Two of my least favorite things are antisemitism, and people being hounded out of their jobs for expressing controversial views. So that makes the David Miller case, at the University of Bristol in England, a bit of an ethical quandry for me:
Professor Miller has been accused of making "unacceptable" statements about Israel and Jewish students.
More than 500 academics have signed a letter supporting Jewish students and saying they "wholly condemn" the comments, with more than 100 MPs and peers writing to the university's Vice Chancellor demanding action.
In a Zoom video call last month, Professor Miller called for the "end of Zionism" and said Israel is "trying to exert its will all over the world".
The sociology lecturer later said Jewish students were being used as “political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime” and accused his university's Jewish Society (Bristol JSoc) of a “campaign of censorship”.
Bristol West's Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire described the comments as "completely unacceptable".
Bristol Jewish Society has also been campaigning for the university to act, saying Prof Miller's views "have no place on our campus".
However, more than 190 professors signed a letter Professor Miller, saying they "oppose such efforts to crush academic freedom" and the attempt to "publicly vilify" him.
The university has said it "does not endorse the comments made by Professor Miller about our Jewish students".
If Miller is just spouting crazy shit in class - and if he has tenure - I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about him. If he is singling out Jewish students for abuse, that crosses a line.
What’s noteworthy about Miller, aside from his thinly veiled antisemitism (disguised, as usual, as “anti-Zionism”) is that he’s yet another example of Damian’s law of conspiracy theorists: a person who believes in one big conspiracy theory goes on to believe every big conspiracy theory, even the ones that contradict the others.
Britain’s Jewish Chronicle notes that the Zionism stuff is just the tip of the David Miller iceberg of madness:
…the sociology lecturer was an early member of the “Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media” (SPM), an academic body criticised for indulging in conspiracy theories. He has suggested that MI6 helped frame the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to falsely accuse him of using chemical weapons.
And he dismissed the government’s conclusion that Kremlin agents poisoned the Skripals in Salisbury as “British government misinformation”.
Amnesty International has described SPM members as “war-crime denialists”, adding that they are “just in the realm of conspiracy theorists”.The group has been widely criticised for spreading “pro-Assad disinformation and conspiracy theories promoted by Russia”, though Prof Miller denies that it is biased.
Other SMP members include Vanessa Beeley, a pro-Assad blogger who shared claims that the Kristallnacht attacks were perpetrated by “Jewish-paid thugs”; Piers Robinson, who was accused of “whitewashing” Assad’s crimes and wrote a glowing review of a 9/11 truther book before leaving Sheffield University; and Professor Tim Hayward, who sparked outrage when he presented slides in a lecture at Edinburgh University that were regarded as pro-Assad propaganda.
[…]
In 2019, the academic co-authored an SMP paper claiming that international chemical weapons investigators had “nobbled” an inquiry to blame Assad’s forces for a chlorine gas attack in Douma, Syria. Writing on Twitter, Prof Miller suggested that Assad had been wrongly blamed for chemical attacks on his own people, alleging that some atrocities were likely “false flag” operations carried out by rebels with the aid of MI6. The victims, he said, had been “killed in a managed massacre to lay a false trail”.
Many of SMP’s claims that the Syrian regime was innocent of using chemical weapons were based on testimony from two former employees of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an independent international watchdog. Their credibility was dismissed by the organisation itself.
But Prof Miller told the JC: “Our work has thus far been fully, totally vindicated by the subsequent information released into the public domain. You should tell your readers this.”
He added: “Our work on alleged chemical weapons attacks has rested primarily upon a range of documents and primary sources.”
His contentious opinions do not stop there. After the Kremlin poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, Prof Miller insisted it was wrong to conclude that Putin was behind the attack, calling it “an extraordinary case study in the continuing relevance of understanding state propaganda in 21stcentury Britain. To support their lies, the British government employs thousands of people directly in propaganda and related activities,” he wrote in an essay on the Open Democracy website.
Miller’s shtick is that Jewish and pro-Israel organizations are “influence peddling by a foreign state.” You don’t get an example of projection much more clear than that.
Meanwhile, Naomi Wolf, once a respected feminist author who started becoming increasingly paranoid during the George W. Bush era, now has some interesting thoughts about COVID-19 vaccines:
Turns out even Bill Gates isn’t powerful enough to get this taken down from Twitter. Tim Cook, on the other hand…
One of the OG 9/11 conspiracy theorists, former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts, moved on to freebasing the really heavy stuff:
Same for another pioneering 9/11 troofer, University of Wisconsin ex-professor Kevin Barrett. And James Fetzer, who also says the moon landing never happened and that no one died at Sandy Hook Elementary School:
Before he became a full-time conspiracy theorist, Fetzer was a prolific philosopher of science who wrote about the theoretical foundations of computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. He founded the international journal Minds and Machines, wrote or edited a long list of books, and retired from the University of Minnesota at Duluth in 2006 with an impressive title: distinguished McKnight university professor emeritus.
[…]
In the past four years, the independent publishing house Fetzer co-founded has also published books he’s edited on mass shootings in Parkland and Orlando, Fla.; the Boston Marathon bombing; the car-attack death of a woman in Charlottesville, Va.; the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the John F. Kennedy assassination; and the moon landing. He disputes historical facts about the Holocaust and believes the real Paul McCartney is dead. [emphasis added]
And, of course, now the QAnon cult has a foothold in Congress. And a choke-hold on one of America’s two major political parties.
Conspiracy thinking really is like a drug. It’s intoxicating to think you have “secret knowledge” about how the world really works, that you’re on to the outrageous schemes of the master puppeteers who control the world, and that you’re intellectually superior to the sheeple who don’t know and don’t want to know the truth. While everyone else chooses the blue pill, you went with red.
Early in the movie Trainspotting, Ewan MacGregor’s junkie character has a monologue in which he talks about how good it feels when you inject heroin into your veins. If you’ve seen the film, you know what he went through when he tried to detox.
Extracting yourself from the conspiracist worldview might be even harder, even if it doesn’t involve any dead babies crawling across the ceiling.
If you regularly read James Lileks’ Bleat blog - and if you aren’t, why not? - you’ve seen his photos of downtown Minneapolis bring fortified and boarded up in anticipation of the Derek Chauvin murder trial. Chauvin’s 2020 killing of George Floyd, caught on video and quickly disseminated around the world, kicked off a long summer of protests whose effects are still being felt today.
Many people are instinctively calling it the “George Floyd trial,” to which activists rightly respond that Floyd is not the person on trial. He was the victim. It is the Derek Chauvin trial - and that works both ways. He is the alleged perpetrator and is entitled to a fair trial.
Could Chauvin walk? Such a verdict would shock the conscience of anyone who watched the video of Floyd’s agonizing death, but Law & Crime says it’s certainly possible:
Chauvin is charged with second degree unintentional murder and second-degree manslaughter. It’s not clear at this time whether a third-degree murder charge will be reinstated. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (DFL) officially brings the charges, and the lead prosecutor is assistant attorney general Matthew Frank.
Under the Minnesota statute, Chauvin is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree if he caused Floyd’s death while 1) committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or (2) intentionally inflicting or attempting to inflict bodily harm upon the victim, when the perpetrator is restrained under an order for protection and the victim is a person designated to receive protection under the order. The underlying offense charged is third-degree felony assault.
The difficulty presented by the requirement that Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd’s death is perhaps best understood by thinking about its inverse: if something other than Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd to die, then Chauvin isn’t guilty of murder.
Those who watched the video might think causation is a no-brainer: Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck, suffocating and killing him. However, proof beyond a reasonable doubt requires more, both in this trial and in just about every murder trial. Standard operating procedure is for a medical examiner to testify that whatever actions the defendant undertook were the medical cause of the victim’s death. As anyone who’s seen A Few Good Men enough times to remember lactic acidosis can attest, the science of death can cause major drama during a murder trial.
George Floyd underwent an autopsy. The county medical examiner listed the official cause of death as “[c]ardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression,” and concluded the manner of death was homicide. [Note that while the conclusion as to homicide is certainly relevant, the medical examiner’s opinion about manner of death is not the same thing as a jury’s determination of legal guilt.]
But that’s not the only thing the ME found. According to the autopsy report, Floyd died of a combination of causes. Floyd not only had underlying health conditions, but was also intoxicated with the drug fentanyl. What’s more, the ME found that Floyd had recently used methamphetamine.
[…]
Causation isn’t the only major hurdle in the prosecution’s case either. The statute also requires proof of what Chauvin had been doing at the time he unintentionally caused Floyd’s death (remember, that criminal statutes must distinguish between those unintentional deaths we wish to criminalize and those that are just unfortunate accidents). Under the law, Chauvin is guilty if he was committing or attempting a felony offense. The felony here is defined as the intentional infliction of bodily harm.
Once again, this element promises to tease out the difference between general public opinion and precise legal findings. If Chauvin’s defense team can make a convincing case that he was acting reasonably given the situation, then restraining Floyd would not constitute a felony. It’ll all come down to the specific factual underpinnings of the circumstances. Jurors will consider the facts leading up to Chauvin’s restraint of Floyd. They’ll hear evidence about Chauvin’s moment-by-moment actions, his police training, and both the demands and the norms of police work.
Proving that Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd’s death might be relatively easy, compared to proving that he intended to kill him. And that’s why the possible reinstatement of a “third degree murder” charge - not exactly the same as, but fairly close to “criminal negligence causing death” in Canada - might be critical to the case:
Prosecutors had initially charged Chauvin with third-degree murder in addition to second-degree murder. However, Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill dismissed the third-degree murder charge for lack of probable cause, reasoning that a person cannot be guilty of that particular crime when their actions endangered just one person, as opposed to multiple people. Shortly thereafter, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Cahill “erred” and had to reconsider reinstatement of the charge. On Monday, Cahill said he lacked jurisdiction to do so and that he was prepared to proceed with jury selection on the other charges. But prosecutors petitioned to the appeals court to halt jury selection.
“The State is fully ready to go to trial, but the trial must be conducted in accordance with the rules and the law,” AG Ellison said in a statement. “Now that Mr. Chauvin has stated his intention to appeal Friday’s Court of Appeals ruling to the Minnesota Supreme Court, as is his right, the district court does not have jurisdiction to conduct jury selection or hear and rule on other substantive matters in the trial. We have filed motion with the Court of Appeals to ensure that justice is pursued properly.”
Should the Minnesota Supreme Court ultimately decide to reinstate the third-degree murder charge, it gives prosecutors a very strong fall-back position. A prosecution for third-degree murder would only require proof that Chauvin caused Floyd’s death “by perpetuating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.”
A ruling upholding the dismissal of the third-degree murder charge, on the other hand, would be a serious blow for prosecutors. Second-degree murder carries a potential penalty of 40 years, and third-degree murder carries one of up to 25 years. The maximum penalty for manslaughter is 10 years. If Chauvin were to be acquitted of murder but convicted of manslaughter, he might face around four years behind bars. However, even if found guilty of murder, Chauvin would not likely receive the maximum penalty for any of the relevant crimes. Rather, Cahill would likely follow sentencing guidelines and hand down a sentence unlikely to exceed 10 or 15 years.
Everyone on the internet has already decided they know what Chauvin was thinking, based on the video, but that’s not enough for a court of law. Proving negligence or indifference, or even the intent to cause harm needed for a manslaughter conviction? That’s easier, though still not a given.
As I usually find myself saying in cases like this, the problem isn’t that white defendants are given too much benefit of the doubt. The problem is that minorities on trial don’t get it.
If Chauvin walks, or if he is convicted on a lesser charge, are we in for another summer of riots and unrest? Maybe. But with COVID-related lockdowns gradually being lifted, authorities having more time to prepare and a white-nationalist-adjacent bombthrower no longer in the White House, we’ll all hopefully be in a different mental space in 2021 than we were in the cursed year of 2020.
A member of the band Mumford & Sons used his Twitter account to promote a book which argues that left-wing extremists threaten freedom of expression.
This was a lie so he had to be fired from the band for it.
I hope Chauvin gets a fair trial and an appropriate sentence. It won’t satisfy everyone, but that’s not its purpose. If he’s given unfair consequences in either direction, it won’t serve anything good.
Drugs, cigarettes, conspiracy theories, etc. all seem to share one feature - the pursuit of a good feeling contrary to rational evidence. When one first catches oneself doing that, it’s time to say a firm No to oneself and get out while it’s still possible. The ripple effect on one’s life, family, friends, finances, etc. seems to destroy people’s chances of finding a better path by displacing healthier choices. Like having a crush on someone, but infinitely worse and harder to leave behind.
Trainspotting is one of the first movies I would have seen when it actually came out. Been awhile. Should watch it again.