Comments on: KC Johnson vs. the commonplace campus radical–One good rush to judgment deserves another

By: Robert Zimmerman

Robert Zimmerman — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 06:32:26 +0000

I just shunted a couple of comments onto the extras page, one from TP Squirrel, the other from leftisnotright. Both concern things I'm not going to host a discussion about right now.

By: Ralph DuBose

Ralph DuBose — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:39:27 +0000

Re: Your coda about the Burch case. Your latest post shows us that you have achieved total mastery of your grasp-at-anything approach to critiquing KC. You have shown us that you are willing produce a fine long paragraph meant to injure his reputation even though you present not a single fact that is at all useful for that purpose. Having nothing to work with is not, apparently, a problem for you. Maybe it is a state you have, by necessity, gotten comfortable with. You can pretend, if you want, to mis-understand the plain meaning of the stark contrast between Duke Administrations handling of the story of a rape of a black woman by white men - that they knew was false - and the story of a rape of a white woman (a Duke student) by a black man - that they knew had occurred. By all means, tell the world that your brain sees that tableau and interprets it as "Duke learned from the LAX case" - even though they were still at that time persecuting the LAX guys that they knew to be innocent. Go for it. It certainly helps to teach the world how KCs critics process information.

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My coda is about Johnson's failure to say anything useful or informative. I don't think that the way the case was handled shows that "Duke learned from the LAX case."

By: RedMountain

RedMountain — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:03:28 +0000

It is amazing that Tyson’s book is attacked and Steel’s investment in the movie version comes under so much scorn. KC does not offer a critique of either the book or the movie or any reason to shun them other than both people are the essence of evil because of the Duke Lacrosse case. Maybe he is upset that Tyson’s book sold more copies than his and made the big screen rather than as possible future HBO titillation fantasy. Personally, I can’t wait to see how HBO treats his book. I am convinced it will be a serious and important documentary that will garner many awards. You betcha.

By: Ralph DuBose

Ralph DuBose — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:55:37 +0000

I have not been following the Hashmi case with much close attention so I will not comment on it directly.However, I have followed a number of high profile “celebrity” crminal cases thru the years and with this casual background I feel able to make a comment of a general nature: These things are nearly always “murky.” N. Mailer and W.F. Buckley both, way back in the day, championed the innocence of some inmates who happened to write well themselves and who proceeded to murder new victims soon after their celebrated releases. I am old enough to remember that first hand. Criminals in general are long term members of the sub-culture of criminals; they rarely commit just one crime and then get caught. That is why, I think, even honest cops do not lose much sleep over the conviction of a known criminal for a crime her or she did not actually commit. It really does make the streets safer and that is not a trivial matter. And nothing is murkier than the interface between civil liberties and modern high tech terrorism because if the worst happens - like an atomic explosion in a large American city - no government would go on spending a second worrying about civil liberties. So, from this point of view, perserving civil liberties comes down to preventing a doomsday attack. You may not agree but I suggest that history is on my side in this matter. Sept 11, 2001 really happened and the threat of someting worse is on-going. So there is, imho, something on the other side of the scale from an absolutist view of civil liberties that has some heft and about which serious people can debate in good faith.
Come we now to the LAX case. In my perseption (one shared by all hooligans, I bet), it was quite the singularity. For once, there was no murk. The medical exam showed no injuries, the specific DNA tests showed no contact, two of the kids could prove they were not even there, and the rest had a pile of time stamped fotos on their side.
See, the reason this case was a singularity was not that the defendants had such a good set of facts, it is that prosecutors went forward anyway, even with no real evidence of their own. And they did this with all the cameras running. Exactly why the Durham/Duke axis acted in this fashion we may only guess at, unless they tell the truth under oath. But the fact that they did so was obvious in real time to anyone paying attention and created a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fire away without mercy or restraint at pure evil uncluttered by the usual murk and ambiguuity of real life criminal/civil liberty matters.
This is why comparing KCs -or hooligans in general - methods in the LAX case with his methods in regards to any other case is basically out of focus and misses a crucial distinction.
Indeed, one could make a fair argument that the core failure at Duke was that so many smart people chose to go on acting as if there was enough of the usual murk and ambiguuity in the LAX case long past the point that there really wasn’t any. They were in the presence of a singularity and they hid from it in their own faux, pretend murkiness.