with Congress's 1984 enactment of the Sentencing Reform Act, Pub. L. 98-473, 98 Stat. 1837, 1976 (1984) ("the SRA"). The SRA changed the century-old federal indeterminate sentencing scheme to a determinate one and created the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which ultimately created the Guidelines. WEST GROUP, FEDERAL SENTENCING GUIDELINES MANUAL 1-2 (1999). One can be a neo-retributionist without necessarily being a fan of the Guidelines. The SRA and its Guidelines triggered a whole host of controversies, including constitutional questions about the separation of powers and institutional questions about the role of judicial discretion, the resolution of which do not necessarily depend on one's views on retribution. See, e.g., Charles L. Ogeltree, Jr., The Death of Discretion?: Reflections on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1938 (1988) (criticizing the Guidelines for failing to address the complex issues involved in sentencing, such as individual characteristics of the defendant and racial disparity in sentencing); Note, The Federal Sentencing Guidelines and Confrontation Rights, 42 DUKE L.J. 382 (1992) (advocating that confrontation rights should apply to sentencing under the Guidelines in order to adequately protect defendants); Note, The Standard of Proof at Sentencing Hearings Under the FederalSentencingGuidelines:Why the Preponderance of the Evidence Standard is Constitutionally Inadequate, 1997 U. ILL.L. REV. 583 (1997). In 1989, the Supreme Court rejected constitutional attacks on the SRA and Guidelines based on arguments that they were a delegation of excess legislative authority and a violation of the separation of powers. United States v. Mistretta, 488 U.S. 361 (1989). Commentators have disagreed about whether the Guidelines allow appropriate rehabilitative consideration, especially in drug cases. Compare Note, Sentencing the Reformed Addict: Departure Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and the Problem of Drug Rehabilitation,91 COLUM. L. REV. 2051 (1991) (describing the disagreement over the interpretation of the Guidelines as allowing downward departures for rehabilitated defendants) with Comment, Downward Departures from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Based on the Defendant's Drug Rehabilitative Efforts, 59 U. CHI. L. REV. 837 (1992) (arguing that defendant's genuine efforts at rehabilitation can be a valid reason to justify departure from the Guidelines).

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 159-64.

Id. at 159-64.

A situation which, as described in the text accompanying note 38 supra, comes close to describing most European criminal systems from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment.

'For example, the utilitarian J.J.C. Smart argues that although deterrence should be the prime consideration of legislators (what he calls "second order" questions), judges should be concerned primarily with retribution (what he calls "first order" questions). J.J.C. Smart, Comment: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment 6 RES JUDICATAE 368 (June 1953). Even Norval Morris, who is associated more with incapacitation than retribution, acknowledges that retribution must play a central role in linking the punishment with the crime. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 163.

ALLEN, supra note 69.

Id. at 86-87.

The one exception I found was an article about restorative justice written by an Australian social scientist, John Braithewaite. Braithewaite, supra note 1. Professor Braithewaite not only tackles the difficult traditional philosophical and criminological issues underlying punishment, he also attempts to summarize the data behind the claims and criticisms of the model.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 17-21.

See, e.g., STANTON PEELE, THE DISEASING OF AMERICA: ADDICTION TREATMENT OUT OF CONTROL (1989).

See generally supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.

See generally supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 142-43.

Margot Slade, At the Bar, N. Y. TIMES, May 20, 1994, at B20.

Sch. Dist. of Phila. v. Friedman, 96 PA. COMMW. 267, 270 (1986).

THE FEDERALIST No. 78, at 490 (Alexander Hamilton) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 1.

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 2.

In The Federalist No. 47, which was Madison's first exposition on the separation of powers, he discusses at length the entangled failings of the British judiciary, and even quotes Montesquieu's criticisms: "Were the power of the judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with all the violence of an oppressor." THE FEDERALIST No. 47, at 338 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed, 1996).

"A circumstance which crowns the defects of the Confederation remains yet to be mentioned-the want of a judiciary power. Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation." Id. at 187.

THE FEDERALIST No. 22, at 489-96 (Alexander Hamilton) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

THE FEDERALIST No. 47, at 84 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

See, e.g., Three Affiliated Tribes of Ft. Berthold Reservation v. Wold Eng'g, 467 U.S. 138, 157 (1984) ("It is a fundamental rule of judicial restraint ... that this Court will not reach constitutional questions in advance of the necessity of deciding them.").

Id.

See generally OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., THE COMMON LAW 33-37 (Harvard Univ. Press 1923) (1881).

Holmes is perhaps more responsible than anyone for breathing life back into the founders' commitment to judicial restraint. He wrote powerfully and elegantly about the need for judges to judge rather than legislate, and his commitment to that principle was all the more impressive because he personally disagreed with so much of what the progressive Congress was trying to do in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, he suggested that his epitaph be "Here lies the supple tool of power." ALSCHULER, supra note 57, at 82. He also wrote that "[I]f my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." Id. (quoting Letter from Holmes to Harold Laski (March 4, 1920)).

THE FEDERALIST No. 39, at 281 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

See supra notes 24-30, 72-73 and accompanying text.

See supra notes 64-66, 69 and accompanying text.

Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1476.

Id. at 1528-29.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 62.

Id. at 62-65.

Id. at 97.

Id. The judge explains his funding activities this way: Whether you like it or not you as the judge are considered a leader of your drug court team. Your team looks to you for inspiration and guidance. So as a leader of that team you must take a very active part in the raising of funds. For the Rochester court, I went out and raised all the money from local foundations.

CAROLINE COOPER ET AL., DRUG COURT RES. CTR., DRUG COURTS: 1997 OVERVIEW OF OPERATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES 120- 27 (1997).

See, e.g., Judith S. Kaye, Rethinking TraditionalApproaches,62 ALB. L. REV. 1491, 1494 (1999).

Id.

Id.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about community-based courts is that their proponents are seriously proposing that they be extended from petty crimes to the entire justice system. Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye of the New York Court of Appeals has suggested just such an unbounded extension. "What about a community court for civil cases? For commercial cases? For family cases? For youth crime? .... [T]hese are very very good questions, well worth considering." Id. at 1494. With all due respect to Chief Judge Kaye, what is a community-based commercial court? Would Chief Judge Kaye have panels of community activists decide whether defaulting borrowers should clean subways instead of repay their bank loans? Should negligent surgeons have to lick and stuff envelopes for the American Trial Lawyers Association instead of paying damages to their victims? In the end, if the rights that flow to individuals-from their contracts, from common law, from statute or from the constitution-are nothing but the shadows of communal judgment, and if individuals' opportunities to enforce those rights in courts of law are replaced entirely by a system in which those rights mean nothing but a certain level of symbolic community opprobrium, then we might as well disband the judiciary. Indeed, our modern world has already experienced a most advanced form of such unbounded community courts-the People's Courts in China during the cultural revolution.

For a discussion of the ethical dilemmas drug courts impose on criminal defense lawyers, see Richard C. Boldt, Rehabilitative Punishment and the Drug Treatment Court Movement, 76 WASH. U. L. Q. 1205 (1999); Developments in the Law—Alternatives to Incarceration for Drug-Abusing Offenders, 111 HARV. L. REV. 1863 (1998). Professor Boldt summarized the problem this way: [D]efense counsel [in the drug court] is no longer primarily responsible for giving voice to the distinct perspective of the defendant's experience in what remains a coercive setting. Rather, defense counsel becomes part of a treatment team working with others to insure that outcomes, viewed from the perspective of the institutional players and not the individual defendant, are in the defendant's best interests. Boldt, supra, at 1245.

Indeed, treatment is imposed as a blanket condition of bail in many drug courts, despite the potential constitutional problems with such a non-particularized approach. See Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1462 n.7; cf United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 751-52 (1987) (upholding the constitutionality of the Bail Reform Act of 1984 because it required a particularized showing of governmental need); see also Richard B. Abell, Pretrial Drug Testing: Expanding Rights and Protecting Public Safety, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 943, 956 (1989) (arguing that pre-trial drug testing is constitutional).

See Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1524.

Criminal defendants, even those labeled as the system's "clients," have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel and to be present at all critical stages of a criminal prosecution. E.g. Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 68-72 (1932).

See supra notes 2-14 and accompanying text.

See supra notes 121-123 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 7-9.

Even for these kinds of long-established programs, there is virtually no evidence of their efficacy.

Prosecutorial charging and bargaining discretion is a fundamental principle inherent in the doctrine of separation of powers. See, e.g., Wayte v. United States, 470 U.S. 598, 607 (1985). This broad discretion [afforded the prosecution] rests largely on the recognition that the decision to prosecute is particularly ill-suited to judicial review. Such factors as the strength of the case, the prosecution's general deterrence value, the Government's enforcement priorities, and the case's relationship to the Government's overall enforcement plan are not readily susceptible to the kind of analysis the courts are competent to undertake. Id.

See supra notes 31-32 and accompanying text.

In Denver, for example, the dispositional algorithm for defendants charged with simple possession is fairly rigid: (1) if the defendant has two or more prior felonies, he or she is ineligible for drug court; (2) if the defendant is arrested with a small, so-called "personal use," amount of drugs, he or she is offered a deferred judgment; (3) if the defendant is arrested with more than a personal use amount, he or she gets probation. See also Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1513 nn. 297-98.

[thewormwood]

A little in-between scene I wrote a couple weeks ago which is cute enough to post; Dagny is much chattier when he’s had a ‘drink’ or two. But he’s not gushing. What? He’s not.

The ceiling’s exposed beams arched overhead like the ribs of a breaching whale. In matching pairs, they ran the width of the room, the cool silvered-blue of weathered bone, or lichen. There were an abundance of greys in fact, from the floorboards to the wall paneling, to the soft wing-backed chairs held down by a patronage no few of which were also grey. The bar was paler still, a moth-white jigsaw made from hundreds of palm-sized rectangles; bone perhaps, or ivory of some kind. Dagny’s familiarity with the sort of wildlife Nexus had to offer trophy hunters was limited to being able to differentiate between something that was liable to consider him prey, and something which was safe to summarily ignore. The fact that he’d begun counting aurin among the latter may have meant something, were he required to be in contact with them for any duration. Once in a while, business in Thayd put him in the general vicinity of the small, colourful creatures, but following the mission which had sprung a swarm of them from a tiny dominion outpost, Dagny had made sure ‘general vicinity’ meant well beyond arm’s reach. The bar was, happily, not the sort of location one would have found an aurin, or a human. Neither species would be likely to appreciate the viciously morbid sense of humour lurking behind the decision to name a bar set over top a crematorium, Burn. Mordesh reality required such a sense of humour, for survival if nothing else, but it was difficult to tell at times if Trilby found this, or anything genuinely amusing. While the Long Night had changed them all, immeasurably, it had made Trilby of all people more closed, even to him. Although, in her defense, she was making an effort at present. Dagny on the other hand, was stubbornly refusing to engage beyond basic operational civility, purely for the satisfaction of watching her increasingly blatant attempts to try and jostle him out of it. It was the little things after all. “Ange says she has a contact in Galeras, but there’s nothing in Galeras right now except rock-picking humans and roans. If there’s an ICI spy embedded somewhere in that whole area, he’ll be easy to find.” “Oh?” Dagny had said ‘oh’ four times in the last six minutes, and Trilby was still pretending she didn’t notice the conversational toe-dragging. “For one, he’d be the only one with all of his teeth.” “You assume it's a man.” “Women make better spies. I wouldn’t have heard about them, if it were a woman.” Her drink was the colour of liquid rust, and viscous enough to cling to the inside of the glass for a moment after it was set down again. Dagny’s modulator offered up a sound that would have in another reality been a derisive snort; what came out was an ugly little grunt. His hands wanted a glass to fidget with, robbed of that option, he twisted the plunger on the empty syringe instead. It didn’t feel like much of anything yet, but then, the clever creature who’d realized a profitable portion of the mordesh population had lost the ability to drink but not the desire to, hadn’t gotten much of the engineer’s coin thus far. The alchemical concoction didn't have exactly the same effects as liquor, but the similarities meant anyone as focused on job performance as Dagny wouldn’t have had much use for it. The cleverness of calling the product ‘drink’ was hard to argue however. Trilby’s face finally betrayed something more than polite interest. She looked annoyed, and Dagny gave himself a mental point. “Maybe you should have another. What’s the dosage is required to reach ‘fun’?” His response was to wag the empty tube under her nose, until she batted it aside. “There are not enough of these in all of Thayd for that.” “And I had such high hopes after last week.” Dagny wasn’t sure for a moment if she was being flip or not, but relented. Twisting the cap off a second syringe, she lifted her glass at him in silent toast. “Last week? Were you feeling particularly delusional last week, or am I missing something?” The contents were almost certainly room temperature, but the slow trickle of the chemical cocktail into his system felt like flushing his veins with ice water. She was looking at him, flatly, impatiently, as though the answer were obvious. Dagny flashed a pale palm at her in a microcosmic shrug. “I honestly don’t know what you’re on about. I spent the first half of the week finding ways to keep myself from going mad with boredom while Markov rubbed his greasy little hands together over my suspension, and the second half being accosted by the professionally invasive attentions of a psychiatrist who implied more than once that I was emotionally unstable.” “Mmm,” Trilby hummed through a mouthful of liquid, then swallowed to continue, “I’ve yet to meet the emotionally stable mordesh, myself included. But you are, absolutely.” The engineer’s brows rumpled abruptly. “It was not the assertion that bothered me as much as the delivery. Pseudo concern, familiarity…” “Oh, were they too nice to you?” “You know very well what I mean. It was all professional concern, smarmy, insincere. I’m meant to believe she’s genuinely concerned for my well being while she’s judging me am I? Does anyone ever truly buy it? No one can be that gullible. The real insult is that she refused to drop the act. She's one of Markov's creatures, I'm sure.” Trilby fluttered her eyelashes at the near tirade. Dagny lifted his chin and huffed, rather imperiously. “Her eyes looked like raisins pushed into rising dough.” Her laugh carried over the audible-murk of a dozen quiet conversations. “I think it's working.” Dagny had moved from fidgeting with an empty syringe to trying to balance it on it's uncapped end. “Why, is this fun? I don’t feel particularly fun. I’m not sure I remember exactly what fun is. At very least I think our opinions on its definition are… divergent, these days at least.” If he’d been looking, he would have noticed the conspiratorial tilt to her mouth, the way her ears which had always been over-long leaned back slightly. “Maybe so. Your definition seems to be ‘can carry a tray without spilling things and pink hair’.” “Carry a- oh really. Trilby,” A prayer, a plea for mercy perhaps. Or at very least, an expression of disappointment, as though he’d thought better of the woman who had left more ruined relationships in her wake than an Arkite-Flu sufferer leaves wadded tissues. It was a testament perhaps to some unspoken depth of optimism in him. “I will even grant that she wasn’t bad. For being the help.” This time, Dagny found himself caught up in her laughter. “Oh, I'm sorry - do you outrank her then? No? I thought not. Either way, it was a…” here he made a small gesture with one hand, while the other continued to attempt a balancing act with the syringe, “small lapse in judgment shall we say. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and happened to collide with one of my more, fractious moods.” “Fractious isn't the word I'd have chosen. But, if there's a silver lining to your dalliance with a former servant, its that your standards seem to be rallying.” The woman behind the bar was yellow, more so even than the engineer; a searing, lemon-zest hue that seemed wildly out of wing with the desaturated palette of the room. She set another glass in front of the stalker, who smiled so beatifically in return that the woman’s cheeks went orange. During that fleeting exchange, Dagny had managed it. The syringe, in defiance of gravity, was standing point down on the bar, and he’d moved onto the second one. Trilby looked only, wholly unimpressed with the balancing act. “You worried me with that business about the skeleton.” “Don’t you dare thump that glass down on the bar right now,” Dagny’s brow furrowed in concentration. “What skeleton?” “The one with the good personality.” This time his gaze slipped sideways, concentration broken by suspicion. Trilby’s face gave it away, and Dagny wrinkled a nose he no longer had. “If your cynicism were a well, it would be fathomless in depth… and used regularly to drown kittens. He does have an interesting personality. Although it may be difficult for you to differentiate these days between a compelling person, and one simply feeding you flattery like scraps to a starving dog.” Anyone else would have been offended. Trilby’s amusement was like a patina poured over the steely edges of her base personality; a mere embellishment. “He is an ambulatory coat rack!” “You’re a metaphorical hive of wasps with nice hair, and it doesn’t seem to hold you back. Yes, I noticed your new one by the way, she is very tall and looks like the sort of person who thinks the ability to crush things between their thighs is the height of personal achievement. Congratulations.” “There’s no use trying to rouse my protective instincts in an attempt to change the subject. I have none.” “No, you don’t. Which I suppose makes the wasps comparison inaccurate; you’re more like… a nest of sand spiders with good hair. Be nice,” Dagny instructed, knowing full well it was outside the realm of her ability by about fourteen light-years. “I could have him kill you, and make it look like an exceedingly embarrassing accident.” Trilby didn’t guffaw, because that too was outside the realm of her ability, but she did cough, politely, around a mouthful of the rusty-red liquor. “I promise, it would be too great a challenge for that little bundle of twigs. From the look of it, opening most doors would be.” “When you sling mud, I know you have only mud to sling.” The second syringe wobbled dangerously as he removed his supporting fingers, slowly, like a magician revealing the apex of his trick. “He is rather clever, incidentally.” “And he never interrupts you, which I assume is the lion’s share of the allure. Difficult to be clever-” “When people don’t let you get a word in edgewise? Yes, I know a thing or two about that, speaking of harpies who love the sound of their own screeching.” Trilby dropped a fist onto the bar in retaliation, but the syringes had been positioned carefully, by a man quite familiar with the stalker’s destructive streak. They toppled toward one another, catching at the cross-beams, and remained balanced on their ends, in a perfect X shape. Dagny wagged a smug eyebrow at her. Trilby straightened on her stool, and took up her glass again with an air that was more exasperated than impressed. “Please, stop gushing. I’m embarrassed for you.” “You made me take two shots, and you can damned well deal with the consequences.” The gesture was a relic, one that once-upon a time would have been enough to make the honey-blond strands of his bangs flop charmingly over an eye. “His hair is.... cute.” “I’ve died. I’ve died, and this is some strange alien netherworld in which Dagny Vancura is squealing about a mouthless scarecrow. I need to speak to that psychiatrist… she’s done something to you.” “No that was Marta. She calls everything cute. It was only a matter of time before the word lodged like a poison dart in my vocabulary.” The engineer leaned forward, folding his forearms across the silvery bone mosaic that he could peer at shelves. The vague shine on bottles of every conceivable shape and size shifted with the gentle bobbing of the floating alchemical lanterns. The effect was nice; a bit like those little phosphorescent bugs. Absently, he wondered if Zoran would like it. “What exactly are you staring at?” “Hmm?” “You’re staring worryingly at that shelf, and I'm honour-bound to remind you, I’m a drink ahead.” “Is it possible to over-indulge in these?” Ruining his carefully engineered balancing act, Dagny snatched up a syringe and examined in critically. “We'll certainly find out.”

[bewarethebasement]

Spero Meliora

Judy Kristel Bayalas

Art is the language of the elite; it is the propaganda of the ruling class.

If I have one takeaway from all our discussions in ARTS 1, it’ll be this sad but true reality: that the current state of the arts that we know is being dictated by those who are capable of doing art—those who have the means to exhibit their works to astound the unassuming middle class.

I wouldn’t fully know since I am merely a passive student, enrolled in a very scientific course at that, but around this time last month I decided to take a small step to see more of what art is, at least here in Elbi, by visiting the month’s exhibit in the Sining Makiling Gallery. While I do not mean to say that this exhibit represents all art in Elbi, my visit to the gallery is already a breakthrough for me as I am among the crowd who does not really engage in the arts, at least not willfully. For the art community, this means more and more students are getting reached by their craft, whether or not they needed prodding from their dear professors. 

I realized that the Elbi art community is not so closed off—one just has to be placed in a more proactive community to realize that. I especially love how agriculture was one of the themes of the exhibit I went to (entitled August Rush showcased on, well, August), and it showcased the life of the underappreciated (thank you, respectable Senator Villar) heroic farmers. There is of course too much romanticism in the portrayal of farmers:  I really do not think our farmers’ current plight is as colorful as that (again thanks to our beloved government), but then, I’m grateful since it is not every day that one comes across people who took time to dramatize the farmers’ noble life. 

But I would say that visual art in Elbi and Laguna proliferates through those who have more access to art exhibits, which means to say the middle and elite classes, as is very much evident in the artists showcased. I wouldn’t say it is bad—I am more excited for what is happening in the art scene rather than apprehensive of it. I choose to look at it in a more positive light, for considering that when I was in my younger years, I didn’t know I could go to art exhibits for free so this is already an improvement. Art exhibits have always been clouded by mystery and elitism; in my mind it’s like a place you visit to cough out your money. So I am beyond thankful for what I have experienced, since it is such a breath of fresh air. 

As an agriculture student, it warmed my heart to see efforts to raise interest and support for the agriculture sector, which is key to a more promising and sustainable future (if only the government would look beyond the confines of their air-conditioned offices, and into the golden snail-infested fields of these heroes). It is exciting to see this shift in perspective in the visual arts, for at last, the story of the masses is given the chance to be voiced out. I may be biased but it is high time for the arts to engage in and tackle more of these socially relevant issues, to be the stronger voice to empower those who are oppressed by the ruling class. Enough of the thinking that has gripped us for years on end of art as just being for the “may kaya” or those who have “too much time on their hands”. The arts should become a platform to voice the plight of the disenfranchised, for it has the power to at least raise the interest of the elite. 

 Art can be of much wider influence if only its great value is recognized. One of the means to achieve this is through normalizing art exhibits and not promoting it as a mere opportunity for incentives to grade-conscious students in the university. Furthermore, measures should not be boxed to this. Although the efforts of the Sining Makiling Gallery to showcase these exhibits and make it accessible to the public is highly appreciated, I should say that this is not enough. 

The way we value an artwork should not be constrained to the recognition of distinguished art bodies or the judgment of art institutions; this perspective in valuing artworks is a toxic ideology that is not much help to already struggling artists. Elbi kids should be given the option of also dreaming to become a painter or sculptor or writer as much as others want to become a doctor or lawyer or engineer. Art could also be a way of life, a noble career path, a stable source of income—if only people would stop looking at people in the art world as those who have “slower minds” or those who should be exclusively “elite”, but as people, period. Because the art community is not composed of just painters and sculptors, art here in Elbi (and even outside Elbi) should not be perceived as of lesser status compared to the sciences but should be seen as equal in voice and influence. Society has to stop looking down on the arts as many are doing so today, for maybe then more people would get in touch with their humanity. Maybe so, our brilliantly creative minds would stop struggling and dealing with mental health issues as much as they do today (after all, the ones bringing the toxicity to our small and precious art community is society itself, and it’s time for it to stop bullying the element it needs to unlock the greater good).

I don't quite know how exactly this is supposed to work, but I envision a day where the Elbi community will have a place where artists can meet regularly, exchange their ideas, and be able to rally their varying ideas and advocacies in their chosen medium and form, in a space that is reserved solely for that purpose. In this space, artists would not showcase art just for art’s sake; it’ll be the platform where the oppressed can have more people listen to their side of the ongoing narratives. I remember the numerous efforts of Cebuano artists to portray such works, by means of holding the Gabii sa Kabilin, publishing original Cebuano poems and music in magazines dedicated solely for such works, and even having dedicated infrastructures that aim to show the local color (Museo Sugbo and other tourist spots). As Cebuanos have various art festivals and conferences that showcase different genres such as week-long Otaku fests and cosplay events, weekly art galleries in the malls, and art competitions held annually, I envision Elbi to have similar promotions to develop the state of arts here. 

I’m not knowledgeable as to how activities are conceptualized and organized, but I am certain that it took a collective effort from various proponents to solidify these practices, and it’s not impossible if one has the passion to make it happen. It’ll take years and years of continuous efforts to achieve this and I highly doubt it’d be smooth sailing, but from what I can see, our community is going in a promising direction. A lot more has to be done, but at the very least, the Elbi art community is shaking with conversations. I can only hope that it’ll continue to be like that.

---

Though inarticulate, Judy Kristel Bayalas likes to write. 

twitter.com/judy_jk

[psychotherapyconsultants]

My Local Town Facebook Groups are a Hot Mess

Back in the 1990s when I first got my start publishing mental health resources, it was my firm belief that the internet was a wonder that could help anyone who had access to it. I was a true believer, and it was my job to help convert not only my profession, but everyone I met.

In the 2000s, when social networking sites began to take hold, I again held out hope and expressed optimism. “Such services allow us to better keep in touch with our loved ones.”

Over the past few years, however, my optimism and faith in the internet to help bring us all closer together is beginning to slip. Seriously slip. And what is bringing me down most of all are the Facebook groups I subscribe to for each of the little local towns I live by.

Facebook is no stranger to controversy and hot water. It’s always had a very lax relationship with personal privacy, and has a history and track record that, in my mind, clearly demonstrate they don’t give a shit about you personally. I, like most people, understand that point yet still continue to use the service.

The Intent of Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups were meant to help expand the social networking giant’s reach into our lives. Introduced in 2010, they were originally intended to help friends create new social groups focused around shared interests or locales. Since that time, millions of new Groups have been created for every hobby, health condition, and town in the world. In fact, some towns around me have more than one Group devoted to them, so that residents can share local gossip and talk about local happenings and interests.

It sounds great. At the time of their introduction I thought, “What better way to enhance the feelings of connectedness with the people who live in the same town than to provide them a nice, easy-to-use platform on a service that most people already have an account with anyway?”

People will share town happenings, get excited for an upcoming art show or event, and talk about memories of the town they grew up in. If some elderly citizen’s driveway needs a quick shovel, we’d all pitch in to ensure it got done. And when that new restaurant or gift shop opens up downtown, we’d all rally around to show our support. Just found a sale going on in your favorite store, you’d share it. The local coffeeshop is selling pastries at half off, you’d post it.

Those were my perhaps unrealistic expectations when I joined my first town group.

The Reality of Facebook Groups

The reality, however, is far different.

At first, I thought that what I was seeing must’ve been an anomaly after subscribing to two different town groups. So I did what my scientist brain always tells me to do — increase the sample size.

So over the past two years, I’ve subscribed off and on to over a dozen different town groups in my region. I saw the same behavior on all of them, to varying degrees. In fact, the behavior I observed is so common across town groups, enterprising souls have made up “town bingo” cards that you can play along with, waiting for people to talk and complain about the exact same things on a regular basis.

One of the towns (more of a small city) loves to talk about police sirens in a certain bad section of town. “What are the cops doing there, anybody know?” “I hope they’re arresting those dealers down on the corner finally!” Which is exactly what I would expect of a town group. Except this conversation repeats itself nearly every week. It’s like we’re living in our own version of the movie Groundhog Day. More grimly, perhaps the drug/crime problem is really that bad — a unique warning sign to the town’s mayor.

The color of the town’s water is a big deal in many of these groups, too. It’s no wonder, since all of the towns reside along the Merrimack River, one of the most polluted rivers in New England due to cities being allowed to dump overflow sewage into it when it rains a bit too much. It also doesn’t help that many of the towns around here date from the 1700 and 1800s, with sewer and water systems that are none too young either.

Helicopter flying overhead or a plane that seems to be flying too low? Facebook Groups has got you covered! Someone will inevitably remind us that technology is in our skies, as though helicopters and planes were invented just yesterday. The fact that there is daily business being carried out in our skies that ordinary citizens generally don’t know, much less care about, seems to be a true wonder to some people.

Oh no, a new business wants to open in our historic little town! Somebody wants to build a new building? Instead of welcoming new businesses and industry, most of these town group’s members seem intent on keeping all change away. Not understanding that change is what makes diversity and growth possible (the opposite of stagnation and decline), too many of these citizens see any change to their town as a negative. Nearly always, these conversations start with, “How can we stop so-and-so from coming here?”

You wouldn’t live in New England if you didn’t have a post at least once a week noting some sort of wildlife the person saw. “I just saw a coyote, watch out, be safe, and keep your pets indoors!” It’s as if people don’t realize that most people aren’t using Facebook as a real-time social alert system any more. (And if you are, shame on you! Turn off all Facebook notifications that aren’t private messages to you. Whatever that’s going on on Facebook is not more important than what’s going on in your real life right now in front of you.)

No Way to Fix Facebook Groups for Towns

I’ve spent some time thinking about this issue and whether there’s some way to reinforce or encourage more positive behavior in Facebook groups for towns.

I’m not sure that it’s possible. Sometimes the loudest people are the ones who have the least interesting thing to say. There’s virtually no policy or guideline you could implement, even if you were an admin of one of these groups, that wouldn’t be heavy-handed and impossible to enforce.

Complaining, for better or worse, is a natural part of the human condition. It’s one of the things that brings us together. I’m just not sure it draws us closer to one another in any meaningful way, because its based in negativity.

In short, people will complain and talk about whatever is on their mind. Some people have no filter, and Facebook groups is simply a reflection of that reality. Most of us probably didn’t realize our town was full of such a diverse group of individuals until Groups made that clear. We have to take the good along with the bad, since that’s what makes a group of people potentially interesting.

The never-ending negativity, however, is grating. And since my little observational study has ended, I’m going to remove myself from some of the most negative of these groups. I’ll stay in the ones where beautiful photos of the town and surrounding views are regularly shared, and steel myself against the weekly complaints of “over development” whenever someone proposes a new business or building in town.

The intent of Facebook Groups was good. But when it comes to towns, perhaps we see a little more of our fellow citizens than we had expected.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/my-local-town-facebook-groups-are-a-hot-mess/

[todaynewsstories]

Ankara aims to defuse tensions with European allies | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW

Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s relations with Germany have, in recent years, gone from bad to worse.

In March 2017, Erdogan personally attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel, accusing her of using “Nazi measures” after Berlin prevented Turkish ministers from holding campaign rallies in Germany. Later that year, German parliamentarians were refused access to troops stationed at the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, prompting the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr from the base. In addition, there have been numerous cases of German citizens being imprisoned in the country in recent years.

After harsh words for Germany and Merkel in recent years, Erdogan will make a state visit to Berlin on later this month

Read more: Istanbul locals feeling the pinch of Turkey’s economic crisis 

But now, Turkey wants to leave this in the past and is seeking to repair relations with Germany and the European Union – a desire that has coincided with Ankara’s ongoing spat with the United States and the downfall of the Turkish economy. 

The visit of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas comes at a time when Turkey desperately needs reliable allies. But this will require political action from Erdogan. Maas’ mission is to lay the groundwork ahead of Erdogan’s state visit to Germany at the end of the month.

Imprisoned Germans a priority

Maas’ first goal is to secure the release of seven German citizens, who have been jailed for political reasons since an attempted coup in 2016. Three of the detained have dual citizenship with Turkey.

Roy Karadag, a Turkey expert and director of the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen, expects the prisoners will be released soon. “I believe the German prisoners, or to be precise the hostages, will be set free in return for economic, financial and political support,” he said.

But Turkey will have to make substantial reforms if it wants to secure financial assistance from Germany and other European countries. And it will have to work to reassure foreign investors that Turkey is a safe place for them to operate, said Jürgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesman for Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU).

“Many potential investors are German-Turks or Turks living in European countries. There must be guarantees for their investments and personal safety,” he said. “No one traveling to Turkey should have to fear getting arrested just because they said something wrong from Ankara’s perspective.”

Read more: German journalist Mesale Tolu arrives home after Turkey lifts travel ban

‘Thousands of people are in prison’

Nils Schmid, the foreign policy spokesman for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), is concerned about the many human rights violations in Turkey. “Thousands of people are in prison,” he said, singling out Turkish entrepreneur and human rights activist Osman Kavala, whom Schmid called “an immensely important partner when it comes to cultural exchange between Turkey and Germany.”

Schmid conceded Ankara’s right to hold terrorists to account, but argued Turkey can’t simply “cast a net of terrorism suspicions over the entire civilian population.” Turkish authorities regularly accuse imprisoned politicians and journalists of terrorism, he said. “That does not correspond to the European standards we expect from Turkey.”

Skeptical about the visit, Stefan Liebich of the socialist Left Party has warned against making too many hasty compromises with Turkey. Ankara must do much more than release a few Germans from prison, he said.

New refugee wave in the making 

 Also on the agenda during Maas’ visit will be the future of conflict in Syria. As the Syrian government gets ready to launch an offensive against the last major rebel stronghold in Idlib province, the United Nations is warning of a new humanitarian crisis. Turkey, which already hosts nearly 3.5 million Syrian refugees, could see another wave of refugees come its way.

Germany’s goal is to prevent further military escalation in the region, while attempting to focus on a post-war system for Syria. According to Bijan Djir-Sarai of the business-friendly FDP, the aim is to have a political framework that would allow Syrian refugees to go back to their home country. 

“This is important. However, one should not forget that Turkey is an important actor in the refugee issue and we will need Turkey’s support,” he said.

One thing is certain, as far as Roy Karadag is concerned: “It is in Germany’s interest to prevent even more refugees from coming to Europe.”

“Diplomacy means having to talk to people we normally wouldn’t. That’s why Maas’ visit is important,” said Armin Paul Hampel, a senior politician with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). He added that if Turkey is serious about reviving relations with Europe, it will have to rethink its ties to Russia.

“Mr. Erdogan has been isolating himself, and turning more strongly toward Russia. This, in turn, is blocking his path to Western Europe. This cannot be in Turkey’s interest,” he said.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

July 2007: Abdullah Gul becomes Turkey’s first Islamist president

After years of free market reforms, Turkey’s transition slowly begins to reverse. Islamist Abdullah Gul’s candidacy as president in 2007 marks a clear shift away from secularist policies, and strains relations between the ruling AKP and the military. However, with broad support from both conservative Muslims and liberals, the AKP wins the parliamentary elections and Gul is elected president.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

September 2010: Constitutional reforms take hold

Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tables a constitutional reform increasing parliamentary control of the judiciary and army, effectively allowing the government to pick judges and senior military officials. The amendment, which is combined with measures also aimed at protecting child rights and the strengthening of the right to appeal, passed by a wide margin in a public referendum.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

May 2013: Dissent erupts in Gezi Park

Pent-up anger directed by young people at Erdogan, Gul and the Islamist-rooted AKP hits a boiling point in May 2013. The violent police breakup of a small sit-in aimed at protecting Istanbul’s Gezi Park spurs one of the fiercest anti-government protests in years. Eleven people are killed and more than 8,000 injured, before the demonstrations eventually peter out a month later.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

July 2015: Turkey relaunches crackdown against Kurds

A fragile ceasefire deal between the Turkish government and the Kurdish rebel PKK group breaks under the weight of tensions aggravated by the war in Syria. Military forces resume operations in the mostly Kurdish southeast of Turkey. In early 2016, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) — a breakaway PKK faction — claim responsibility for two bombings in Ankara, each killing 38 people.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

July 2016: Military coup attempt falls short

A military coup attempt against the government shakes Turkey to its core and briefly turns the country into a war zone. Some 260 civilians die in overnight clashes with the army across five major cities. Erdogan, however, rallies supporters and the following morning rebel soldiers are ambushed by thousands of civilians on the Bosporus Bridge. The troops eventually drop their guns and surrender.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

July 2016: President Erdogan enacts a state of emergency

In the aftermath of the failed coup, Erdogan announces a state of emergency, leading to arrests of tens of thousands of suspected coup sympathizers and political opponents. Among those detained are military and judiciary officials and elected representatives from the pro-Kurdish HDP party. The purge is later expanded to include civil servants, university officials and teachers.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

2016: Crackdown on the press

As part of Erdogan’s crackdown against supposed “terrorist sympathizers,” Turkey becomes one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders. The government shuts down around 110 media outlets in the year following the coup and imprisons more than 100 journalists, including German-Turkish correspondent Deniz Yücel.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

March 2017: AKP officials try to stoke support in Western Europe

With a referendum on expanding Erdogan’s presidential powers set for April 2016, AKP officials look to galvanize support among Turks living in Europe, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands. However, the Netherlands forbids Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from landing in the country, while Germany opts to cancel two rallies. Erdogan accuses both countries of Nazi-style repression.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

April 2017: Erdogan clinches referendum vote

Erdogan narrowly wins the referendum vote expanding his power. As a result, Turkey’s parliamentary system is abolished in favor of a strong executive presidency. Erdogan is also allowed to remain in power potentially until 2029. However, international election monitors claim that opposition voices were muzzled and that media coverage was dominated by figures from the “yes” campaign.

Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism

June 2018: Election wins secure Erdogan’s power

Erdogan secures a new five-year term and sweeping new executive powers after winning landmark elections on June 24. His AKP and their nationalist allies also win a majority in parliament. International observers criticize the vote, saying media coverage and emergency measures gave Erdogan and the AKP an “undue advantage” in the vote.

Author: David Martin

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[newssplashy]

During a tense White House briefing on Thursday, he challenged the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to disavow President Donald Trump’s description of journalists as “the enemy of the people.”

Jim Acosta, the square-jawed CNN correspondent, has stood out among the White House press corps for his impassioned on-air monologues about the importance of the First Amendment.

During a tense White House briefing on Thursday, he challenged the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to disavow President Donald Trump’s description of journalists as “the enemy of the people.” Sanders declined to do so, saying she had been personally attacked in the media and had faced threats since starting her job.

Opinions on the exchange varied.

Many liberals praised Acosta for confronting Sanders, particularly after he had faced vitriol from Trump supporters at a Florida rally on Tuesday. Many conservatives knocked Acosta as a biased showboat. And some of his rival White House reporters rolled their eyes.

Acosta, a CNN veteran, is used to it.

Since January, when the president-elect shouted him down at a news conference, Acosta, 47, has been a featured player in the Trump v. Media battle royale. The president, no fan of CNN, has called Acosta “a real beauty” and refused to take his questions last month during a session with reporters in Britain.

All that has made Acosta a ripe target for Trump’s army of adherents. This week, Sean Hannity of Fox News ran a montage of “Jim Acosta Lowlights” and called him “a liberal partisan hack.” In Florida, Acosta, who is regularly escorted to rallies by security personnel, faced hostile Trump fans who interrupted his live shot and shouted “fake news.”

That set the stage for Thursday, when Acosta, breaking from the usual sober style of White House reporters, framed his question to Sanders as a moral choice.

“It would be a good thing if you were to state right here, at this briefing, that the press — the people who are gathered in this room right now, doing their jobs every day, asking questions of officials like the ones you brought forward earlier — are not the enemy of the people,” Acosta said in his newscaster’s baritone. “I think we deserve that.”

Sanders deflected — and then mirrored Acosta’s tone.

“It’s ironic, Jim,” she said, “that not only you and the media attack the president for his rhetoric, when they frequently lower the level of conversation in this country.”

Sanders, without much evidence, went on to accuse the news media of using “personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger.” She also cited her experience at this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner, during which comedian Michelle Wolf mocked Sanders’ “smoky eye” makeup and compared her to “an Uncle Tom” for “white women.”

“You brought up a comedian to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender,” Sanders said. “As far as I know, I’m the first press secretary in the history of the United States that’s required Secret Service protection.”

Her answer did not directly address the question, so Acosta tried again, with more oomph.

“This democracy, this country, all the people around the world watching what you are saying, Sarah, and the White House for the United States of America — the president of the United States should not refer to us as ‘the enemy of the people,'” he said. “His own daughter acknowledges that, and all I’m asking you to do, Sarah, is to acknowledge that right now and right here.”

Sanders replied: “I appreciate your passion. I share it. I’ve addressed this question.”

At that, Acosta promptly walked out.

Those watching the exchange on television would have noticed the faces of Acosta’s fellow correspondents, some watching with curiosity and others averting their gaze.

“I don’t understand why it matters if Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she doesn’t think the media are the enemy of the people,” said Alex Pareene, a liberal commentator who has written for Splinter, Gawker and Wonkette. “She isn’t the White House or the president. Her words would be meaningless and would have no effect on either Trump’s supporters or even the president himself.”

Pareene added, “It just seems silly and self-righteous, even if I guess it is still notable or newsworthy that the White House press secretary can’t bring herself to make some anodyne statement of support for the press.”

For his part, Acosta was cheered on by his CNN colleagues. He later wrote on Twitter that he was “totally saddened by what just happened.”

“Sarah Sanders was repeatedly given a chance to say the press is not the enemy and she wouldn’t do it,” he wrote in a post that received a torrent of retweets. “Shameful.”

Around the same time, a United Nations group issued a statement condemning Trump’s “repeated attacks on the free press.”

“His attacks are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts,” wrote representatives of the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Trump resumed his customary denigration of the press at a rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday night, pointing at the journalists in the arena and telling the crowd, “They can make anything bad. They are the fake, fake disgusting news.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Michael M. Grynbaum © 2018 The New York Times

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[whatiswildness]

Death of the Cowboy

The Wild West is no longer defined by the cowboys and Indians of the old westerns. Something strange and profound is happening, signalling the death of a way of life and the beginning of a new era. The changing moral value of wildness itself manifests as radical change in wildlife management principles and practices on the ground. This is the rewilding phenomenon as understood from 130 interviews and hundreds of hours of observation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Findings

Rewilding has proven to be a distinct contemporary social phenomenon in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). A growing appreciation of wildness, that is non-human and thus, of ‘nature’, and the theorised object of rewilding, is highly motivating for those in wildlife-related occupations in the GYE. Although it is abundantly clear that an anti-rewilding movement also exists (and is perhaps more consolidated), in which wildness is equally motivating as anathema for individuals; advocacy for the wild is prevailing at a societal level within the study area. 

Findings point to a transfer of ‘moral capital’ from the ‘old West’ to the ‘new West’. This is embodied, ultimately, in changing wildlife management practices, adaptive behaviours of wildlife in response, and new landscapes.

Desire for wildness or, conversely, its absence, manifests as bitter conflict in the GYE. Species management-based conflicts, as conflicts over wildness, constitute a prominent part of a broader battle for the American West; a clash of cultures and identities; of the ‘old West’ versus the ‘new West’, in which the ‘new’ is increasingly taking centre-stage at a grassroots level, and gradually, in the political arena too.

Demographic change, specifically in-migration, can explain much social change in the GYE in a superficial way, including the rewilding phenomenon. However, understanding demographic change does not accomplish making sense of practices and principles with respect to meaning and motivation, neither does it even provide full account of numbers ‘for’ and ‘against’; ‘born and bred’ locals’ values are changing too. 

Meanings of wildness centred on grizzlies, wolves and bison for a great majority of interlocutors. These species, as representative of wildness have great historical and contemporary significance (meaningfulness) in the American West. Rewilding, therefore, is defined here as advocacy for the welfare and freedom of one, or all, of these species, thus, it is generally understood that rewilding requires wilder, connected lands.

Concepts of the ‘wild things that represent wildness’ were surprisingly homogeneous for both advocates for a wilder GYE, part of the 'new West’, and those against, part of the 'old West’. This shared meaning at a semantic level adds weight to the premise that the conflict is one of deeper moral values - a conflict over whether wildness is good or bad.

The Political Arena

Despite losing ground - both cultural and moral capital, and quite literally in terms of acreage for traditional livestock production - within the GYE at a grassroots level, what I term the 'anti-rewilding lobby’ remains highly efficacious in state and sometimes federal politics. Representational make-up of any governing body tends to lag behind actual demographic change which may explain this disconnect. This political influence is shown, for example, in the back and forth federal de-listing and re-listing of the wolf as an endangered species over the past decade.

Governmental bodies such as the Department of Livestock (DoL) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) - both under US Department of Agriculture (USDA) - generally sympathise with the 'anti-rewilding camp’ whilst agencies such as the National Park Service (NPS) and state fish and wildlife departments generally offer (somewhat muted) support for rewilding. Agencies, including tribal councils, have their own 'character’ and regularly butt heads as witnessed, most notably, at the Inter-Agency Bison Management Plan conference.

Each of the three states of the GYE, and all but one county surrounding the Park, voted convincingly for the Republican party at the last presidential election. I argue that deep respect for the cowboy way of life and for the 'success’ of early 20th century pioneer farmsteaders in taming this last frontier, is a Republican trait at the regional governing level. For local conservative politicians (I use “politicians” loosely to include politically influential people), reverence for this heritage is an important part of what it means to be an Idahoan, a Wyomingite or a Montanan. This translates into an anti-rewilding, pro-production agriculture political agenda at the state congressional level in the GYE.

However, this agenda is successfully challenged; subtly by some agencies, and less subtly by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), particularly those able to rally support nation-wide. Analysis of these NGOs will focus on the Sierra Club, Yellowstone Forever, Greater Yellowstone Coalition and National Wildlife Federation as well as Eastern Shoshone tribal leaders (although they identify as a sovereign entity not an NGO).

Lastly, an ever-expanding body of scientific research is being published in support of the benefits of ecological complexity - largely measured in terms of biodiversity, and 'completeness’ of trophic cascades, and thus in support of wild bison, wolves and grizzlies. This is theorised from the perspective of the rise of an environmental technorational regime of power, which leaves policy-makers with quantitative data (and financial capital) to make their case. Given the starting point of the vast majority of studies, that “ecological processes” exhibiting “completeness” and “complexity” are inherently good, the 'anti-rewilding political camp’ find themselves disadvantaged, unable to deploy this emergent language of power.

This shift has, in many ways, been gradual, but a very recent landslide in scientific consensus on the Brucellosis issue (regarding bison) against the anti-rewilding political agenda, is noteworthy. I bore witness as the most comprehensive federal study ever undertaken was presented to agency representatives and the public in November, it certainly touched a nerve. I argue that this may have been the last powerful techorational device available to the anti-rewilding political camp.

The Grassroots Level

Grassroots occupational practices of interlocutors included species management practices, and related practices of land management, advocacy, activism and political resistance centred on grizzlies, wolves and bison. These occupations align very closely with those of ‘political’ interlocutors with the exception that no policy-makers fell into the grassroots category. The main difference was how well-heard their opinions were, effecting principles and practices but not motivations.  

Selection by occupation was highly predictive of meaningfulness of non-human nature’s wildness. Sharing an occupational species-focus whilst passionately negotiating differing moral values attributed to wildness, this group is jointly responsible, with non-human nature, for many observable behavioural and landscape changes.

Non-human grassroots actions will be discussed in my thesis, where appropriate, with respect to their influences on human meaning and motivation. There will be no attempt to decipher the 'why’ of non-human actions. This leaves this thesis wanting in its aim to make overarching sense of wildness and rewilding; only the ‘human’ of the rewilding social phenomenon is investigated. Ironically, the rest remains lost in the wild. We’ll never know how wildness is meaningful to the wild things which help to produce it at the grassroots level.

Native Americans

During my time in the field, motivations for Native American practices which, on the surface, appeared to demonstrate the rewilding phenomenon, were in fact inconsistent with the narrative thus far. Native Americans seem to be swept up in the broader political phenomenon, not as prime agents, but sadly as pawns. Both the anti-rewilding political camp and even the pro-rewilding camp have manipulated Native American interests to support their cause, channelling tribal resentment. This follows a long and painful history of injustice. The tragic irony is history is marked in the American West by the deliberate annihilation of the bison in the 19th Century as a food source for the Indian; a task for which Native Americans were co-opted as their tribal societies disintegrated. Eastern Shoshone, Northern Arapaho, Shoshone-Bannock, Salish-Kootenai and Nez Perce, to name some prominent entities, variously partake in bison slaughter and bison reintroduction, as a way of ‘righting past wrongs’.

Analysis

Genealogy of ‘Wildness’

Two socially constructed, problematic, concepts underpin the cultural meaning of wildness and thus the rewilding phenomenon; ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature’. Perceptions of nature and wilderness are problematised most cogently through the lens of the Anthropocene. The developing moral value assigned to wilderness and nature can be traced through 19th and 20th century literature, political speeches and legislation. The most recent history of these concepts is marked by biocentrism and ecocentrism, through a wealth of modern scientific literature as well as the rise of bureaucratic and institutional structures of scientific expertise.

Additional Theory

The narrative of changing morality around wildness; of the ‘old West’ transition to the ‘new West’, is bound to a parallel narrative of feeling. It is the social shift towards a deep aesthetic appreciation of wild things and an emergence of love for the sublime which is mutually imbricated with the rise of wildness as moral purpose over the past 150 years in America. This shift is much more recent in the American West, and follows demographic change from the 1970s in the GYE.

A postmodern rejection of ‘truth’, of human self-consciousness, on an emotional level, is part-responsible for the practices and principles of rewilding as the embrace of uncertainty in the GYE. This state evokes a preponderant appreciation for the sublime; for the beauty of wild, complex and unmeasurable nature, and (selective) misanthropy in which the Anthropos encompasses the ‘West’ but rarely Native Americans. Rewilding is here characterised at its limit, contributing, in small part, to defining the 'new West’. The Buffalo Field Campaign, with which I spent a month, embodies this ‘new West’ emotional frontier. It is juxtaposed with the heart-felt pragmatism, anthropocentric utilitarianism, dominionism, and finally the threat-response of the 'old West’, which harbours a well-founded fear of its own moral demise as it faces rapid social change.

The Rewilding Paradox

Data gathered in the GYE offers an insight into the motivations of those at either end of the rewilding spectrum. Analysis of data, ultimately of motivations, raises philosophical problems which do not aid in sense-making. They are fascinating nonetheless. Firstly, the oxymoronic reality of ‘managing for wildness’ – can humans really work towards a wilder world without debasing wildness as ‘unmanaged’, rendering it less meaningful? Secondly; even if we allow that humans could act without rendering wildness meaningless, can we successfully imagine future wildness without drawing upon ‘nature’ as a snapshot of the past, or space as devoid of human influence?

[junker-town]

The day Chris Long gave a season of NFL checks to charity

The Eagles defensive end’s career is football, but he won't let it be his legacy.

Chris Long looks up from his phone in time to see the stoplight change from yellow to red. He slams on the brakes of his Toyota FJ Cruiser and apologizes; he’s trying to follow his GPS while looking for an Instagram video he filmed with a drone at his farm in Virginia. It’s a bird’s eye view of him and a few childhood friends blowing up a Darth Vader doll stuffed with colored powder and Tannerite, an explosive target used in rifle practice.

Long, a defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles, is driving to the Mariana Bracetti Academy Charter School in North Philly to speak to high schoolers. Earlier this morning, he announced that he and his wife Megan are donating his last 10 game checks to three different organizations devoted to educational equality in the three cities in which he’s played football. He’s calling his new initiative “Pledge 10 for Tomorrow,” encouraging fans to give what they can, and he’ll donate an extra $50,000 to the city with the most donations.

“Ah, here it is!” he says, finding the video. “I know Tannerite isn’t good, but how cool does this look?”

He hands me his phone. It looks very cool, mesmerizing even. Long has set the video to a song by My Morning Jacket, and the soaring chords match the brilliant bursts of teals, greens, and pinks that billow out against a white blanket of snow.

“One of my buddies from high school who I do this stuff with just had a kid,” Long says, taking his phone back. “I hope it doesn’t mean he’ll stop doing dumb shit like this with me.”

I remind Long, who is 32, that he has a kid, and that having children hasn’t stopped him, nor generations of men before him, from doing dumb shit.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he says, and smiles.

Long starts telling me about the other dumb shit he does. He regularly runs out of gas. He's had the car we’re in for two years and hasn't registered it. He lost his birth certificate a while ago. He was so obsessed with the movie Drive that he bought himself a ‘96 Chevy Impala, then totaled it listening to the soundtrack a day later. (He owned a replica of the scorpion jacket Gosling wore, too, but gave it to Goodwill after the crash because “the dream had died.”) Last year, he listed his former Patriots teammate Danny Amendola’s number on a fake Craigslist ad for a Suzuki Spider, then watched a bewildered Amendola field calls from people looking to buy his nonexistent motorcycle. He and William Hayes, who’s on the Dolphins now but played with Long on the Rams, once filled a teammates’ car with packing peanuts and crickets. The crickets died and it smelled terrible.

“I am incapable of not being a regular fucking moron,” Long says, laughing.

He misses the turn for the high school. He whips the car around, finds the entrance, parks, and walks by a few vans belonging to local news crews and NFL Films. The league is filming the event for some series about Players Doing Good Stuff.

This fall is the first time Long has so overtly publicized his charitable work. He founded WaterBoys in 2014 after he climbed Kilimanjaro with his then-teammate James Hall. So far the organization has funded 26 wells — 22 of which have been built in East Africa — that serve 7,000 people each. With former NFL player and Green Beret Nate Boyer, Long also leads trips of veterans up Kilimanjaro. He then founded the Chris Long Foundation in 2015.

Following the Unite the Right rally in his hometown of Charlottesville, Va., he was moved to put his arm around his teammate Malcolm Jenkins when Jenkins raised his fist during the national anthem before a preseason game. Long has continued to do so through the season, and yesterday, he and Jenkins were two of 12 players at the NFL owners fall meetings to discuss the protests. In a week, they will spend their day off after the Eagles’ Monday Night Football game against Washington at the Pennsylvania State Capitol advocating for criminal justice reform.

After his symbolic gesture, Long felt he had to publicly do something concrete. In September, he gave his first six checks to fund two scholarships at St. Anne’s-Belfield, the private high school he went to in Charlottesville (even though he and Megan had quietly funded two already, and those kids are about to head off to college). But he wanted do something “more macro,” so now he’s giving away his last 10 checks, too, forgoing an entire season’s salary. He also created the matching campaign on social media because he thinks a lot of people truly do want to help, they just don't know how. Give them a link and a pre-vetted charity, turn it into a competition, and boom: you’re raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. (As of publication, Long has raised over $205,000.)

Inside the high school, Sylvia Watts McKinney, the director of Summer Search, one of the programs Long is supporting, introduces him to the group of kids he’ll be speaking to. She reads a passage from Ralph Ellison’s essay What These Children Are Like.

“If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.”

“A little bit about me,” Long says, after he thanks McKinney and takes the mic. “I’m a football player. I spent eight years in St. Louis, and we never won more than seven games in a season, which is really bad, for anyone who follows football. It was a rough time.”

He’s not using any notes, and sounds far more natural than he did recording a Pledge 10 PSA from a teleprompter this morning at the Eagles facility. The students, very few of whom are white, seem skeptical at first, but they warm up as Long tells them how the Rams never made the playoffs, how he was injured in 2014, how he was released in 2015, how he went to New England and won a Super Bowl. He thinks he can do that here with the Eagles. A few kids whoop.

Long, back row, with students from North Philly’s Mariana Bracetti Academy Charter School.

“For me as a student growing up,” Long says, switching gears, “I had everything I could ask for. Every resource was at my disposal. I went to a private school, I had tutoring, all those mentoring opportunities I needed, but I still struggled in school. I wasn’t a great student, but I also think I took it for granted. And that is something I really regret.”

Long did, and does, have everything. He’s the son of Diane and Howie Long. Howie was a famous NFL player, actor, and is now an analyst. Football is the reason Long — and his brother Kyle, who plays for the Bears, and Howie Jr., who works in player personnel for the Raiders — grew up rich and is the thing that has made him richer. It’s afforded him over 311,000 Twitter followers, given him a platform. Which, right now, he’s using to tell kids that they should value people the way people value retweets or likes on Instagram. This makes them laugh.

Then he lets it rip.

“Life is short,” he says. “Live it with joy. I really think that the biggest thing I could leave you with today is to take pleasure in the work that you do, whether in classroom or community, and enjoy it. Be that contagious light that spreads energy to other people. Great people make other people feel they can be great, too. We talk about this in the locker room as football players and leaders, how you want everyone around you to feel like they can be great for having played with you, sat in a classroom with you, been a friend of yours. Through your loyalty, your excitement, and for who you are. Be contagious in your energy.”

It’s Wednesday around noon, five hours before the event at the high school, and Long is walking into the Whole Foods next to the apartment he and Megan are renting in Philly. It’s 75 degrees out, but he’s decided it’s fall, so he’s wearing socks with Birkenstocks, thick sweatpants, a long sleeve wool shirt, and a Carhart vest.

“I call his style, ‘rich hobo,’” Green Bay Packers tight end Martellus Bennett will tell me on the phone a few days later. He played with Long in New England and the two became very close. Bennett describes their connection as “cerebral.”

“He’d walk into the locker room and I’d be like, ‘Nice jacket, but those sweats are trash, and those Birks gotta go,’” Bennett says. “But he has to wear socks because his toes are gross. I love his style, he always makes me feel okay to dress the way I dress. We both just didn’t care. He’s like a rich bum. Just look at him.”

The rich bum is currently looking at a wall of healthy-looking drinks. He picks up a Maple Water and puts it in his basket. I ask what Maple Water is. He’s not totally sure, but it’s probably just water with maple in it, and he says it’s good. I ask if he worries about getting recognized when he goes out in public.

“Nah,” he says. “I haven’t been in Philly long enough. And the great thing about being a football player is you don’t get a ton of facetime. You always have a helmet on.”

Long also grew up around fame. It’s not something new he’s had to adjust to.

“It’s too hot for the hot bar,” he says, waving his hand in the direction of the steam trays of chicken and tofu.

He then proceeds to wander up and down each aisle. I lose him at one point, which is hard to do, because he’s 6’3” and weighs 276 pounds. His arms are the size of a normal human’s neck. He has wide eyes, a square jaw, and broad, decisive shoulders. He could pass for a Viking, if Vikings had tattoos that said VIRGINIA; he has a full sleeve on one arm and a half on the other that will soon become full. Tattoos, he says, are addicting.

“He shows us as black players in the NFL that he gets it. He’s not turning a blind eye.” — Martellus Bennett

Long scoops some peanuts and raisins out of a bulk bin. If he occasionally acts like a teenager, he consistently eats like one (or at least a somewhat health conscious one). Over the next three hours, I’ll watch him eat a bowl of cereal, a protein bar, a piece of Ezekiel bread with peanut butter, a chicken breast, an entire bag of trail mix, a grapefruit, more trail mix, all of these peanuts and raisins, and another protein bar.

“He’s a total meat,” Diane will say about her son when I call her tomorrow. Long credits his parents — who’ve been involved with the Boys and Girls Club of Charlottesville for a long time — for teaching him and his brothers the importance of giving back.

“Did he clean his truck when you were there?” Diane asks.

I tell her I don’t know if he cleaned it, but that it was very neat.

“I'll tell you what,” she says. “That’s probably the one inauthentic thing you saw about him. Because usually, when you get in that truck, there’s piles of clothing and paperwork. He looks like he lives out of his car. He probably cleaned it for you.”

About an hour after the Whole Foods excursion, Long is sitting in a plush room off of the lobby of his apartment. He just called in to Ryan Russillo’s radio show, and we can’t go back upstairs because Megan doesn’t want us to wake their 18-month-old son, Waylon. We have to get out of this room, though, because the sun is beating directly in and Long is sweating through his wool shirt.

“You wanna play pool?” Long asks.

I say sure, so we head to the lobby, where there’s a pool table that no one ever uses. We’re playing best of five. Long breaks, then sinks the eight ball a few turns later. I win. I somehow manage to win the next game, too, on my own merit, which shocks both of us.

Suddenly, he realizes there's a chance he could actually lose this thing. His eyes narrow and he starts enforcing obscure rules. He wants to raise the stakes, so we bet that I have to publicize who loses in this article.

Long was the No. 2 draft pick out of UVA and a fierce competitor during his six “miserable” seasons with the Rams. He was, at one point, one of the best defensive ends in the league, but the team consistently sucked, and he suffered back-to-back, season-ending injuries in 2014 and 2015. When then-Rams coach Jeff Fisher released him, Long reached out to Bill Belichick and the Patriots. New England wasn’t the perfect schematic fit for Long in terms of defense, but he just wanted to win, so Belichick said he’d find something for him to do.

Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Chris Long won a Super Bowl during his one season with the New England Patriots.

Last season wasn’t ideal from an individual standpoint — he was only on the field for 65 percent of the snaps — but it culminated in a remarkable Super Bowl win. And it gave him some of his closest friends; he still talks often to Bennett, Devin McCourty, Julian Edelman, and Rob Ninkovich often. That team had something special.

Still, he can’t get rid of the devil on his shoulder whispering that he wasted his prime with St. Louis, a team that was once a single fake punt away from going 0-16. He decided not to resign with the Pats because, while a championship was nice, he’s still acutely aware that he won as a role player. He loved team success, but his individual ambition was still unfulfilled.

“My career’s been all over the map, and I think players struggle with what’s their legacy,” Long says. “I haven’t been a superstar, but you can still think about your average-ass legacy. What’s kept me in the game is trying to leave on my terms. This has probably happened to so many players, and I probably won’t be able to accomplish it. But I want to leave playing at a high level. And using the game. I don’t want to let the game use me.”

Long felt that the Eagle’s defense was a better fit for him, and his intuition that they’d exceed expectations has turned out to be correct. With only one loss, Philadelphia has the best record in the league as of Week 7. And while he isn’t on the field more than he was in New England — he’s playing just 45% of snaps this year — he has two sacks so far and seems happy with his role. He also knows that as an active player, he has a bigger platform to raise money and speak out than he would if he retired.

Long sinks a shot, rubs his arm. He’s still sore from the Thursday game against the Panthers, which was almost a week ago. When he was recovering from surgery in 2014, he’d sit on the sidelines and watch huge guys crash into each other, thinking, I do this? He hasn’t been diagnosed with any concussions, but he worries about how CTE manifests itself. He also knows it’s too late to reverse any damage.

“And what’s me taking a knee in response to Trump? That’s not what this is about. He can’t make me kneel or stand.” — Chris Long

“Something I worry about more than that is the void that football will leave when I’m done playing,” he says. “You’ve been doing something your whole life, and then it’s over. You’re approaching your middle age. My friends back home have settled in. When I stop playing, I’m going to be the one who’s like, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

Long wins the fourth game to tie us up, 2-2. He keeps getting interrupted by the phone calls, FaceTimes, and texts from other players (including one from Edelman that just says “so tight”) as Pledge 10 gains traction.

“I think he’s one of the most genuine guys you could be around, especially off the field,” Hayes tells me. “Ninety percent of the guys you play football with, you don’t talk to after that. Chris and I haven’t played together the last couple years, but we’ve never left each other. He was my partner in crime when it came to pranks, and we both love competition. I tried to push him every day, and he did the same for me. He’s more of a brother than even a friend.”

Long breaks to start the fifth game, then goes on a roll, putting away most of his stripes for an early lead. He eyes up the cue ball, aiming for the striped No. 10, but he judges the angle wrong and sinks the eight ball again. I win.

We go back up to Long’s apartment after playing pool. Waylon has woken up, and is very busy putting wooden pieces of mail into his wooden toy mailbox. He’s a spunky kid with a mullet, which Long thinks is hilarious (he called him a young Mike Gundy on Instagram, in reference to the mulleted head coach of Oklahoma State). Megan gives Long a hard time for losing to me while she gets ready to take Waylon to the park.

Nicole Woodie, who used to run community outreach for the Rams until Long hired her to run his foundation, showed up at the apartment a few minutes ago. She sits on the couch replying to emails. Media requests have been pouring in since Pledge 10 went live.

“Someone from The Ellen Show just emailed me,” Long says, sprawled out on the coach and overflowing onto the ottoman. “They want me to come on. I’m gonna tell them no.”

“Chris, are you crazy?!” Woodie says. “You can’t turn down Ellen! Think of the moms!”

“Hmm,” Long says. “I don’t know. Would we reach people we wouldn’t reach through the sports media stuff we’re already doing?”

“Yes!” Woodie practically cries. “It's a totally different demographic! And Ellen usually does something like gives a big check. Come on, you have to do this.”

Long reluctantly agrees.

“His thing is that he’s not trying to bring attention to himself,” Bennett tells me. “He's trying to bring attention to the cause. That's noble, because a lot of people try to make it about themselves. He's trying to spread a message. He’s like, ‘Nah, I’m a part of this fight, but these [black players] are the generals. He wants to put the generals out there, guys who are more adept to talking publicly about it instead of himself."

I’ve watched Long try to do this all day. The Eagles’ PR guy asked Long this morning if he’d do SportsCenter before the upcoming Monday Night Football game against Washington.

“Nope. Put Malcolm on,” Long told him. “Put Malc up there. He’s doing great stuff in Philly.”

On Monday night, SportsCenter will run a short segment on Long anyway. But they will have to use old footage, random photos they dug up, and quotes from one of Long’s statements.

“How do you support guys like Malcolm without hijacking the situation?” Long wonders. “And then how do you interject your opinion without making it seem like you know these issues better than the people dealing with them? That’s a thin line you gotta walk.”

Bennett thinks Long is managing to walk it.

"You go through the league,” Bennett says, “and not many white players are actually saying things like Chris does. When he does, it goes bigger than just a black player saying it. He shows us as black players in the NFL that he gets it. He’s not turning a blind eye. When white players stay quiet, I’m like, I know you see the struggle, I know you see what’s going on. You play with me. We're examples of how people can get along and come from different backgrounds to work toward the same common goal. But when I speak on things that matter like this, and you turn your head, it’s like you think you can wash it away.

“Chris has always been real about it,” Bennett continues. “We'll have a conversation if he doesn’t understand something. That’s a powerful thing. And now he’s donating all of his salary to equality education? It's just like, what?!?"

Hayes appreciates Long’s involvement, too.

“When he put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder, it showed a lot,” he says. “That one little thing he did. He knew that it could possibly cause a rift or cause a lot of conversation, but Chris, he knows what’s right, and what feels right. And he’s gotta stand up for it.”

Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images

Eagles defensive end Chris Long embraces teammate Malcolm Jenkins on October 8, 2017, during the National Anthem.

Long hates that Trump has made the method of protest the point of contention. He thinks the national anthem is the most effective way players can draw attention to social injustice in their communities, but he’s never felt comfortable taking a knee because of the work he’s done with veterans. After Trump said that team owners should fire any player who kneels, a lot of people tweeted at Long telling him it was now his duty to do so.

“A lot of people use the knee as though it were some barometer for how much you care about these issues,” Long says. “I could take a knee and not do a thing off the field — and I’m not alluding to anybody doing this, I’m just saying — and it would be worthless. And what’s me taking a knee in response to Trump? That’s not what this is about. He can’t make me kneel or stand.”

Long picks up Waylon and gives him a raspberry on his stomach, then goes to find a shirt that doesn’t have a picture of the band The Highwaymen on it. He comes back out wearing a corduroy button-down that Megan bought him yesterday. He almost walks out the door with the tag still on.

On Wednesday night, after his speech, Long spends time with the Summer Search kids in the cafeteria. He takes pictures, posts a video to his Instagram story, and then does the requisite press conference before thanking McKinney, the director of the program. On the drive home, he talks about how jazzed he is that he got to meet some kids his donations will benefit.

“Before somebody’s president, or a hero in society, or somebody who invents something, they were sitting in a classroom,” he says. “You have no fucking clue who that person’s gonna be, who sets that whole thing in motion that alters the path of a city. Programs like this tell kids, ‘You matter. You fuckin’ matter, man.’”

I ask Long if he liked high school, and instead of answering, he asks me if I liked high school. He keeps flipping the script like this — who would I profile if I could pick five people to write about? What’s been my biggest mistake in an article? What’s been my most disastrous tweet? (All of them, I tell him.) He might be testing the waters; he’s mentioned that he might want to have a podcast, or try writing, once he retires.

He’d be good at getting people to talk; I’m five minutes into a story about the time I almost got suspended before I remember he's supposed to be telling me things like this. I ask him the question again.

No, he says after a beat, he didn’t especially like high school. He thinks he squandered it. He loves his friends from Charlottesville, but he wonders what his life would’ve been like if he hadn't gone to college in the same town he grew up in. He’s grateful for football, but wonders what it would’ve been like to find a passion off the field, something that didn't require Toradol shots to the ankle. That wouldn’t be over before he’s 35. That he’d be sure could fill the void. He never graduated from UVA and still wants to get his degree. He wishes he could've lived two different lives at once.

“I don’t know if you were like this,” he says quietly, staring ahead. “But when I turned 18, I got so sad. I was like, man, I just want it all to slow down. I kept thinking how I’d be 30 soon, how we're running out of time. I’m always thinking 12 years ahead.”

Long is motivated by an adolescent invincibility and stubbornness, but guided by an old soul’s understanding that life is short. He’s at once the teenager still doing “dumb shit,” and a grown man looking 12, 20, 50 years into the future.

It’s this duality that allows him to believe two things can be true at once. He's convinced he can still have his best season yet, but knows time is working against him. He knows about the risks of CTE and the fragility of bones and tendons, but puts his brain and joints on the line each week. He’s squirmy in the spotlight, but knows he needs it to make the biggest difference he can.

“You’re looking to catch him in the lie. And you won’t. It’s just like, why bother?” — Scott Van Pelt

The path of least resistance for Long would’ve been to retire after winning a Super Bowl and shut the hell up. Instead, he signed with a new team and dove into the thorniest political issues facing the league. And now he's doing it for free, at potentially huge physical cost.

“Charity is one of the coolest parts of being a football player,” Long had said on night before the launch of Pledge 10. “I’m really not bullshitting you, I really do care about what we do. I would totally resent the idea that I just do this shit for no reason.”

He sounded desperate to make me believe him; I could almost see his brain spinning. I asked him if he’s ever anxious.

“Yeah,” he said. “I am. And I’m trying to control the narrative in a positive way. I want to make sure I’m not misunderstood. I hate being misunderstood.”

Long has this recurring dream where he’s going to jail for life. Because no matter how hard he tries, the narrative is out of his control. Thanks to social media, he hears people who accuse him of having a white savior complex, or of being an entitled millionaire trying to stay relevant. He can see when people call him a libtard, a snowflake, unpatriotic, tell him to stick to sports. It drives him nuts when people insult his intelligence, and it’s the reason he fires back — the way he did when people criticized him for not going to the White House after the Super Bowl. Or the way he will in a few days when a conservative columnist (whose recent columns include “Hollywood has too little masculinity, not too much”) for the Bucks County Courier Times writes that Long “is a good example of the odious trend of virtue signaling.”

There will always be naysayers, so what can he do? Find a place — both on and off the field — where he can be useful, try his hardest to do what he believes is the right thing, and hope to cement a legacy he’s proud of.

“You can’t believe this guy is as good as he is,” ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt says. He’s admires Long and gave $10,000 to Pledge 10. “You’re looking for reasons for him not to be great, or good, or with his heart in the right place. You’re looking to catch him in the lie. And you won’t. It’s just like, why bother? Why not just accept that this is someone whose heart really is where it appears to be, and just be happy that exists? As opposed to trying to figure out how, or being an accountant for ways he could better. What a waste of time.”

Long’s mother says something similar.

“It almost sounds like a Disney movie,” Diane tells me. “It’s like he’s a weird, dark Disney movie. Dark because the subjects are more serious, but really, he’s just a good soul trying to do good.”

Having successfully navigated back from the high school, Long pulls up to the parking garage of his building and turns his car off in the middle of the road. I’m confused at first, but then realize the fob that opens the gate is attached to his keys. Which means he has to take them out of the ignition. He does, then waves them in front of the security pad to open the door.

“Chris,” I say, “There’s gotta be an easier way to do this.”

“Yeah,” he says grinning. “I know.”

Then he puts the key in the ignition, turns the car back on, and floors it up the ramp.

[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

Ask D'Mine: When You Need Support, The "Where's Waldo" of Diabetes Care

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/ask-dmine-when-you-need-support-the-wheres-waldo-of-diabetes-care/

Ask D'Mine: When You Need Support, The "Where's Waldo" of Diabetes Care

You can't do diabetes alone, right? In this week's edition of our weekly diabetes advice column, Ask D'Mine, your host, Wil Dubois, (veteran type 1, diabetes author and community educator) delves into the importance of support from family and friends, and pushing your healthcare team to make sure you're getting the answers you need!

Need help navigating life with diabetes? Email us at AskDMine@diabetesmine.com

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Sheryl from North Carolina, type 2, writes: Throughout my life I was always thought to be "the strong one" by friends. While I loved being dependable, reliable and the "rock" when others needed help, what I lacked in my life was the option to be vulnerable and the ability to ask for and accept the help of others. My recent bout with diabetes has reinforced this need. There's probably no single answer to this question, but how do you ask for, and accept, the support and assistance of others? I'd just like to hear your thoughts.

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Actually, there is one single answer: Be humble. You ask for support and assistance by simply asking for it. Of course, it helps to ask the right people—more on that in a second. But you put your finger on the much harder issue, accepting the help of others, and I think this is especially true for people like you who have functioned as the "rock" for others.

But consider this: Being humble doesn't make you weak. Being humble doesn't change who you are. Being humble doesn't make you undependable or unreliable. We all need the support and assistance of others. We're social animals, after all. And being humble doesn't make you vulnerable, either. All it does is make you wise.

Actually, I think you're halfway there already. You yourself have admitted that you need the help of others. That's a big step. And while that can be true for life in general, it's doubly true for diabetes. Hey, diabetes is a team sport from top to bottom. You can't do this alone. Your doc has help from a wide variety of specialists, educators, nutritionists, exercise folks, dentists, eye docs, and maybe even a shrink. And you need your family and friends on board.

But your friends and family, while they need to be on board at least passively, may not actually be the best people to ask for support and assistance from, depending on their level of willingness and capacity for empathy. The very, very, very best people you can get support and assistance from are others of your own kind.

No one can understand diabetes better than another person who has it. When you reach out to another PWD, even if you don't know that person, you're not reaching out to a stranger. You're reaching out to someone who's walking in your shoes. Someone who understands you. Someone who "gets it." And most importantly, someone who loves you on the basis of your shared challenges.

The other advantage of reaching out to your own kind is that these new folks whom you share so much with don't know your reputation as "the strong one," or the "rock." You can afford to be vulnerable with them. You left your baggage at the door when you entered this new world.

There are lots of places you can find support, especially as a type 2—simply because there are so many more of you than there are of us type 1s. You can start with your doc. Ask if he or she knows of a good local support group. Or you can check in with (not into) your local hospital. Or your church. Or your chamber of commerce.

And if you live somewhere so obscure that you're the only person with type 2 diabetes, and I can't imagine where that would be... Ice Station Zebra?... then may I suggest the internet? We type 1s are great lovers of the internet because it's our home-away-from-home. We're the victims of a genetic diaspora. We're so few and so far spread out that in many places there aren't many of us around. Of course, while most places in the country have type 2 support groups, not everyone is comfortable connecting with other persons with diabetes in person in their own communities for any number of personal or professional reasons, so it's OK for you to connect with your own kind online instead.

One great place to start would be at our partner community Diabetic Connect. Or boot up a browser. Why, all you have to do is enter "diabetic support" into Google to get 41,900,00 hits. Oh. Wait a minute. 40,900,000 of those are for diabetic support socks. Oops. Most of us don't actually need those, but that's a topic for another day.

So, I think you're off to a great start. Admitting that you need support and assistance took strength. Taking that first step to reach out to others will take strength, too.

But I know you can do it. Because you're still the rock.

Mark from Indiana, probable person with pre-diabetes (new designation? A PPWPD?), asks: Is a blood sugar of 250 right after a meal normal? I'm not sure I have diabetes, I had blood labs done and my blood sugar was 175, but could not remember if I ate before the test. So I bought a meter to monitor my blood sugar. Oh, and my blood sugar drops back down again after two hours.

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Ummmm... No. Not normal. But how abnormal is an open question, because where your blood sugar be should right after a meal is like one of those "where's Waldo" games (trying to find a needle in a haystack). No one really knows, because for the last umpteen years, the medical research types have been looking for Waldo two hours after a meal, not right after it.

But maybe we can ferret an answer out for you by reading between the lines.

Back in the bad old days, like three years ago, we used blood sugar numbers to diagnose diabetes. Now, we use A1C scores instead. But when we still used fingersticks for diagnosing, this was how the game was played: If you had a fasting fingerstick above 126 mg/dL on two different days, you had diabetes, and we gave you a meter and your official "I have diabetes" T-shirt. Welcome to the club!

Or... if you had two random fingersticks above 200 mg/dL you got the meter and the T-shirt. Random simply meant not fasting, but was generally viewed as two hours after eating. Even further back in the past, diabetes was diagnosed using oral glucose tolerance tests where blood sugar was measured precisely two hours after drinking medical Kool-Aid.

Meanwhile, if you had two fasting fingersticks between 100-125 you had pre-diabetes, which is sort of like being a little bit pregnant. You also had pre-diabetes if you had two random fingersticks between 140 and 199. Remember, 200 and over with random readings, and you had the Big D. Oh, and if your random was under 140 you were assumed to be "normal."

There were any number of problems with this system, not the least of which was once you had the first 200+ reading, convincing the potential new inductee to our club to come back for the confirming fingerstick was problematic at best. All-in-all, using the A1C is simpler and a slam dunk. The A1C test isn't affected by the Big Gulp the patient drank in the clinic parking lot, meter accuracy, or unusual stress on a given day because A1C measures the average glucose environment of your blood for the past three months. The other good thing about using A1C to diagnose is not having to keep track of all those numbers we just went though. The threshold for diagnosis of diabetes is a single A1C number of 6.5, at which point your average BGL has been 140 for months.

There's than 140 again.

Why? How did 140 get chosen, you ask? You might not really want to know, but it was chosen by expert Consensus Panels again. Actually, as reported by Dr. David M. Nathan, et al, in the ADA's look at postprandial glucose readings, most research into the subject has shown that in non-dFolk, glucose peaks about 60 minutes after eating, rarely goes above 140 mg/dL, and usually returns to fasting levels in 2-3 hours. So if you are still at or over 140 two hours after eating, something is amiss!

About. Rarely. Usually. That's a lot of qualifying words.

Well, in no human endeavor can your mileage vary more than when eating. What did you eat? How fast did you eat it? What time of day did you eat it? How long was it since your most recent meal? And so on and so forth.

Still, if non-dFolk usually peak at no more than 140 about an hour downstream of a meal, and you are hitting a 250 right after eating, it does appear that something is eff'd up. Big time. If you're seeing a 250 right after a meal more than once it would suggest you do have the Big D. That's based on the fact that you shouldn't even peak for about an hour. If you're already at 250 right after eating, you will go even higher. What size T-shirt do you wear, Mark?

It's interesting, however, that your body rallies and your blood sugar comes back down by the two-hour point. Something is eff'd up, alright, but something's working right, too. As to your 175 on your labs, well, if you were fasting, again, that would suggest the Big D. But if you'd eaten that day, it would suggest pre-D.

You should probably hook up with your doc again (not in that way) and just get the damn A1C test run to resolve this once and for all, but in the meantime you can have some fun with that meter your bought. Use it to embark on a voyage of self-discovery. Test regularly at bed time and the next morning and see if your blood sugar goes up, down, or stays level overnight. Test before you eat various meals and at the magic two hours after the first bite to see how much a change there is.

Let us know what you discover!

This is not a medical advice column. We are PWDs freely and openly sharing the wisdom of our collected experiences — our been-there-done-that knowledge from the trenches. But we are not MDs, RNs, NPs, PAs, CDEs, or partridges in pear trees. Bottom line: we are only a small part of your total prescription. You still need the professional advice, treatment, and care of a licensed medical professional.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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