Category Archives: culture

Race-Based Admissions at UNC

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The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is under fire and in the courts over its fundamentally racist admissions policy.  Plaintiffs are arguing that UNC violates Supreme Court rulings by giving too much weight to applicants’ race. The problem, though, is that any weight to race is too much, is fundamentally racist.  The Supreme Court’s rulings don’t go far enough to bar this behavior.  As things stand, though, the plaintiffs have a case IMNSHO.

UNC admissions readers frequently highlight the applicant’s race, citing one reader’s comment that even with an ACT score of 26, they should “give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.” Another reader wrote, “Stellar academics for a Native Amer/African Amer kid,” the plaintiffs said.
Steve Farmer, the university’s vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions, said in response: “Language in this exchange does not reflect Carolina’s values or our admissions process.”

Farmer is being disingenuous. The language clearly reflects both UNC’s values—emphasizing race as they do—and that language equally clearly reflects the fact that UNC does use race emphatically in its admissions process. The notes are right there on the applicants’ forms.

UNC says it has studied race-neutral approaches to admission for many years….

The only race-neutral approach possible for admission—or for any other purpose anywhere—is to not consider race at all. Any inclusion of race (or gender, or…), even as a “plus” factor, necessarily segregates in favor of one group at the direct expense of another.

If UNC truly wanted diversity, it would achieve it by admitting the best students regardless of race, or ethnicity, or gender.  The resulting student population would be a microcosm of the underlying population from which it was drawn.

If that didn’t produce a diversity reflecting the more general population, the correction would not be to play race games with high school graduates, it would be to commit university personnel and resources to improving the K-12 education so those high school grads would more closely reflect the underlying demographics.  And to press other universities and colleges to do the same.

But that would take actual work and dirty hands, not virtue signaling.

Talk and Sovereignty

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French President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on a “debating tour” of France in response to the uproar surrounding his gas tax increases, decision to impose from the center a “carbon free” economy on France, and the yellow vest demonstrations against first the tax increases and subsequently in broader opposition to that overweening centrality of governance.

And Macron laid bare his basic misunderstanding of his own political environment and of the nature of French sovereignty.  He’s already met with 600 mayors in Normandy, and there he laid out his basic tenets.

Macron said he was there to hear the concerns of the French and promised that the questions raised by the citizens would be given consideration.

Given consideration.  But no commitment actually to answer those questions satisfactorily to “the citizens.”  And this:

We won’t agree on everything, that’s normal, that’s democracy. But at least we’ll show we are a people who are not afraid to talk, exchange, and debate[.]

Talk, exchange, and debate.  Chit-chat, not action.  We’ll put on this show, though.

And who is this “we” that won’t agree on everything?  Disagreement among the citizens is, indeed, the stuff and core of democracy.  But government?  Government has nothing with which to agree or disagree; that’s a non sequitur.  Government has only to obey the instructions of its employers, those citizens.

Or does the French government (not only Macron, and not only the present administration), the head of a legal system one of whose basic tenets is that the burden is on a government-accused man to prove his innocence rather than on the government to prove his guilt, conceive that the people work for the government and not the other way around?

Not even Rousseau went that far.

A Telling Interview

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Progressive-Democrat from Texas, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke gave a wide-ranging, disjointed, somewhat confused interview to The Washington Post.  Here are some highlights.

Beto on the wall:

[It would] cut off access to the river, shrink the size of the United States and force the seizure of privately-held land.
[He] noted that most undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States in the past decade came not over the border but on visas that then expired.
WAPO: So what should be done to address visa overstays?
Beto: I don’t know[.]

What cut-off?  What river?  Walls aren’t contemplated, anymore, for the Rio Grande, just stepped up patrols and tech detection means.

Shrink the size of the US!?  Huh?

Seizure of privately-held land?  Has ol’ Beto read the Constitution?  The 5th Amendment has something to say about that.

Illegals come in via overstaying visas, so nothing should be done about curtailing their illegal entry across our border?  Apparently.  Because if a water pipe leaks over there, also, there’s no point in fixing it here and reducing the leaks’ flow.  All because he doesn’t know how to fix the leak over there.

O’Rourke insists the thorny immigration answers will come from everyday Americans. It’s an approach that puts off specifics that might define him or narrow his appeal in a presidential race….

Or, it’s an approach that allows Beto to virtue signal on the subject without offering anything concrete—or without exposing his ignorance on the matter, as his overstayed visa and his property seizure bits expose.

And this, larger, question:

Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?

Aside from our obvious lack of an empire—we don’t occupy anyone anywhere, we have no colonies, we have nothing of the trappings of empire—he’s badly mistaken about all of that.

This Progressive-Democrat is saying that the principles of limited government, individual liberty and responsibility, of morality are not universal, nor are they timeless.  He’s saying they’re matters of convenience and political expediency, and that convenience and expedience have evolved.

Watch out, and hold on to far more than your wallets when individual rights and obligations become what the men of government say they are and not what is permanently endowed in us by our Creator.

The Paranoid Hysteria of Progressive-Democrats

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Presumptive Progressive-Democratic Party primary candidate for President in 2020 Congressman Eric Swalwell (D, CA) (who already has touted the use of the government’s nuclear weapons against any who disagree with his wish to limit our ability to keep and bear arms) is a core example.  The question, he says,

has “shifted” from “whether the president is working with the Russians” to “what evidence exists that the president is not working with the Russians?”

Because guilty on proof by Swalwell’s say-so.

And

I think that an unwillingness to sit down with the special counsel demonstrates a continued effort to obstruct and delay the inevitable[.]

Because no man—not even a President—has an obligation to cooperate with an investigation of that man.  Oh, wait—yes, he does; Swalwell says so.

And

“now we know” the notes from the 2018 summit in Helsinki have been “effectively destroyed” by the president.

Because a newspaper said so.

If Donald Trump took them, as the Washington Post story states, then they’re effectively in the hands of the subject and, you know, I don’t trust Donald Trump to turn them over.  We actually know in the past that he’s known to just rip up important pieces of paper and destroy them—notes that are important for presidential records. There’s been reporting on that. So, I see it as we have no way of obtaining the physical evidence now other than getting it from Donald Trump, someone who’s been wholly uncooperative.

It’s been reported.  What more proof is needed?  Well, here’s more: Swalwell doesn’t trust the President.  There it is.  Never mind that not even in that newspaper evidentiary story was there a claim that Trump had destroyed anything.

Can our nation—already harried by the identity politics and divisiveness of the Progressive-Democratic Party—afford such irrationality in the White House?

Bigotry and the Left

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Nicole Wallace, of MSNBC, says there isn’t any on the Left.  She insists, regarding Congressman Steve King’s (R, IA) remarks, there is no analogue on the Left.

…this does not have a parallel on the left. It doesn’t. There isn’t. There isn’t a strain of racism on the left.

Never mind that the identity politics of the Left, especially with the segregationist bent inherent in it, is fundamentally racist.

Never mind the overt racism of the Left’s heroine Tamika Mallory and her praise of the anti-Semitic bigot Louis Farrakhan.

Never mind the Left’s routine labeling conservative Blacks as Uncle Toms.

Never mind the Left’s routine vilification of conservative women as voting the way their husbands tell them to, or of being worthy targets of rape.

Never mind the Left’s labeling any who disagree with them irredeemably deplorable.

Never mind the Left’s slur of Tea Partiers as tea baggers.

No, none of that is racist, or sexist, or anti-Semitic, or general, casual bigotry.