Monthly Archives: November 2017

There’s much more at stake than cake

Erwin Chemerinsky writes for Daily Journal (registration required), Nov. 14, 2017

This should be an easy case for the Supreme Court. Businesses should not be accorded a constitutional right to discriminate based on sexual orientation or race or sex or religion.

Us vs. them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them

john a. powell writes for and Ian Haney López quoted in The Guardian, Nov. 8, 2017

The opposite of Othering is not “saming”, it is belonging. And belonging does not insist that we are all the same. It means we recognise and celebrate our differences, in a society where “we the people” includes all the people.

In the United States, politicians used to engage in what scholar Ian Haney-Lopez calls “dog whistles” – they could make references to Others but only in a coded way; never saying “those Mexicans” or “those Muslims”, for example.

What explains U.S. mass shootings? International comparisons suggest an answer

Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins study cited by The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2017

The United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. … American crime is simply more lethal. … They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.