Is it enough to jolt racists out of their intellectual rut?

From Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind by Jay Caspian Kang.  The subheading is The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend.

For a Classical Liberal, the overturning of Affirmative Action is to be celebrated almost solely because we both believe that it is immoral to discriminate based on race and because we read, correctly, the Constitution as preventing the discrimination based on race.

No matter how worthy the intentions might have been in passing Affirmative Action in the first place, that was always based on the weak philosophical grounds that evil means can be justified by noble ends.  

Kang almost is writing as if the major flaw was that Affirmative Action was wrong because it did not distribute the bounty equally among non-white races.  While true that it was not equally distributed, that would not be my argument at all.  Discriminating based on race is simply wrong and we are well done with it.  (Yes, yes, there will be rear guard actions by those institutions so wedded to racial discrimination but ideally, without legal cover, it will fade away sooner than later.)

Kang is better at pointing out some of the inherent follies of Affirmative Action.  He mentions one that came to my attention two or three decades ago and which I think is profound.  Because the best universities could not find native-born American blacks with the academic wherewithal to perform well at their institutions, they switched goals.  The original intent, and one towards which it was easy to be sympathetic, was for Affirmative Action to function in part as a restitution to those descended from slaves.  

Not being able to make their racial quotas, most top universities began admitting more and more black students who were emigrants or the children of emigrants of the African diaspora.  As many as 40-50% of the elite university black student population were not American born blacks.  Those who were intended to be the beneficiaries of an ill-guided policy were being left out of it to the benefit of emigrants.

Worse, from my perspective, is that that highlighted an even greater sin.  If you want real diversity, diversify based on class.  The behavioral and value gulf between upper-income family blacks and whites in minuscule compared to the gulf between both of those groups and lower income Americans.  Filling their race quotas with immigrants illuminated that elite universities are not interested in real diversity but are interested in maintaining and serving a clerisy elite.

Many more fights are left before those committed to racial discrimination are finally defeated but the overturning of Affirmative Action is a good first step.  Hopefully it might be enough of a jolt to get the racists to shift their perspective from a flawed policy to something more beneficial, such as helping all Americans of every race, every religion and every class, to acquire the education that will allow them to maximize their life opportunities.  Be that elite universities, state universities, community colleges, or high school.  Each and all of these institutions should be a launch pad for all citizens and be delivered effectively, cheaply and expeditiously.  To all based on their abilities.

History

Exciting news: Sir John Soane’s architectural #DrawingOffice – the oldest surviving example of its kind – has been restored and will open to public tours for the first time! ✍️🎉 pic.twitter.com/rP6YumyJrk

— Sir John Soane's Museum 🏛️🖼️ (@SoaneMuseum) May 11, 2023

An Insight

Students who are alien and hostile to the education process ought to be removed. You say, "What will we do with them?" I say that's a secondary issue. The first priority is to stop thugs from making education impossible for everyone else. - Walter Williams

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 11, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

TSUTAYA Bookstore in Japan. pic.twitter.com/8qy0UhgsY4

— World Of History (@UmarBzv) May 10, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

 Heh.  Haven't seen this in a long while.

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

Start your meetings on time!

This paper finds that meetings which start late don't just annoy participants, they are much less productive and creative. And making a habit of lateness hurts. Just the anticipation of a late meeting has similar effects https://t.co/xxByihmNnK pic.twitter.com/BiZ3Z2oCym

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) May 11, 2023

 

Thinking clearly

A succinct summary of some of the confused thinking among the clerisy of the mainstream media.  From Actually, Dobbs Was the Opposite of a Power Grab by Charles C.W. Cooke.  

In the Atlantic, Kimberly Wehle argues that:

By its own maneuvering, the modern Supreme Court has made itself the most powerful branch of government. Superior to Congress. Superior to the president. Superior to the states. Superior to precedent, procedure, and norms. In effect, superior to the people.

Interesting. What does Wehle have in mind?

Most talked about in this regard, of course, is the Court’s ending of long-established reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the assertion of extreme power extends well beyond the issue of abortion.

Wait, what? Wehle’s primary example of the Supreme Court’s supposedly making “itself the most powerful branch of government” — “superior” in position to Congress, the president, the states, precedent, procedure, norms, and the people is . . . Dobbs? The case in which the Court overturned an act of astonishing judicial usurpation and sent power back to the people? The case that returned to the states an authority that the judiciary had falsely claimed for half a century. That was the “assertion of extreme power”?

He finished with:

There is nothing at all wrong with the Supreme Court stepping in to limit the power of the elected branches when an enumerated constitutional right has been violated. On the contrary: that the judiciary is empowered to play that role is one of the things that makes America so special. But one cannot have it both ways: to enforce constitutionally protected minority rights is often to thwart the transient will of the majority, and it is to do so explicitly. In effect, Kimberly Wehle is trying to play both sides of the same coin; she wants the Supreme Court to grant her the policies that she wants and to pretend that doing so is an expression of democracy. What a ridiculously confused and self-serving approach “living constitutionalism” has become.

 It is not dissimilar to the cognitive dissonance of the Left complaining about anyone who has the opinion that there was electoral corruption in the 2020 election and that it was sufficient to overturn the election.  It appears that they are doing their best to make having that opinion illegal.

One might have more or less good reasons for holding that opinion but that one is entitled to have that opinion is black letter law.  

Wehle wants the Supreme Court to only enforce the rules which she likes and not decide against policies which she supports.  Similarly, I keep hearing NPR and others trying to make the case that it is good to have free speech but it is also illegal and outside the political norms to question the 2020 election results.

Pick a principle, any principle, and stick with it.  The worst form of mindlessness is to irrationally swing about based on emotional attachment to alien principles.  

American political conservatism is an effort to conserve American liberalism

From You Keep Using That Word by Jonah Goldberg.  The subheading is I do not think ‘liberal’ means what you think it means.

Goldberg is exploring the confusing history of the American use of Liberal.  For many, perhaps most, people in the modern usage, it is a label on progressive and Marxist derivative ideas.  For some, among whom I count myself, it means what is has always meant - natural rights, rule of law, equality before the law, due process, consent of the governed, etc.  

In the 1930s, progressives needed a new brand name because they had exhausted the p-word like an old horse that had no giddy-up left. So, led by FDR, they started using the word “liberal.” 

This also created an opportunity for the hard, communist-sympathizing left to adopt the “progressive” label for themselves. Tensions between progressives and liberals came to head in the mid-1940s when the Progressive Party, a quasi-communist front led by Henry Wallace, and liberal Democrats, centered around Americans for Democratic Action, went to war with each other. Regardless, the term liberal was not owned by left or right prior to the middle of the 20th century. Even folks like Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy used “liberal” positively into the early 1950s. But by the end of the decade, liberal became the widely accepted ideological signifier of the left. It wasn’t until the early 2000s when the term had become problematic that the word “progressive” was revived as the go-to-word for the mainstream left.  

Goldberg nicely summarizes what I view as one of the more vexing confusions.

One useful way to think about it: The opposite of liberalism isn’t conservatism. Historically, much (though not all) of what we call American political conservatism is an effort to conserve American liberalism. If you believe the government should be bound by the rules laid out in the Constitution (including the amendments!), then you are arguing for conserving (or preserving) American liberalism. If you believe in the right of consenting adults to commit capitalist acts—or to refuse to for reasons of conscience—you are for conserving liberalism. In short, the opposite of political and philosophical liberalism isn’t conservatism—it is illiberalism. And neither the left nor the right have a monopoly on illiberalism. 

Because we are a huge nation, geographically and by population, other than immigrants, it is hard for many native born Americans to understand just how repressive and authoritarian much of the world, even if they have nominally adopted the dressings of classical liberalism.  It is hard for Americans to appreciate just how radical, how revolutionary is the American system of Classical Liberalism embodied in a Constitutional Republic.  American Exceptionalism is alive and well.  

In American contemporary parlance, one can, and most people, knowingly or not, are both Conservative and Classically Liberal.  They are willing and wish to defend and nurture the Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal model and they reject the totalitarian and authoritarian derivatives of Marxism and the more traditional forms such as dictatorship.  

We are blessed by our history and heritage.  If only we could speak more clearly about it.  But the authoritarian and totalitarian tradition, having no track record of success in human flourishing, is completely dependent on continuingly redefining words to mean something different, often the opposite of what they originally did.  

Unknown title by Sven Ljungberg (Sweden, 1913-2010)

Unknown title by Sven Ljungberg (Sweden, 1913-2010)

Click to enlarge.

When we do science, we are pantheists

From Maxim and Reflections by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  

When we do science, we are pantheists;

when we do poetry, we are polytheists;

when we moralize, we are monotheists.