Daily Archives: 22 November 2017

Affirmative Action Liberal Style

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve written before about the inherently racist and sexist nature of the Left’s “affirmative” action programs.  Here’s another example of that, courtesy of Harvard University.

The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the use of race in Harvard University’s admissions practices and has accused the university of failing to cooperate with the probe, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The Justice Department is investigating complaints that formed the basis of a federal civil lawsuit filed in 2014 in Boston, according to the documents. That suit alleges Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted.

Apparently, the only thing affirmative about such programs is the affirmation of the Left’s view of minorities (and of women, come to that) and their ability to compete on a level playing field, an affirmation first made appallingly plain by President Woodrow Wilson (D, and proud Progressive):

[S]egregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen [of the black press].

Wilson held this position because he considered blacks inherently inferior and so needed to be protected from competition he assumed they could not win.  Today, the Left takes the same view, using a different tool. Today, the Left’s “affirmative” action also assumes blacks (and women) cannot compete on a level playing field, so it gives, openly and blatantly, additional weight to race and gender—because without that additional weight blacks and women can’t compete.

In Harvard’s case, too, the “affirmative” action program also apparently affirms that Americans with Asian heritage are so inherently superior that they must be held back so that those inherently inferior blacks (and women, mind) can keep up.  It’s unimportant to the Left that this denies those held-back Americans their own equal opportunity right, the right as another Progressive icon, Theodore Roosevelt, put it at Osawatomie, Kansas, that

each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

Go figure.  And then go vote next fall and again in 2020.

Charlie Rose is…Embarrassed

Posted on by
Reply

Read the whole thing over at the Washington Post, it’s a long and shameful description of NLMSM icon Charlie Rose’s fall from grace—and a shocking between-the-lines read that Rose got to that position of grace in the first place—but I’m struck by a couple of comments in particular that Rose has made about these revelations and associated accusations.  The first is this gem:

I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times….

Wow.  How does Rose suppose his embarrassment compares to the humiliation and damage suffered by those eight (and more?) women he abused?  And his abuse was insensitive behavior, yet….

And this one:

I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings….

Now, as readers of my stuff know, and particularly from what I’ve written in this sort of scandal recently breaking, I’m a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty at trial, and Rose should be afforded the same consideration, but—again, wow.  “I did some of this stuff, but not all of it; and it was all a big misunderstanding, anyway!?”  This utterly destroyed what was otherwise a (structurally, anyway) sound apology.

Separately, but just as important, how is it possible that CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg TV were unaware of these abuses over that long stretch of time?  Because no formal complaints were made?  Who believes that?

That would be utter nonsense, unless we were to believe that those three teams of executives, every single one of them high-powered, highly intelligent, highly alert, fully grown adult humans were in fact just a couple of monkeys busily hearing no evil and seeing no evil.

Every organization has its rumor mill; these abuses were being talked about around the water coolers, in the wash rooms, in workers’ cubicles.  It boggles the sensibility to claim that these things didn’t eventually bubble up to “management” separately from formal complaints.  It boggles the sensibility yet further, that having heard these rumors, the executives were so lacking in initiative that they couldn’t look into them on their own initiative.

Furthermore, at least one knew from direct testimony.  Here’s Yvette Vega, Rose’s longtime executive producer, responding to one women with an explicit complaint:

That’s just Charlie being Charlie.

Vega thought everything was jake.  Guys are guys.  No worries, dearie.  Vega added, claiming to have learned better:

I should have stood up for them. I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.

Yewbetcha.  Now, what is Vega doing with her “regret?”  Besides bodice-ripping and wallowing in it, I mean.

And this, from an unnamed PBS spokeswoman:

PBS was shocked to learn today of these deeply disturbing allegations[.]

We’re shocked—shocked—to learn that inappropriate behavior is going on in this establishment.  Right.

Maybe it’s time that, in addition to holding the miscreants to account, we started firing and, yes, jailing, supervisors and executives who actively condoned, if not outright encouraged, these behaviors through their own conscious decisions to ignore rampant rumors and their deliberate choices to hide their heads in the sand and not investigate—whether to protect the abused employees or to clear the good names of other employees subjected to salacious, but baseless, rumors.

These guys shouldn’t be allowed to hide under their desks in their corner offices anymore.