#and tried to report me to the dean of academic affairs for.... not helping him with discrete math homework

[a9saga]

the fucking week i have had in the last 24 hours

[getthatshitouttahere-blog]

My Week from Hell

Stressful would be an understatement. I do not even know where to begin. I would love to begin at the beginning and give you every finite detail, but that would require a shit-ton of more work than I am willing to put in. I’ll just summarize...

My husband began the Respiratory Program at our local technical college in the spring of last year. We were all so very excited. I was a nurse at my dream hospital, he had finally found the career he wanted, and was fighting for it. All was hunky-dunky until he discovered he had an asshole for a teacher. A tool. A dick. A sadist, if you will. He is the type of guy who will pretend to be your friend, and then do everything in his power to destroy you. Not teacher material. He was the type of guy that made all of his students want to report him and get him fired; but there is a catch: The bastard is tenured. Untouchable. A god. He has full control and can play his students like fucking puppets. 

He started playing games on day one, and my husband was a pawn. My husband was given the impression he was going to make it. All signs pointed to graduation, until his sorry excuse for an instructor nearly destroyed our hopes of having an incredible future. During final checkoffs, William did not answer all of the given questions verbatim, the way this god-teacher wanted. His responses were passing-material, but not perfect. So he dropped my William from the program. Put a halt on his career goals. Potentially destroyed our future.

My immediate response was to complain to the dean: Beg and plea for a second chance. Request an interview like we should have done months ago before the prick gained momentum and went on a career-destroying rampage. Then we found out he is friends with virtually all of the faculty in the Respiratory Program. Shit. Well, the next step is the VP of academic affairs. We are gathering an army of disgruntled students and will march in to her office hopefully some time next week.

Sounds shitty? I’m not done. So, I work every weekend. Not because I want to, but because it pays so much extra it is like I am receiving income from a secondary part-time job, but without the extra hours. I use this money to pay for my horse, pay off bills from our past ridiculous spending habits, and save up to buy a house. I knew there were conditions that were required to be followed in order to keep said extra pay. I signed an agreement. I was ready. Excited. I have been doing it for 15 months. When I started, I was verbally told one thing, but then found out last week that the policy I signed actually meant something different than the words I was told. To go in to detail would mean I will be typing all day. Just understand that said misunderstanding has left me with the threat of losing this incentive pay. The incentive pay is so significant that the loss would be nearly ten thousand dollars annually.

Shit. There has, however, been a silver lining in this. My manager has been willing to work with me and has given me the opportunity to plead my case. I plead my case last week. I was promised a decision by Monday. Today is Friday and the stress of not knowing is beginning to take its toll. I am beginning to wonder if she even realizes how significantly this will impact our lives. Ten thousand dollars is probably nothing to her, but it is everything to us. Losing this amount of money will cause detrimental consequences. We have thought of Plan Bs. They will work, but they will suck. I may lose my horse. We may not be able to buy a house when we want. We may have to wait to have a baby--but I am not getting any younger. I’ll be 30 this year.

Sounds shitty? Still not done. We were informed, on the same day William was dropped from the program, and after I checked my work email for the 359th time hoping to finally hear from my manager, that a close family member had lost his job. This affects us significantly because we will have to take on the burden of more financial strain due to the elimination of their monthly contribution to some of our bills. I cannot go in to much more detail than that, for sake of this person’s privacy. Just understand that it fucking sucks for all parties involved.

Sounds shitty? Nope...I’m still not done. Last week my dentist told me that I may need to have a root canal, so he sent me to an endodontist. I saw him today and he confirmed my dentist’s suspicions. I am not good at the dentist. I have had dental issues my whole life thanks to grinding and gritting my teeth. I have had terrible experiences, and said experiences have made me wary of any future necessary procedures. Thankfully, the dentist that will be performing the procedure seems incredible. He is very personable and understands my anxiety, so I will be doped up on Valium and Nitrous for the root canal next week. Also, the cost is turning out to be no where near as expensive as we anticipated. I have no idea how this is the case. Perhaps karma is starting to balance itself out. Still sucks though because we will have to put the charges on a card that we literally just paid off three months ago.

You’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with my weight loss journey. It has everything to do with it. The stress hormone, cortisol causes your body to retain fat. Your body basically goes in to survival mode when you are stressed, and it becomes nearly impossible to lose weight. The stress this week was so bad that I went to bed with chest pain; pain so severe is seared through to my back, and radiated down my left arm. I was so stressed on Wednesday after hearing William’s news that I had a panic attack and vomited what little I had in my stomach. I did the opposite of over-eating: I had almost nothing for nearly two days. The only thing that makes your body retain fat more readily than stress is starvation. My body was hungry, but my mind shut every desire for food out. I was afraid of throwing up again, so I listened to my brain.

Needless to say, I stayed within my calorie limit, but I lost nothing. I was thrilled that I did not gain anything, but I have plateaued for a week. Yes, I have been checking my weight frequently. I have been doing so because I need to keep a close eye on it, given the extreme stress. I recently joined a weight loss challenge site called DietBet. You pay a sum (this particular challenge was $35) to enter, and if you lose an agreed upon percentage of weight by the deadline, you get a portion of the pot. Given the circumstances, I need the money. I need to ensure that I am staying on track so that I do not lose this bet. Therefore, I have been watching my weight carefully.

This week has been discouraging in so many ways, largely where my weight is concerned, but I am trying my best to give myself some credit. I have tried several stress reducing techniques, but few of them have helped. I am sipping on a beer while typing this, and my chest pain has improved. Today was better than yesterday, but every time I open my work email, I get chest pain so severe I nearly black out. I just want to know. It may be good news, it may be bad news; but I just fucking want to know. The wait is killing me, and probably literally. I wish my manager knew how terribly this is affecting me, then perhaps she would not make me wait for 8 days before giving me the verdict that will determine my future.

[theconservativebrief]

Coming soon to the Katharine Cornell Theater in the small town of Vineyard Haven, emeritus Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz will be answering questions about President Donald Trump.

Specifically, Dershowitz tells the Boston Globe, “I want to start a civil, serious dialogue on the Vineyard about the civil liberties implications of the current efforts to impeach or prosecute President Trump.”

It’s the latest twist in a bizarrely long news cycle about a well-known legal scholar’s summer vacation that touches on many of the flashpoints in American civic life today: Trump, the exceptional anti-Trump political mobilization of educated women, the ambiguous posture of the mainstream news media in the crisis, the sometimes perplexing nature of social class in contemporary America, contradictory ideas about “law and order,” and the growing substitution of celebrity grifting for actual politics.

The saga touches on many subjects of profound importance, but it began with something extremely unimportant — a Trump apologist whining about not getting invitations to dinner parties.

It all started with an op-ed in the Hill published on June 27 in which Dershowitz, like any good author, tried to promote his book by linking it to a currently hot topic of discussion.

At the time there was a lot of talk about “civility” in the context of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being refused service at the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia. Dershowitz, who is currently trying to get people to buy copies of The Case Against Impeaching Trump, chimed in with an op-ed about how despite not favoring impeachment, he disagrees with many of Trump’s policies.

“But that is not good enough for some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard,” he wrote. “For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.”

This fairly unremarkable claim ended up spurring a remarkable four New York Times articles with contributions from eight reporters which, in turn, spurred a well-reported Lloyd Grove story in the Daily Beast that revealed that even Times executive editor Dean Baquet felt things had gotten out of control.

“We are trying to increase our coverage of cranky white guys,” Baquet quipped in a text to Grove. “Seriously, it’s a big place and different desks made their own plans. We should have coordinated better and done fewer.”

But rather than ending the story, Grove’s reporting if anything confirmed that the story by now had its own momentum — if a celebrity is defined as a person who is famous for being famous, Dershowitz’s social life on Martha’s Vineyard is now being covered specifically for being overcovered. Now you can find him on CNN and The View talking about Martha’s Vineyard.

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Those of us who’ve tried in the past to promote a book about public affairs can only gaze with wonder at Dershowitz’s stunning success here, especially because arguing that Trump should not be impeached at a time when nobody is actually trying to impeach Trump is on its face a not particularly interesting thesis.

Martha’s Vineyard is a fancy vacation spot close to the major Northeast Corridor population centers. Consequently, it’s so well-known to the people who run the major media outlets in America that stories that take place in or around it have often been covered as if the typical person knows what Martha’s Vineyard is. (Realistically, people might wrongly assume it has something to do with wine production and/or Martha Stewart.)

In reality, Martha’s Vineyard an island south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts whose geography makes it an isolated getaway (you can’t drive there after all) that is also reasonably close to the most densely populated portion of the country.

Historically, Martha’s Vineyard was a center of the American whaling industry (the harpooner Tashtego from Moby Dick was from Martha’s Vineyard), which is why the preppy apparel brand Vineyard Vines uses a lot of whale iconography. In the 19th century, a quirk of population genetics gave rise to a large deaf population on the island, many of whom (along with many hearing islanders) used a distinctive Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language.

The widespread deployment of railroads and especially the rise of the automobile, however, greatly changed the economic geography of the East Coast’s off-shore islands. At a time when water-based travel was generally faster than land-based travel, islands were not particularly isolated from other coastal communities. Automobiles inverted that logic, and rapidly turned places like Martha’s Vineyard into essentially specialized vacation communities that made a virtue out of their relative isolation from the hustle and bustle of the Northeast Corridor.

All the various Northeast summering spots have a fair amount in common, but the Vineyard does distinguish itself in several ways. For starters, the town of Oak Bluffs has long specifically been the vacation destination of choice for African-American elites on the East Coast. Secondarily, as an island the Vineyard leans in the direction of being a tight-knit community with defined edges.

The heavy presence of academics among Greater Boston’s social elite and the relative paucity of truly super-duper rich people compared to New York also means that the Vineyard has a distinctly tweedier, less flashy vibe than, say, the Hamptons. This in turn makes it a good getaway spot for celebrities who prefer to stay out of the public eye, and both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enjoyed the ability to vacation there in a low-key manner.

None of this is super relevant to the story, except to say that between the relative diversity, the association with Democratic Party presidents, and the disproportionate academic population, Martha’s Vineyard is more uniformly liberal in its politics than other places Dershowitz might have chosen to go on vacation. It’s also the kind of place that lots of journalists might like to go on vacation, which helps explain the media coverage.

There have been a lot of stories lately about the impact of Donald Trump’s trade policies on the lobster industry in Maine. While this is unquestionably an important story in its own right, as a person whose family has long owned a summer house on the Maine coast, I can’t help but notice that the East Coast media’s level of interest in the economic well-being of seaside Maine towns invariably seems to skyrocket in the summertime.

In a practical sense, the off-season would be a much better time to do this reporting since lodging would be considerably cheaper and a reporter could be confident that almost everyone he encounters is a bona fide local. But from the standpoint of wanting to get a little work done while on vacation, wanting to get work to pay for you to go on vacation, or simply spending or week or two “working from home” while remote in a scenic location, it’s better to report from Maine in the summertime.

Something similar, I strongly suspect, was at work in the overwhelming enthusiasm Times reporters exhibited for following up on Dershowitz’s social life.

To this one might add that while the question of which dinner parties Alan Dershowitz does and does not get invited to is fundamentally uninteresting, Dershowitz’s political trajectory over the years actually is pretty interesting.

Dershowitz began his career as a very typical — albeit unusually successful — liberal legal academic, clerking for the chief judge of the DC Circuit and then for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg before joining the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1964 and becoming the school’s youngest-ever full professor at the age of 28 in 1968. Though primarily an academic, he did dabble in litigation work, including the successful 1976 appellate defense of Deep Throat star Harry Reems.

In 1984, Dershowitz became a legal celebrity thanks to his successful representation of British socialite Claus von Bülow, who’d been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny von Bülow, who had fallen into a coma. Dershowitz got the conviction overturned on appeal, Bülow was acquitted in a retrial, Dershowitz wrote a successful book about the case, and the book was adapted into a very good 1990 film, Reversal of Fortune, that earned several Oscar nominations.

One particularly charming detail of the story, as told by Dershowitz, is that he was initially reluctant to take the case, believing Bülow to be guilty. But Dershowitz agreed to take Bülow on as a client when he agreed to also finance the defense of two African-American teenagers facing death penalty murder charges.

This kind of upstairs/downstairs class dynamic, where the famous law professor serves as an advocate for privileged clients while making the case that he is serving the core interests of the underprivileged, is at the core of a lot of Dershowitz’s most noteworthy legal work.

He served, for example, as an appellate adviser for O.J. Simpson’s legal team during the former football star’s murder trial. The Simpson defense team managed to use the considerable resources at its disposal to successfully wield the black community’s longstanding grievances with police and prosecutorial misconduct into an acquittal for their client without really accomplishing much of anything for less famous members of the community.

By the same token, Dershowitz insists he’s not defending Trump because he’s suddenly become a right-winger — he’s doing so because as a longtime progressive civil libertarian he’s concerned about prosecutorial overreach and the FBI running amok to persecute an enemy. The larger political context in which Trump is governing as the least civil libertarian president in a generation, mobilizing and implementing a massive political and cultural backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement, is not interesting to Dershowitz. So while the Trump advocacy is a bit of a new posture for Dershowitz it is, on another level, entirely consistent with the broader trajectory of his career, which has always been more focused on exonerating individual high-profile clients than on systemic reform.

Meanwhile, separately from his main academic work Dershowitz has over the past 15 years been increasingly involved in pro-Israel advocacy, writing The Case for Israel in 2003 and The Case Against the Iran Deal in 2015. For a liberal Democrat to also have stridently hawkish views on Israel was not uncommon in the recent past, but the sands have been shifting on this issue.

Dershowitz supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign in part over Israel-related issues, and Israel became a much more party-polarized topic during Obama’s administration with Democrats shifting to the left even as Israeli politics has shifted well to the right. Meanwhile, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been openly supportive of Republicans.

The point, however, is that when Dershowitz tells his Vineyard friends that they — rather than he — are the ones who have changed, he has a point. And that includes the fact that, fundamentally, he’s just a guy out there doing a good job of promoting a quickie book.

The really crucial point in all of this is that while Dershowitz would like you to think that we are talking about his social life because he is being shunned over his pro-Trump book, the truth is the opposite — we are talking about alleged shunning (or lack thereof) because he is out promoting a book.

Dershowitz writes a lot of books — indeed, The Case Against Impeaching Trump is his second book of 2018, following February’s release of The Case Against BDS — and he is a shrewd self-promoter. His impeachment book is on an interesting subject, but it suffers from several fundamental problems.

First and foremost, nobody is really trying to impeach Trump! Democratic congressional challengers aren’t running on impeachment, Democratic congressional leaders say the impeachment issue is a “gift to Republicans,” none of the incumbent Senate Democrats in tough reelection battles favor impeachment, and it’s overall a nonissue.

Secondarily, while the possibility of impeachment is obviously a subject of Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation, that investigation is not complete and Mueller himself has said almost nothing about it. Depending on what Mueller finds, it’s certainly possible that support for impeachment will grow (maybe even Dershowitz will be convinced). But it’s also entirely possible that Mueller will bring charges against a few more Trump associates and ultimately conclude that the president personally didn’t do anything wrong, and the currently very low levels of political support for impeachment will go even lower.

Whether or not to impeach Trump is not really a live issue in American politics this summer. What is very much on the agenda is how college-educated liberals who feel viscerally that Trump is much worse than the average Republican should react to Trump supporters they encounter socially.

Stories about Sanders’s trip to the Red Hen, White House adviser Stephen Miller’s misadventures in take-out sushi, and other day-to-day acts of civic disrespect for Trump figures have been widely trafficked and widely debated despite a lack of obvious significance. Among other things, even in a social circle where nobody would actually defend Trump on the merits, it’s easy to reach an equilibrium where reasonable people can disagree about exactly how much shunning of Trump supporters one should engage in.

By linking his book directly to a live controversy, Dershowitz has managed to secure oodles of coverage and sell books. And I, frankly, can only admire him for it.

Original Source -> The bizarre media hoopla over Alan Dershowitz’s social life in Martha’s Vineyard, explained

via The Conservative Brief