Sunday, April 30, 2017

The Parenthetical Steven Diamond

A great writer (me) once said (wrote) that you can tell everything you need to know about a writer (dickwhiz!) by what they place in parentheticals, like when they place ellipses in creative parentheticals as such:

.(.)(.).

So here's the parentheticals of one Steven Diamond's latest essays on Whitter's closing; for the uninformed (all of you), Professor Diamond has recently begun a series (like Police Academy) of internet writings (*) where he continually fights (academically, of course) the good fight - now against (!) Brian ("Wu-Tang") Leiter:
(in Orange County which is 60% white; fwiw, [**ad hominem warning**] Chicago and NU are in the low 30’s in a city that is 55% non-white)
(even Rodriguez has admitted there is a California problem)
(as I observed in the recent debate)
(Figures back to 2012 below.)
(One myth out there is that lower ranked schools have somehow turned into horrible schools once the credit crisis hit – in fact, lower ranked schools have always had much lower placement rates – applicants certainly know this despite paternalistic claims that they are too stupid to understand the challenges.)
(to borrow a felicitious [sic] phrase of Prof. Leiter)
(employment growth for lawyers is up 22%)
(perhaps under severe political pressure)
(hubristic and unkowing [sic]?)
(reported to ABA/2016 is preliminary)
It's naturalistic po-mo poetry.  If you submit this sort of thing to a truly prestigious competition, you just might wind up associate general counsel at a hot Silicon Valley start-up, where they snap up Santa Clara graduates like *that* because there's jobs aplenty in Californey, except for, you know, the fact that lower ranked schools have always had much lower placement rates and their applicants are just smart enough to make stupid decisions, or something...minor logical reasoning stumbling block on the road to literary eclat.

7 comments:

  1. “One myth out there is that lower ranked schools have somehow turned into horrible schools once the credit crisis hit – in fact, lower ranked schools have always had much lower placement rates.”

    Wow, Steve Diamond finally acknowledges a fact that law school scam bloggers have been making for years. Of course he left out that before the credit crisis, these schools reported 99% employment, with private practice salaries averaging $100k.

    Notice how his argument has changed in response to being viciously destroyed on Tax Prof Blog and Rodriguez’ blog. First he argued that Whittier should stay open, because the Orange County legal market was booming, and lawyers were making $160k according to BLS data. After many commenters pointed out how dishonest he was for ignoring facts and data to make a terrible case to keep Whittier open, he now concedes that less than a quarter of Whittier grads actually get legal jobs. So now he argues the school should stay open because the students know Whittier is a terrible school when they enroll. The school adds diversity to the legal profession because it provided “access” to the legal profession for almost a quarter of the class! Funny how he doesn’t get that a board of trustees of a college didn’t think this was a good justification to keep a terrible law school open.

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    1. Yeah, sacrifice more than three-quarters of the class so that the others can get "access" to a job in law that may pay perhaps $40k—at a cost of $200k in debt. Incidentally, how many racialized students get those jobs? I wonder why we don't get any data on that subject.

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  2. Yet, you can't even spell his name correctly.

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  3. Years ago Rush Limbaugh developed a technique for exposing journalistic bias. He would record interviews from talking head shows on TV and have his staff edit out all the answers. When they played all the questions in rapid-fire succession the bias would become quiet obvious, as would the fact that the interviewer was trying to steer the interview toward his or her foregone conclusions. I don't think he does that anymore, but I think it is because he forced journalists to actually do some work and consider how their questions would sound in that format before asking them.

    Although I will concede that Diamond's parenthetials seem to owe more to e.e. cummings than Rush Limbaugh.

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    1. Diamond writes about as well as he thinks, which is not very.

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