Tolerance for pain

Stuart A. Reid reflects on raising a child with a disability:

But logistical challenges are much easier to deal with than existential crises. And the existential crisis that blinded you on diagnosis day will fade away as you learn that you can in fact continue to exist. You will no longer ask, “How can I go on?” but, “Where is the nearest 24-hour pharmacy that has Clobazam in stock?”

…

There will be hardship ahead: more hospital stays, more missed milestones. But much of day-to-day life will merely be annoying.

Meeting the kid where she’s at

Stuart A. Reid reflects on raising a child with a disability:

You will learn all the lingo of the disability and rare-disease communities. “Genetic change” is now preferred to “mutation.” … Your child is not “intellectually disabled”; she is “a person with an intellectual disability.” (She is still apparently “developmentally delayed,” although this phrase feels due for a refresh, too. Is a train that is never expected to reach its destination merely delayed?)

A suspended sentence as the sword of Damocles

Steven Klepper compliments a recent opinion, Robbins v. State, from the Appellate Court of Maryland, making the point that the threat of future incarceration is just one more reason for mentally ill people to be paranoid:

The Court deserves praise for pointing out the severity of the sentence, even though the sentence was suspended. For those facing mental health challenges, such a Sword of Damocles makes things immeasurably worse.

Clarence Thomas

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, back in October 2022, said about Clarence Thomas:

Clarence, who grew up very poor, believes that everyone is capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I believe not everyone can reach their bootstraps.

ProPublica, in April 2023:

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show.

History repeating itself

David French says that Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech was written for our time, quoting this “gut punch” of a paragraph: 

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

French adds:

When we read these words after the contemporary onslaught of mass shootings, the anguish of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the turmoil of two Trump impeachments, you can again see the parallels today.

In response to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s originalist argument in Merrill v. Milligan (the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments allowed for race-based remedies for racial subordination), Michael Dorf argues that “liberal originalism has the same vices as conservative originalism.”

The framers of the Reconstruction Amendments did not think they were forbidding racially segregated schools because they (more or less) contemporaneously provided for racially segregated schools in the District of Columbia and seemed unperturbed by the fact that the viewing gallery in Congress at the time was racially segregated. Does it follow that Brown v. Board of Education is wrong?

Public pretender no more

Public defenders achieve better case outcomes than private counsel, according to this study from Philadelphia:

One in five indigent murder defendants in Philadelphia is randomly assigned representation by public defenders while the remainder receive court-appointed private attorneys. We exploit this random assignment to measure how defense counsel affect murder case outcomes. Compared to appointed counsel, public defenders in Philadelphia reduce their clients’ murder conviction rate by 19% and lower the probability that their clients receive a life sentence by 62%. Public defenders reduce overall expected time served in prison by 24%.

On the N-word

John McWhorter distinguishes between “use” and “mention”:

Not too long ago, it was considered OK for people who aren’t Black to refer to the N-word in conversation. Not to use it, but to mention it. … I suppose the idea behind this new idea — that the problem isn’t just using the N-word as an insult, but uttering it in any context, including quoting someone else — is that the old approach was insufficiently antiracist. But it is a strange kind of antiracism that requires all of us to make believe that Black people cannot understand the simple distinction between an epithet and a citation of one.

…

Anyone who’s willing to process Black people referring to one another with the N-word, as a term of endearment or a form of word empowerment (and many, including me, are, even if we don’t use it this way ourselves) understands that a spoken or written instance of the N-word can mean more than one thing. As such, they should be able to appreciate, if not embrace, that quoting a savory rap lyric or comedian’s routine that includes the word or just referring to the word to note its prior application are not the same thing as deploying it as an insult.

True reconciliation

The late Desmond Tutu wrote:

True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.