An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch announced that Morrison had been charged with felony child abuse and misdemeanor assault, running a picture of her wearing a pearl necklace and a white lab coat, with a breast-cancer-awareness ribbon pinned to her chest. She had straight blond shoulder-length hair, and her teeth were impeccably white. In comments online, the Post-Dispatch’s readers seemed almost uniformly outraged at the arrest. “Bet the daughter is an entitled brat,” one said. “Such a shame this angry teenage girl just destroyed her mothers career,” another wrote.
And oh my god that story is one of the most enraging things I’ve ever read.
It’s impossible to select the most rage inducing passages, the whole thing makes me want to drive to St Louis and confront that mother, but WHAT THE FUCK PENN???
Mackenzie’s lawyers learned that the university was considering initiating a process in which Mackenzie’s bachelor’s degree could be revoked. The university offered her a deal: as Raffaele described it to Mackenzie in an e-mail, the university would “take no action against your undergraduate degree,” if she gave up the Rhodes, along with her Latin honors (she’d graduated summa cum laude). In addition, she would have to take a mandatory leave—“to get needed counseling and support”—before the university would grant her M.S.W. degree. When White learned that Mackenzie had been telling professors that she felt the university was threatening her, she added a new requirement. In an e-mail, she said that Mackenzie would have to write a statement saying she’d agreed to withdraw from the scholarship “voluntarily and without pressure.”
I mean, do we really expect better from Ivy League institutions at this point? A primary function of these institutions is to make sure that failsons of the ultra wealthy like Jared Kushner get success that they don’t deserve. The rest of it is a “nice to have”. They will unhesitatingly throw a single student under the bus to protect the flow of donor money and the rubber stamping of rich kids to influential positions.
There’s a parallel between her mom beating the shit out of her and then forcing her to lie about her abuse and the university hearing that she felt threatened by them and the forcing her to lie to say she’s withdrawing of her own volition.
Come on. You don’t think “I was helping her get some gum out of her hair, and then she accidentally fell down 2 or 3 stairs, and then she went to bed before I could see her face” sounds believable?
Not to mention the years long journal detailing the abuse, showing up to school with bruises and black eyes to the point teachers called children’s services, children’s services investigating, confirming the abuse and getting her to foster care, the abusive text messages from the mom’s boyfriend all but confirming sexual abuse, mom both laughing at and blaming daughter for said sexual abuse and mom’s clearly sociopathic smear campaign?
Fuck everyone involved except the childrens services people who did their job. Not nearly enough disdain for the prosecutors for summarily dropping the case, just a complete failure of everyone in a position of power. Of course victims don’t report. Shithole country strikes again. And of course the Penn president was appointed by Biden as ambassador to Germany. Fuck right off
Yeah and it’s disgusting, and I’m glad she’s dragging them in the public square.
This is the system working as been corrupted to work: protecting rich white people. If you are a rich white person and can afford to hire the best lawyers, the LOLlaw works for you. If you can’t, then you end up being forced to write an apology letter by a joke of a supposed Ivy League school run by a bunch of rich white people if you want your degree, and all the connections that are supposed to come with it but probably won’t since you aren’t “one of them.”
Formative experiences shape behavior for decades. We document a striking feature about those who came of driving age during the oil crises of the 1970s—they drive less in the year 2000. The effect is not specific to these cohorts; price variation over time and across states indicates that gasoline price changes between ages 15–18 generally shift later-life travel behavior. Effects are not explained by recessions, income, or costly skill acquisition and are inconsistent with recency bias, mental plasticity, and standard habit-formation models. Instead, they likely reflect formation of preferences for driving or persistent changes in its perceived cost.
