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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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conservatives can now take some public institutions simply by the opposite of their word

Can you please post an alternative link? This just leads to an endless captcha loop for me.

Huh. The underlying link is this Atlantic piece, though it may be paywalled.

It's Blackman, so take it with a grain of salt, but it claims that the ABA's rating for Lawrence VanDyke was heavily biased: selecting many claims for generic ill behaviors without citing a specific example, giving only short and perfunctory interviews to anyone who liked VanDyke without asking about any of them about VanDyke's alleged bad traits, made questionable claims about a private interview that VanDyke denied publicly, and most critically violated its normal procedural rules giving those with a Not Qualified result after initial interview a secondary interview with a different evaluator (which did not happen) and to give the final letter to the judiciary committee at least 48 hours before the final hearing (instead giving well under 24 hours).

(I can't steelman the ABA position; this seems the strongest attempt, and that's damning with faint praise. See Grasz for another example from the same group.)

The piece is indeed paywalled, so I can't read it (I mean I can if I install a paywall bypasser, but I just don't read paywalled content instead). It does seem to me like the ABA is functioning exactly as described based on that Grasz example though. Thank you for the elaboration on your point however!