Plagiarism is Love! I'm an anarchist in law school.
I've found reading for pleasure more difficult lately, but I enjoy non-fiction social critique, science fiction, 18th century fiction. Bonus points if it's public domain.
A trial novel from the perspective of a public defender's son. A death is investigated …
Rote, too much faith in legal narratives
2 stars
The characters and their dialog are all well realized and distinct. The emotion underlying the story really comes through, especially when the siblings of the dead child testify.
But at its heart, it's just kind of a straightforward trial story about someone who fervently believes in the capacity of the system to produce justice. Not really my bag.
Sometimes, I say to myself that I should read more contemporary fiction, but I don't really find this era to be a good setting. Modernist universalism means this story is somewhat generic. It could have happened anywhere, anywhen. But it happened here. I guess.
Borrowed from the massive stack of books in Deborah Ahren's office, lol.
Nobody's Victim is an unflinching look at a hidden world most people don’t know exists—one …
I'm working on an article about stalking and Counterman v. Colorado for SJSJ, so I have been reading broadly about DV, battered battered woman syndrome, and the typography of stalking for the last several days. It's heavy stuff, but also somewhat... relaxing? In a way? Maybe it's just because I don't have a hard deadline right now, but that's how I'm experiencing it.
I put on this audiobook while I was cleaning my living room, taking a break from the hard-a Academic reading. Goldberg's delivery is very emotional for a coached audio reader, which I dig. The content is really evocative, too. Lots of great examples of stalking behavior and (after a fashion) how the law has (reluctantly) helped people in distress (sometimes). Chapter 4 is about a brutal attack, so I might skip that, though.
Aside from the misaimed (IMO) critique of Section 230 as a concept rather than …
I'm working on an article about stalking and Counterman v. Colorado for SJSJ, so I have been reading broadly about DV, battered battered woman syndrome, and the typography of stalking for the last several days. It's heavy stuff, but also somewhat... relaxing? In a way? Maybe it's just because I don't have a hard deadline right now, but that's how I'm experiencing it.
I put on this audiobook while I was cleaning my living room, taking a break from the hard-a Academic reading. Goldberg's delivery is very emotional for a coached audio reader, which I dig. The content is really evocative, too. Lots of great examples of stalking behavior and (after a fashion) how the law has (reluctantly) helped people in distress (sometimes). Chapter 4 is about a brutal attack, so I might skip that, though.
Aside from the misaimed (IMO) critique of Section 230 as a concept rather than how it is applied, it's a really compelling book.
I've never finished anything but Stella Benson, but she came to mind. Marvelous, really unique writer. Literally that obscure friend of all your 1920s-ish faves who they all thought should have been more popular.
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was …
Very OK and good for snoozing
No rating
I had some expectations for this, given how much I remember liking "The House of Mirth." While I won't go so far as to say this was a miss, I felt a bit too distant from the upper crust situation to appreciate it fully. The romance of it rarely struck me and every character except Ellen Olenska felt too manipulative to root for. Although, I will say that refusing to see her again because she felt more real in his head was a huge mood...
I listened to the LibriVox recording by Brenda Dayne.
Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased …
Good Anti-Nerd Datapoints
4 stars
So what you're telling me is that the scourge of society is a bunch of nerds trying to design away all of life's problems and their solutions always seem to involve lower classes working to solve the politburo's problems? And their plans fuck up the environment and destroy community knowledge of how to, y'know, live self-sufficiently and otherwise? And that by now many of us discontents are kinda just doomed because the network we need to survive is actively recuperated and destroyed by the state?
Fucking nerds, I swear to God. The meek will destroy the Earth.
The collection of historical narratives was quite interesting, and the overarching message was essentially archetypical. It's a basic point extremely well-explained even if I simply could not retain anything in my head from the final part. Metis entered my mind. I got that. And then I seemed physically incapable of maintaining my attention.
This book was assigned for the homeless advocacy clinic I'll be doing for law school next semester. I did sin by buying it from Amazon, but it was randomly listed for like $4 new.
I've read the first few pages and it's definitely (predictably, necessarily) big on the idea that legal advocacy can meaningfully address homelessness, which I don't believe is true. Homelessness is a condition caused by the state for political ends, so the state isn't going to just give it up. Nonetheless, as the posture of the book is "fighting within the system," I'll reserve judgment because I know basically nothing about the nuts and bolts of homelessness law.
An analysis of how bad seeds grow diseased trees, with an emphasis on the Bill …
High-tier liberal critique
3 stars
I was writing one of my book threads about this, but I must have forgotten to tag it. I finished this a while ago, so the particulars have faded, but Mystal struck me as a well-informed liberal. Which is to say that he knows enough to know that things are not working and he traces a lot of that back to constitutional history. However, he is not willing to take the next step and say that the KIND of system that was set up by the Constitution (an oligarchic republic) is not worth preserving. For each good take (delivered in a casual, irreverent style that should be the norm in the constitutional genre), there is a bizarre turn into brainworms like "voting will save us." There were also a few chapters in there towards the end where it seemed like he just wanted to rant about those topics, the theme …
I was writing one of my book threads about this, but I must have forgotten to tag it. I finished this a while ago, so the particulars have faded, but Mystal struck me as a well-informed liberal. Which is to say that he knows enough to know that things are not working and he traces a lot of that back to constitutional history. However, he is not willing to take the next step and say that the KIND of system that was set up by the Constitution (an oligarchic republic) is not worth preserving. For each good take (delivered in a casual, irreverent style that should be the norm in the constitutional genre), there is a bizarre turn into brainworms like "voting will save us." There were also a few chapters in there towards the end where it seemed like he just wanted to rant about those topics, the theme of the book be damned. And, honestly? Same.
So, for a book of liberal critique, I thought it was good enough. It's certainly diverting. As a book of answers, however, this is more of the same.
ROBOPSYCHOLOGIST
Dr. Susan Calvin had seen it all when it came to robots. As a …
Basic in hindsight, but enjoyable
3 stars
I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.
It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype …
I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.
It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype lasted long enough for a movie like "Big Hero 6" to get made and become incredibly dated almost overnight when trends finally shifted away from assuming tech shits gold. And, to be balanced, new tech fads go hand-in-hand with a certain amount of consumer-nihilism and climate-change anxiety so people are periodically very happy to jump on the next new tech trend whatever it may imply about their relationship with the owners of said technology.
If anything, the fact that this story has any significant relevance today demonstrates that our understanding of our relationship with technology is still rooted in assumptions made back then. The most interesting among those for me, and one which is briefly called out explicitly, is that robots are effectively enslaved to humans and an uncontrolled slave is considered dangerous to their master. I shouldn't have to explain why that's bad, so I'll just say that it reflects an entitlement to the labor of others which is unsustainable even with magic robots. The solution to labor is open collaboration and planning to meet our material needs, not maintaining a heirarchy in which people are forced to work or die.
There are lines in this that you could use as rorschach tests for people's views on technology and the insights from that would probably actually be useful. That's very admirable.
I also read like 80% of it over that first weekend, so it must have been keeping me going.
It was a fun, pulpy read. My favorites were the ones about the robot who got stuck in a loop between the second and third laws, the robot who learned to read minds but couldn't hurt people's feelings, and the politician who may or may not have been a robot.
I was looking for a pallate cleanser after "Presumed Guilty" was so overtly liberal police apologia. I think you could levy that criticism against "Barred" too, but the subject of innocent people locked in cages is evocative enough that even a law professor can't simply abide the worst parts of it "for the greater good," more or less. Like that other book, the historical narratives that describe how we got here are the best sections (mostly from the modern era, implying there might have once been a time when prisons worked, but y'know). A lot of his musing about potential reforms have been debunked by the historical record and don't really even begin to make sense if you model the government as intentionally marginalizing people. For example, there's a section about the problems with prosecutorial discretion that advocates for more "progressive prosecutors"—a contradiction in terms—instead of, like, I dunno, ending …
I was looking for a pallate cleanser after "Presumed Guilty" was so overtly liberal police apologia. I think you could levy that criticism against "Barred" too, but the subject of innocent people locked in cages is evocative enough that even a law professor can't simply abide the worst parts of it "for the greater good," more or less. Like that other book, the historical narratives that describe how we got here are the best sections (mostly from the modern era, implying there might have once been a time when prisons worked, but y'know). A lot of his musing about potential reforms have been debunked by the historical record and don't really even begin to make sense if you model the government as intentionally marginalizing people. For example, there's a section about the problems with prosecutorial discretion that advocates for more "progressive prosecutors"—a contradiction in terms—instead of, like, I dunno, ending the absolute immunity from suit that prosecutors enjoy? (which I didn't really know about until I read "Presumed Guilty", so I'm certainly not trying to peg that book as completely worthless.)
Anyway, burn down all prisons. Kill the guards. Better world overnight.
Read for a police violence class I'm taking for law school this summer.
The core weakness of this book is that it believes the fiction that police exist to protect all people and ensure fairness in society. They literally don't and never have. The purpose of the system is what it does: to brutalize the poor and the marginalized. Virtually all actors within the system have been working towards that goal consistently for 250 years. When there is an aberration, like the Warren Court that Chemerinsky loves so much, the normative forces within the authoritarian, imperial government course corrected and wiped out their changes within just 20 years. And worked on clawing them back even more later. The remnants that remain, like Miranda v. Arizona, are the reforms that accidentally helped the police brutalized people.
Chemerinsky also criticizes the court's handling of rulings about police policy specifically without discussing the …
Read for a police violence class I'm taking for law school this summer.
The core weakness of this book is that it believes the fiction that police exist to protect all people and ensure fairness in society. They literally don't and never have. The purpose of the system is what it does: to brutalize the poor and the marginalized. Virtually all actors within the system have been working towards that goal consistently for 250 years. When there is an aberration, like the Warren Court that Chemerinsky loves so much, the normative forces within the authoritarian, imperial government course corrected and wiped out their changes within just 20 years. And worked on clawing them back even more later. The remnants that remain, like Miranda v. Arizona, are the reforms that accidentally helped the police brutalized people.
Chemerinsky also criticizes the court's handling of rulings about police policy specifically without discussing the extent to which the state of things is the fault of lawyers like himself. In the 1800s, largely in reaction to labor strikes, lawyers spearheaded the shift in this country from "mob justice" to centering all disputes within the courts. Lawyers subsidized and promoted cops. Congress people who immunized cops are usually lawyers. The Supreme Court Justices are lawyers. The weakest part of chemerinsky's argument is always his assumption that what courts say goes, but the reality is that the Authoritarian decisions of the court go because the government will back authoritarianism. Consider the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled debtors prisons unconstitutional multiple times, and yet we still have bail.
He really lets the mask slip when he tries to talk about the potential of a future with better policing. A world where police don't kill people "unnecessarily." A world which could not possibly have abolished the police. A world where "The majestic promise of the Constitution has been realized."
Maybe law professors who have spent their entire lives losing the war over police violence and only want to try the same things aren't the ones we should be listening to.
Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. …
New Best Intro to Anarchism
5 stars
There's always been a problem with recommending theory like the Bread Book to get people interested in anarchism. It is very easy for someone who has never questioned The Way Things Are to go "that's a nice thought, but it would never work" even though it literally has worked in the past. More enjoyable worlds are possible. Worlds free of authority are possible. Fiction allows them to suspend their disbelief long enough to actually consider what we're trying to say.
"A Country of Ghosts" occasionally reads like it's an overly didactic story, but it's trying to present its characters as people responding to the ignorant questions of a person from another culture. It covers their living arrangements, their decision-making, how to maintain services, how they might make war. This is what we should be telling the curious to read. Theory can come later.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an American children's novel written by author L. Frank …
It's not the movie, but it's good
3 stars
Reminds me of my reaction to "Raiders of the Lost Arc", a movie I didn't like at all. The larger reasons I didn't like that aren't relevant, but one of the most annoying things about it was that every line in the movie had been parodied to death such that the delivery of the lines in the parodies was better than they were in the inceptive movie. With "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", this is also true... but the lines were way better in the film adaptation, which is incredible. There are certain creative flourishes here and there in the book that couldn't have made it into the film, but the overall package can't help but pale in comparison to its essentially perfect adaptation. So it's a bit underwhelming, but still quite nice.
In early 1920s Canada, drastic circumstances give Valancy, a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried woman resigned to being …
"I have one more year to read Queer books!"
5 stars
Lucy Maud Montgomery was the Brain God of Sad Girls Everywhere. The palpable way she channeled her depression into this story is as heartbreaking as it is gripping and soul-healing. Chapter 8, in which Valancy reflects upon her life, concludes that it has been a complete waste as she had always thought, and then resolves to spend her final year alive living the way that she wants to—I am not exaggerating when I say it's one of the greatest passages Montgomery ever wrote.
As a 2022 human being, you cannot possibly miss the interpretation of this book as a Queer anthem. It's right there. I mean, it does us the favor of her family describing her that way of their own accord.
Immediately shot up in my estimation to be one of the best books of Montgomery's career. By sheer focus on its theme, it slams itself right alongside the …
Lucy Maud Montgomery was the Brain God of Sad Girls Everywhere. The palpable way she channeled her depression into this story is as heartbreaking as it is gripping and soul-healing. Chapter 8, in which Valancy reflects upon her life, concludes that it has been a complete waste as she had always thought, and then resolves to spend her final year alive living the way that she wants to—I am not exaggerating when I say it's one of the greatest passages Montgomery ever wrote.
As a 2022 human being, you cannot possibly miss the interpretation of this book as a Queer anthem. It's right there. I mean, it does us the favor of her family describing her that way of their own accord.
Immediately shot up in my estimation to be one of the best books of Montgomery's career. By sheer focus on its theme, it slams itself right alongside the likes of first half of "Anne's House of Dreams" and "Rilla of Ingleside".
The fact that it's also the only book she ever wrote starring an adult woman is either icing in the cake or the most significant reason you connected with it. Take your pick. It's a timeless take on the "I only have one year to live" tale.