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ClaireBerlinski.substack.com Profile picture
ClaireBerlinski.substack.com
@ClaireBerlinski
Elite creds. Interesting jobs. Writes books. Good-looking. If you like my Twitter feed, you'll love the Cosmopolitan Globalist: https://t.co/B0rpQBYjMG
9 subscribers
Oct 7, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
His body was *dismembered?* It's nyti.ms/2Cv2Ys6 Perhaps it's best to wait to report that detail until we see forensic reports? The Turkish government is very capable, forensically--I've seen it in action. (Not least when my apartment was burgled). If it's got a piece, or pieces, of a body, it will be very capable of figuring out to whom it belonged based on DNA evidence. There will be enough security footage to say without doubt not only whether he left the consulate--
Oct 6, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Hollywood perpetrated the fantasy, sure, but that's Hollywood's job. The real culprit here is the federal government. The use of the polygraph to screen employees gives it a luster of official credibility. People insist they don't trust the federal government, but they do. If authority figures use this thing, they figure, it must work. And the government uses it because it *does* work: It works to scare people senseless and extract confessions. That's presumably why Kavanaugh declared it was a useful tool of law enforcement. In that sense, it is.
Oct 6, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Yes, it's a good article. It's bizarre that we're even having this discussion, though. It's worth asking why Americans believe in polygraphs (no one else does, it's a uniquely American superstition). It has something to do with two cultural proclivities, I think. First is the idea that everything can be done with technology. We worship "science," especially if we don't know much about it. "Science" can do and fix everything, to the point we people are willing to believe it can do the obviously impossible:
Oct 5, 2018 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Well, we take our small consolations where we may. Senator Graham has, at least, spoken the truth about polygraphs.

But at this point, I'm game for dunking him in water to see if he floats--and frankly, I think we should go full Roman coliseum-plus.

Let me explain my vision. If we're going to go out like this, let's do it with style. Let's be *the* most spectacularly entertaining and degenerate empire in history.

Let's build ourselves a proper coliseum. We stick Graham, Kavanaugh, a passel of shrieking harpies and Ronan Farrow right into it.
Oct 4, 2018 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
But what's so wrong with our political life that "six current and former senior national security officials" would leak information about an ongoing, Top Secret investigation? Do the American people need to know about this so urgently that everyone in China needs to know, too? Why did these officials imagine the investigation was labelled "Top Secret?"

Why are we hearing about this from people not authorized to go on the record?
Oct 3, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
You Idiot Reporters Are Making It Worse nationalreview.com/2018/10/kavana… Yep. An in doing so, contributing every bit as much as Trump to the destruction of precious norms of civility--ones so much easier to destroy than rebuild. Everyone--stop. Your partisan hysteria, your preening self-righteousness, your eagerness, in every case, to view half of your fellow Americans as enemies to be destroyed, as opposed to than people with whom you're forever stuck on this continent--so you'd best learn to live with them---
Oct 2, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Brett Kavanaugh Is Lying. So Are You. politi.co/2xOK7Ek via @politicomag I don't know if I'm truly "scant few," but I offer myself as an example of the latter. I don't think this is because I'm exceptionally honest with myself. But I am, possibly, atypical in my willingness to express this view publicly. I wouldn't be hugely surprised if Democrats discover to their horror they've fucked up the most winnable midterms in American history, as well as the most important ones.
Oct 2, 2018 • 30 tweets • 5 min read
Okay, so let's look a bit more closely at this: September 5, 2014 U.S. Department of HHS Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, Report Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization -- Crime victimization surveys like this are suppose to elucidate the figures that are truer to reality that police reported crime.

To understand why the dark figure of crime escapes exact measurement, realize that for a crime to be officially recorded, three things must happen:
Oct 1, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Another question occurs to me. The *most extreme* estimates I've seen in the media suggest that one in five American women have experienced completed or attempted rape. See: washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec…. That number is *very* contestable, but let's use it arguendo. That means four in five women have *not* experienced this.

I'd like to see polling data indicating whether women are now more or less afraid of rape than they were in the 1980s, when (according to surveys using the same methodology) they were more at risk.
Oct 1, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'll RTing this because I'm realizing that many people involved in this discussion are too young to remember the 1980s at all. This isn't the best article written on this. Key work was done by Debby Nathan amazon.com/Satans-Silence… and Dorothy Rabinowitz amazon.com/No-Crueler-Tyr… ... Then, as now, there was a practical alliance of far-right and the far-left, with Christian extremists and a particular kind of feminist united in fueling a devastating mass sexual hysteria. (NOT all feminists, NOT all Christians.)
Oct 1, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Fury Is a Political Weapon. And Women Need to Wield It. nyti.ms/2OfI3yP This is on the front page of our former newspaper of record. I'd be grateful, @nytimes, if you'd recognize that women aren't an undifferentiated mass-- --and the use of "fury" as a political weapon is the essence of dangerous demagoguery. The use of rage as a political weapon has resulted in Donald Trump occupying the Oval Office. I'm becoming furious, I admit, that you're further debasing the coin of democratic politics.
Sep 30, 2018 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Let's consider the methodological problems involved in this claim. I'd like everyone to really think about this. It concerns a very old and unsolved problem in criminology, first described in the 1830s by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician and sociologist-- also a key figure in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences. There are two problems here, but let's start with the first: Estimating the Dark Figure of crime. google.fr/search?q=dark+…
Sep 30, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Women are making a mistake if they think their daughters are at no risk if the ideas of "due process" and "presumption of innocence" are jettisoned. It won't just be men. Objects of mass persecutory hysteria tend to shift. These legal principles protect us all. Women, in fact, have historically been more vulnerable to witch-hunts, which is why we use the word "witch-hunt." When people go nuts, they're as apt to do it in a misogynist way as a misandrist way. Women don't have to like or love men, or be related to them, to grasp the idea:
Sep 30, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Is your argument here, seriously, that nice people are never falsely accused of a crime, so just be nice and you don't have to worry about the idea of due process? Is your idea that "evidence" should be subordinated to your sense of who is a "brat" and who is "entitled?" You--as you point out--have attended two Ivy League schools. In the views of many, that makes you *very* entitled. And elitist. By definition. People are surprisingly willing to wave away concepts like "presumption of innocence"--until they need them.
Sep 29, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of people have written to me to express their appreciation for this. It wasn't my intention, but I do seem, strangely to have something with a magical and very useful property. Readers report they were a) distracted from the Supreme Court follies from the beginning to end; and b) able to share it with friends, family, and co-workers and talk about for the length of an otherwise elevator ride without getting into a fight about Trump, the Supreme Court, or Brexit, and without being sexually harassed or accused of it. So it seems to be:
Sep 28, 2018 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
But he does not say why he's ruled, previously, that they are "an important law enforcement tool." leagle.com/decision/infco…. I strongly agree with him--he said this yesterday-- that "if the mere allegation — the mere assertion of an allegation — a refuted allegation from 36 years ago is enough to destroy a person’s life and career, +
Sep 18, 2018 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
Thanks, @mariabustillos. The photo is to illustrate something I talk about in the introduction. It's EveryFace, from Everywhere. It's my accent, not my face, that tells people I'm foreign. Otherwise, no one guesses that I'm not from these parts, wherever they are. And this is true across a surprisingly wide geographic range. My face blurrs into the background pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Otherwise, it's only when I start talking that people say, "Where are you from?" So if I were to lose my accent,
Sep 18, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I've just discovered @ap_org, which seems to feel as strongly as I do that reposing our country's security in a took no more proven utility than a dowser has got to be a bad idea. Even if it elicits a few true confessions, the value is outweighed by the harm-- It makes us more stupid; it establishes that the government can not only withhold information from us in the name of NATSEC (which we all agree is the right thing to do, in some cases) but actively lie in a way that indulges magical habits of thinking, making the government--
Sep 18, 2018 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
News organs would do readers a valuable service if, whenever they report that someone has taken or proposes to take a polygraph, they reminded readers (or explained to them) that polygraphs are voodoo. It's junk science. A polygraph is no more reliable than a pack of tarot cards. Papers that report that Mike Pence has offered to take a polygraph or that Christine Blasey has taken one without explaining that polygraphs do not work are wasting an opportunity to enlighten their readers. It's their choice, but it's an irresponsible one.
Sep 15, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is muddying the issue. Chirac took responsibility for Vel d'hiv in '95 (53 years after). Macron for Audin in '18 (61 years after). ICC didn't exist until 2002, and had nothing to do with Macron's statement, which was clearly a function of time, not the ICC. If in 2069 the United States "takes responsibility" for "the Bush torture," it will be an equivalent gesture. The ICC did not compel Macron's recognition, the deaths of anyone powerful enough to object did.
Sep 12, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The European Parliament needs to start condemning Orban for the right reasons. foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/11/in-… This is very wise. But in urging us not to conflate cultural liberalism with democracy, @DaliborRohac adds to the linguistic confusion. We need to stop conflating the words "liberal" and "left-wing," or at least clarify which meaning we're using, and we need to stop conflating "democracy" with "liberalism."