The "weaponized autists" at 4Chan have done it again, because they can; a new meme suggesting that liberals are soulless idiots who can't think for themselves has gone viral. The concept compares Democrats to "nonplayable characters," or NPCs - the recurring characters in video games with repetitive lines and limited knowledge. Lack of an "inner voice" is a dead giveaway that someone may be an NPC.

The NPC meme essentially meant to ridicule the post-election perpetual outrage culture in which liberals simply parrot the latest talking points from their favorite pundits, who do their thinking for them.

The 4chan version is a simple greyed out, expressionless face known as "NPC Wojak" - which has triggered the left so hard that Twitter conducted a mass-banning campaign for accounts promoting the meme, and the New York Times wrote an entire article trying to figure it out.

Twitter did not take kindly to the meme:

Over the weekend, Twitter responded by suspending about 1,500 accounts associated with the NPC trolling campaign. The accounts violated Twitter’s rules against “intentionally misleading election-related content,” according to a person familiar with the company’s enforcement process. The person, who would speak only anonymously, was not authorized to discuss the decision. -NYT

There is precisely zero evidence that the accounts were spreading "intentionally misleading election-related content," so we're just going to have to take Twitter's word for it.

More:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-16/4chan-sparks-mass-triggering-npc-meme-twitter-responds-ban-hammer

Sally Q. Yates is back

Sally Q. Yates served in the Justice Department from 1989 to 2017 as an assistant U.S. attorney, U.S. attorney, deputy attorney general and, briefly in 2017, acting attorney general.

The latest episode of the reality-show presidency had our president conferring with Kanye West in the Oval Office to get his advice on criminal-justice reform. The bizarre encounter may have been a ratings success, but no celebrity-studded shiny object should distract us from the fact that this administration has in actuality reverted to the failed “lock them up and throw away the key” practices of the past. We can’t lose sight of the reality that people’s lives, the fairness of our justice system and the safety of our communities hang in the balance.

Under President Trump, we have returned to the indiscriminate use of lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for lower-level, nonviolent drug offenders. His administration has erased significant strides in police reform across the country — not only refusing to move forward with previously negotiated consent decrees but also refusing to help police departments as they seek reform assistance from the Justice Department. It has revoked guidance on the potential legal consequences of excessive fines, fees and cash bail that criminalize poverty. It has reversed a mandate to reduce and ultimately end the use of private prisons that are less safe and do not rehabilitate inmates. It has abandoned the “clemency initiative” launched by President Barack Obama that commuted prison terms for more than 1,700 low-level drug offenders. And despite its professed interest in prison reform, it has ended Obama-era reforms to the Federal Bureau of Prisons designed to provide inmates with tools they need to successfully reenter society, including the creation of a “school district” that would for the first time offer high school diplomas and address learning disabilities and illiteracy in our federal prison system.

It would be easy to ascribe these decisions solely to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is decidedly anti-reform. But after conjuring the depiction of “American carnage” at his inauguration, the president himself has continually championed this draconian approach, erroneously claiming that we are in the midst of a violent crime epidemic. Last week, he urged a return to stop-and-frisk while paying lip service to supporting reform.

There are some in the administration who recognize the need for criminal-justice reform and are seeking to advance legislation. But it’s important that we ensure that any reform measure that advances will have a meaningful impact, or we risk checking a box and moving on without making a difference. If the president is serious about criminal-justice reform, there are three issues that enjoy bipartisan support and are essential to building a fairer and more effective justice system.

First, real reform requires that we restore proportionality to drug sentencing. Laws passed at the height of the crack epidemic have exploded the federal prison population by almost 700 percent, with drug offenders sentenced under a mandatory minimum regime that focuses almost exclusively on drug weight rather than the dangerousness of the offender. Not only is such a regime unfair, but it also makes us less safe by diverting public safety resources to keep some offenders in prison for longer than necessary.

Second, we need to reorient our prisons toward rehabilitation. We should adjust not only how much time inmates spend in prison but also how they spend that time. Research shows that inmates who participate in meaningful correctional education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison, and every dollar spent on prison education saves $4 to $5 on the costs of reincarceration. But to make real change, we can’t be satisfied with dabbling on the margins by merely instituting incentives for inmates to participate in programming when there isn’t sufficient programming available; thousands of inmates are already on a waiting list hoping for a chance to enroll in a GED prep program. Rather, we need a wholesale rethinking of the prison experience and smart investment to increase the likelihood that inmates successfully reenter society.

More:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-let-trumps-use-of-celebrities-distract-you-from-his-criminal-justice-failures/2018/10/16/2bfd7b14-d096-11e8-a275-81c671a50422_story.html?utm_term=.3fdb80835125