On December 19, 1776, Tom Paine published one of a series of pamphlets in the Pennsylvania Journal titled The American Crisis. Exactly one year later, George Washington’s Continental Army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
On December 19, 1828, Vice President of the United States John C. Calhoun penned the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing against the Tariff of 1828, a key moment in what became known as the Nullification Crisis.
If it means using crime patterns to determine which neighborhoods should get more police patrols, that’s reasonable enough.
But what if it means assuming that certain individuals may commit a crime if left to themselves? And then “preventatively” harassing them?
The Institute for Justice has just won an important victory against predictive policing as practiced by the sheriff’s office of Pasco County, Florida.
The office’s idea was to predict which residents were most likely to commit future crimes. Algorithms — or what IJ attorney Rob Johnson calls a “glorified Excel sheet” — were supposed to perform a function comparable to that of “precogs,” the psychics in the movie Minority Report, who envision future crimes.
To counter the precrime, the sheriff’s office made frequent visits to the homes and haunts of pre-guilty individuals to interrogate them and their families, “sometimes multiple times a week.” Families who objected would get slapped with citations for bogus code violations.
All that’s over with now, we hope.
In response to IJ’s litigation, the sheriff’s office has admitted violating the due process rights and Fourth Amendment rights of the people they harassed, and it has dropped the program.
Scott Bullock observes that if the policy of harassing people based solely on guesses about what they or associates “might” do had been allowed to stand, such a program could easily have spread to other locales.
This is much less likely now.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
W. H. Auden, Epitaph on a Tyrant (1939).
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
On December 18, 1777, the United States celebrated its first official Thanksgiving, marking the then-recent October victory by the Americans over General John Burgoyne in the Battle of Saratoga.
An apostrophe.
The T-shirt boldly proclaimed “Save Girls* Sports.”
But matters were more complicated for students of Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Riverside, California, who wore the shirts to protest their school’s decision to let a boy claiming to be a girl join the girls’ cross-country team.
The school sent students wearing the shirt to detention, allegedly for violating the dress code. Two of the girls who wore it said that school administrators compared the wearing of it to wearing a T-shirt with a swastika.
Those two students and their families sued the school and school district on constitutional grounds.
Maybe it was the lawsuit, or maybe it was the show of solidarity — but something caused MLK High to cave. And hundreds of other students did show up wearing the “Save Girls Sports” T-shirt, willing to buck the dress code or thought code, whatever it is, to support their classmates.
Somehow the school failed to place these hundreds of students in detention and has apparently dropped the detention policy.
Students at other schools in the area had also started wearing the T-shirts.
With regard to the policy of letting boys play on girls’ sports teams, the Riverside Unified School District says that its hands are tied. “RUSD is bound to follow California law,” which requires letting students “participate in sex-segregated” activities in a way “consistent with his or her gender identity.”
Laws are meant to be changed, however, if not through California’s legislature, then through the state’s citizen initiative process.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* We leave the [sic] for the title.
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If anybody ever attacked democracy, I might discover what the word means.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939).
On December 17, 1777, France formally recognized the United States of America.
The 17th of December, 1819, was the day Simon Bolivar declared the independence of the Republic of Gran Colombia in Angostura.
“We know of no foreign involvement with respect to the sightings in the Northeast,” the Secretary assured the public, “and we are vigilant in investigating this matter.”
That means: He doesn’t know or he’s lying. But he pinky swears to apply the same vigilance to the Mystery Drone question that he demonstrated in managing the border these last four years.
Plus, Mayorkas promised, without even cracking a smile, to let us know right away if anything changes and it turns out these things humming over our heads are part of, say, an alien invasion. Or anything. Sorta don’t call us, we’ll call you.
But he reiterated his desire “to assure the American public that we are on it.”
This follows a news briefing last week by “federal agencies leading the response” that, as CNN described, “left reporters and the public with more questions than answers, as they downplayed but simultaneously legitimized concerns about the reported drones.”
“Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country,” President-Elect Donald Trump stated on Truth Social. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge? I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
Meanwhile, on Friday, an international airport in New Windsor, New York, closed its runways for an hour due to a drone spotted in the area; on Saturday night, Boston Police arrested two men for flying a drone “dangerously close to Logan International Airport,” with a third suspect escaping in a boat and still at large; and, earlier in the week, a Chinese national was arrested leaving the country after having flown a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Is there no one in Washington capable of exerting sane leadership?
Or telling the truth?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation,” The Nation (July 7, 1956), published in book form in The Price of the Ticket (1985).
On December 16, 1689, England’s Convention Parliament began, not only transferring power from one king to another, but establishing procedures and rights.