why is the pressure to "be the bigger person" always placed on the person who was wronged?

A well-timed & cleverly-worded question can expose more than you think...

I am 52 years old. I have been working since I was 15 years old. I have no savings, no retirement, and will never own a home before I die. And there is now a trillionaire.

If you asked me to design the most effective way to destroy higher education in the US, I couldn't come up with something better than this. And it's been going on for decades.

California universities dropped the SAT to help low-income and minority students. The policy is doing the opposite, writes Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. thefp.com/p/bring-back-the-s…

UC soc sci & humanities faculty endorse reinstatement of SAT for admissions: ucstudentsuccess.org/socscih… The UC is an incredible engine of progress and knowledge. We need this to ensure our students are those best able to use what it offers and move it forward.

With 2 days left until Election Day, a total of *52,318 ballots* have been cast (and received by the DCBOE), as of June 13! This means that 89.1% of DC’s 481,148 registered voters still haven’t voted yet (and ~65-70% of total likely DC voters still haven’t voted yet)!

Today’s front (expletive) page chicagotribune.com/2026/06/0…

When I used the term 'hr lady politics,' I think I made a mistake in using the term 'lady.' I'm trying to combine two basic concepts. The first is that we have a specific legal framework that has collapsed our enforcement of important civil rights laws into the hands of corporate executives and eroded our free society. The second are some problematic resulting dynamics within the liberal establishment about how to understand political identity. When the civil rights laws were passed and interpreted by the courts, America was a unionized country with competitive markets and access to the courts. Aka there were basic rights to all. It was illegal to engage in price discrimination in most contexts, and it was hard to fire someone without cause. But there was rampant discrimination against women, gays, blacks, and people with disabilities. We passed laws to redress those specific grievances, meant to stand on top of the broader New Deal laws granting basic rights. In the 1960s, when defense contractors had Jim Crow setups in their factories, it made sense to work through corporations. As those basic rights got stripped through deregulation, de-unionization, mandatory arbitration, and monopolization, the grievance-based supplemental rights were all that was left. It was fine for an airline to price discriminate against customers for any reason to fire someone for any reason *except* identity. So people started to advance identity grievance purely to claim some form of basic economic right that no longer existed. And the conflicts became blurrier as the overt Jim Crow stuff disappeared, but softer forms of discrimination remained. Where were these questions judged? Mostly not in the courts, but as sociologist Frank Dobbin noted, in human resources departments. The ultimate consequence is that the people making decisions about your economic livelihood if you got pregnant or had some sort of social conflict were corporate executives. Now of course the real power center were the CEOs, but Hr, which used to focus on training a workforce, increasingly were forced to become bagmen for monopolists who hated labor. The right's approach was to say 'strip those civil rights laws and stop the entitled grievances.' Of course that was not a way of restoring liberty but suggesting a form of equality based on equal subservience to masters. The Democrats focused on protecting the supplemental rights of discriminated groups, rather than the broader loss of basic rights. In both cases, the CEOs are fundamentally in charge, but their operatives are in the human resources world. it's a terrible setup, bad for everyone. The second concept is the problematic gender dynamics in the Democratic party. Since the early 1980s, Democrats have done better among women and worse among men. In part, this dynamic exists because Democrats handled important social problems like sexual harassment and assault. My Mom was sexually harassed at work, the stories she told me are awful. Harassment was routine. Just watch an 1980s movie, sexism was simply off the charts and normalized in a way that's virtually impossible to fathom today. But Democrats were also avoiding dealing with the arbitrary coercion that men faced in an increasingly hostile economy, which were real. And liberals got confused about the point of ending discrimination. Some could not tell the difference between liberating people from arbitrary coercion vs handing more power to authoritarian corporate officers to make social decisions. As they accepted that corporate authoritarian system as the only mechanism to implement a form of political equality, they saw identity grievance instead of citizenship as the route to political legitimacy. This isn't just about gender, Jewish politics became entirely about anti-semitism, black politics became entirely about racism, et al. They didn't see the illegitimate coercion embedded in the system they thought could deliver equality. This gender gap expanded in the 2010s, and led to such billionaire-friendly phenomena as Lean In and a moral panic moment where accusations against all men were immediately seen as legitimate. It was ok to simply insult men, especially white men, and to call them 'fragile' or otherwise diminish them purely based on gender and skin color. Most men in professional Democratic politics didn't care, since we knew the right coded words to avoid being singled out and were otherwise educated and powerful. It was lower class men that were hit and repelled by these claims. While I used the term 'hr lady politics,' I didn't mean that only women are the ones doing it. The people who benefit from this authoritarian system are almost entirely white male CEOs, but the bagmen are often the women tokenized into HR departments. I don't know that the Democrats have internalized just how much they routinely insulted men, over and over, for years. Most men aren't sexist jerks, they are just people. But the right's answer of tradwife lunacy is simply trying to strengthen the age old scourge of discrimination, which, while diminished, is certainly still a powerful noxious force. But discrimination cannot be addressed without a restoration of basic rights for everyone. I do think there is a re-gearing of liberal politics, a recognition that we all face a set of dangerous oligarchs who seek to set us upon one another. We are realizing that it isn't the powerful corporate officer who will bring us a just society, it is the union rep. It is the competitive market that lets us buy from someone else. It is the plaintiff lawyer. It is the coop. It is the honest small business leader. That's what I meant. I will try to be more clear about it going forward. x.com/matthewstoller/status/…

When I used the term 'hr lady politics,' I think I made a mistake in using the term 'lady.' I'm trying to combine two basic concepts. The first is that we have a specific legal framework that has collapsed our enforcement of important civil rights laws into the hands of corporate executives and eroded our free society. The second are some problematic resulting dynamics within the liberal establishment about how to understand political identity. When the civil rights laws were passed and interpreted by the courts, America was a unionized country with competitive markets and access to the courts. Aka there were basic rights to all. It was illegal to engage in price discrimination in most contexts, and it was hard to fire someone without cause. But there was rampant discrimination against women, gays, blacks, and people with disabilities. We passed laws to redress those specific grievances, meant to stand on top of the broader New Deal laws granting basic rights. In the 1960s, when defense contractors had Jim Crow setups in their factories, it made sense to work through corporations. As those basic rights got stripped through deregulation, de-unionization, mandatory arbitration, and monopolization, the grievance-based supplemental rights were all that was left. It was fine for an airline to price discriminate against customers for any reason to fire someone for any reason *except* identity. So people started to advance identity grievance purely to claim some form of basic economic right that no longer existed. And the conflicts became blurrier as the overt Jim Crow stuff disappeared, but softer forms of discrimination remained. Where were these questions judged? Mostly not in the courts, but as sociologist Frank Dobbin noted, in human resources departments. The ultimate consequence is that the people making decisions about your economic livelihood if you got pregnant or had some sort of social conflict were corporate executives. Now of course the real power center were the CEOs, but Hr, which used to focus on training a workforce, increasingly were forced to become bagmen for monopolists who hated labor. The right's approach was to say 'strip those civil rights laws and stop the entitled grievances.' Of course that was not a way of restoring liberty but suggesting a form of equality based on equal subservience to masters. The Democrats focused on protecting the supplemental rights of discriminated groups, rather than the broader loss of basic rights. In both cases, the CEOs are fundamentally in charge, but their operatives are in the human resources world. it's a terrible setup, bad for everyone. The second concept is the problematic gender dynamics in the Democratic party. Since the early 1980s, Democrats have done better among women and worse among men. In part, this dynamic exists because Democrats handled important social problems like sexual harassment and assault. My Mom was sexually harassed at work, the stories she told me are awful. Harassment was routine. Just watch an 1980s movie, sexism was simply off the charts and normalized in a way that's virtually impossible to fathom today. But Democrats were also avoiding dealing with the arbitrary coercion that men faced in an increasingly hostile economy, which were real. And liberals got confused about the point of ending discrimination. Some could not tell the difference between liberating people from arbitrary coercion vs handing more power to authoritarian corporate officers to make social decisions. As they accepted that corporate authoritarian system as the only mechanism to implement a form of political equality, they saw identity grievance instead of citizenship as the route to political legitimacy. This isn't just about gender, Jewish politics became entirely about anti-semitism, black politics became entirely about racism, et al. They didn't see the illegitimate coercion embedded in the system they thought could deliver equality. This gender gap expanded in the 2010s, and led to such billionaire-friendly phenomena as Lean In and a moral panic moment where accusations against all men were immediately seen as legitimate. It was ok to simply insult men, especially white men, and to call them 'fragile' or otherwise diminish them purely based on gender and skin color. Most men in professional Democratic politics didn't care, since we knew the right coded words to avoid being singled out and were otherwise educated and powerful. It was lower class men that were hit and repelled by these claims. While I used the term 'hr lady politics,' I didn't mean that only women are the ones doing it. The people who benefit from this authoritarian system are almost entirely white male CEOs, but the bagmen are often the women tokenized into HR departments. I don't know that the Democrats have internalized just how much they routinely insulted men, over and over, for years. Most men aren't sexist jerks, they are just people. But the right's answer of tradwife lunacy is simply trying to strengthen the age old scourge of discrimination, which, while diminished, is certainly still a powerful noxious force. But discrimination cannot be addressed without a restoration of basic rights for everyone. I do think there is a re-gearing of liberal politics, a recognition that we all face a set of dangerous oligarchs who seek to set us upon one another. We are realizing that it isn't the powerful corporate officer who will bring us a just society, it is the union rep. It is the competitive market that lets us buy from someone else. It is the plaintiff lawyer. It is the coop. It is the honest small business leader. That's what I meant. I will try to be more clear about it going forward. x.com/matthewstoller/status/…

Having a public defender does not mean you will receive poor representation. There are privately retained attorneys who will take your money and get a worse outcome than a PD. There are many great private attorneys and there are awesome public defenders.

Got an email from pro se plaintiff that started with “Dear Colleague.” You seriously can’t make this shit up.

It's impressive that so many individual government employees resisted political pressure to act improperly, even at the expense of their careers. That depth of principle is the sign of a true democracy.

A @HofstraU professor is facing a disciplinary hearing after calling a colleague’s course proposal “word salad” during a faculty meeting on curriculum changes. What started as academic discussion among faculty has now become a harassment probe.

if it weren't @YAppelbaum writing this I'd have trouble believing this really happened...

City Hall announces another Knicks watch party capacity 5,000 at Bryant Park Free, registration required This is in addition to Wollman Rink and Brooklyn Bowl