Another policing issue, special threatment for officers

I don't want this blog to get a reputation as a police basher.  Policing is a difficult, under-paid and dangerous job.  Shootings of police get much less attention than police shootings of civilians.  Nonetheless, the following is a real issue.  From the NYT:
"Baltimore —The trials of the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who died after suffering a spinal injury in police custody, begin tomorrow. As a public defender here, I have watched the cases of the officers move through the Baltimore City Circuit Court.

These cases are remarkable in that police officers were actually charged in Mr. Gray’s killing, unlike in other recent cases of police violence. But they are also notable in another, less laudable, way.

The court has given extraordinary treatment to the accused officers, from their arrests up to their impending trials. But thousands of other defendants in Baltimore receive an inferior brand of justice."

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"These cases are remarkable in that police officers were actually charged in Mr. Gray’s killing, unlike in other recent cases of police violence. But they are also notable in another, less laudable, way.

The court has given extraordinary treatment to the accused officers, from their arrests up to their impending trials. But thousands of other defendants in Baltimore receive an inferior brand of justice.

Internet Addiction

“The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”
Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addiction.
According to one recent survey, the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email. That doesn’t count time online spent shopping, searching or keeping up with social media.
The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.
Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates. It’s as if our brain has become a full cup of water and anything more poured into it starts to spill out.
I’ve known all of this for a long time. I started writing about it 20 years ago. I teach it to clients every day. I just never really believed it could become so true of me.
Denial is any addict’s first defense. No obstacle to recovery is greater than the infinite capacity to rationalize our compulsive behaviors. After years of feeling I was managing myself reasonably well, I fell last winter into an intense period of travel while also trying to manage a growing consulting business. In early summer, it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t managing myself well at all, and I didn’t feel good about it."

However, some argue that the benefits of the internet outweigh the problems and the evidence is scanty.

More left-wing college intolerance

“Hundreds of students crammed into Amherst College’s Robert Frost Library for a sit-in against racial injustice that turned into a confessional, as one black or Hispanic student after another rose to talk about feelings of alienation and invisibility on campus. . . .[Among their demands]

They wanted students who had posted “Free Speech” and “All Lives Matter” posters to go through “extensive training for racial and cultural competency” and possibly discipline.” 

Although Amherst is a private college and the First Amendment doesn’t apply to them, one would think education and academic freedom would suggest more tolerance. Tolerance and free speech are under attack from both the left and right.  This is very disturbing, and does not bode well.

 

For more on  this general topic see Jack Cashill's book Scarlet Letters: The Ever-increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism.