On this day in 1959, Charles Van Doren admitted to having been given the answers on the show Twenty One in the quiz show scandal. It’s remarkable in the sense that it is such a trivial thing. Why was Congress investigating it? Yet this is what happens all the time. People get worked up about little things and they become very big deals.
I was sad to hear that Hillary Clinton is still maintaining her support for the death penalty. She said, “I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty…” What are these “egregious cases”? Well, she mentioned one: the Boston Marathon bomber. And why is that? Because what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was so much worse than other murderers? No. It’s just pandering to what the mob has decided is this week’s “egregious case.” That’s no way to run a society.
Of course, Clinton is one of the good ones. She’s not even in the same league as the demagogues in the Republican Party. But this is probably the best reason to vote for Bernie Sanders. Not that he is perfect. We are all guilty of this. But I would have hoped after all these years, we would have gotten better. We seem to be worse.
Depends on how you look at it. In some aspects we have gotten worse: the number of random mass shootings by disgruntled young men was next to zero. In others we have improved: the number of death sentences handed down has gone from 295 in 1998 to 73 last year.
Yes, but overall shooting deaths seems to be down. People just weren’t as aware of how dangerous things used to be. I’m amazed I made it out of childhood.
I am in the second where the descriptions of what the unchecked police did all over Europe in the 1850s to the 1870s to women who they “suspected” of being prostitutes.
It was much much worse. As bad as it is now, it certainly was a lot worse.
*section of the book on Josephine Butler
People think that justice movements should be lily white. But they have literally always made the same arguments. It really all comes back to what Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”