Category Archives: culture

A Lesson About Discrimination

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A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about a teacher and a principal who taught a 1968 lesson about racial tolerance, using the equally arbritrary blue eyes-brown eyes discriminant as the teaching prop.

A Letter to the Editor response decried both the lesson and the pride in it that was conveyed in that article.

…one of the most disturbing and emotional things I had ever experienced. Teachers whom I once looked up to were subjecting me to irrational and arbitrary treatment based on my eye color. … My father … called my school’s leadership and received a complete apology.

How sad, that letter writer and his father missed the point of the lesson and missed precisely that “disturbing and emotional thing” that real victims of irrational and arbitrary treatment experience.

On the other hand, a commenter in the Letters thread asked this:

Does this same reasoning that this was child abuse apply to the teachers lecturing about “white privilege” and setting up situations to guilt trip children based on their skin color?

How sad, too, that that discrimination is actively practiced today.

Independent Monitor

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Recall Special Counselor Robert Mueller’s raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s offices and seizure of Cohen’s records, especially targeting communications between Cohen, the lawyer, and Trump, the client.

Cohen went in to Federal court Friday to try to get the subpoena under which the raid was conducted revoked and the confiscated materials returned.  Some discussion surrounding the events centers on the alleged ability of special monitors—a “taint team”—doing the sorting so as to isolate the privileged communications from the rest of the material sought under the warrant.  Furthermore, this team would, supposedly, conduct its sort before Mueller’s team has gone into the material they seized.

I’ll elide the blatant conflict of interest here centered on the taint team’s members being, at bottom, colleagues of the those who ran the raid and of Mueller: they’re FBI agents and DoJ lawyers.

I’m interested in a larger question that’s not being addressed.  Say Cohen wins his case and the subpoena is quashed and the seized materials returned to him in toto.  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team hasn’t already copied all of those seized materials and separated the copies from the originals?  That by itself, incidentally, would be a good practice with legitimately confiscated materials; reviewing the copies would ensure against accidentally damaging the originals and thereby destroying their legal provenance (as well as their utility for their rightful owners).  On what basis do we conclude that, on Cohen’s victory, those copies would be returned, also?  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team isn’t already reading and evaluating those copies of the seized materials?

We Don’t Get Silicon Valley

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That’s what Facebook MFWCI Mark Zuckerberg said in Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate.  On the other hand,

Senator Gary Peters (D, MI) asked whether Facebook is using the microphones of users’ phones to listen in to what they are doing and saying—a charge the company has denied repeatedly in recent months.

And given the level of integrity Facebook managers have shown over the years, of course we should believe their denials. Right.  Never mind that that’s an easily done exploit that hackers have done on and off (pardon the pun) for years.  Right along with playing untoward games with the video cameras on our laptops.

Here’s the kicker, though, from that Senate hearing:

Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley had one for Congress: Why don’t you get us?

The Senators’ questions often were ignorant, but that’s all they were: borne of an ignorance that’s easily corrected. Zuckerberg’s question, to the extent it’s accurately paraphrased and attributed, is a deeply cynical one that carefully misdirects the emphasis, borne as the question is from Silicon Valley’s deeply Leftist ideology—a slant Zuckerberg freely acknowledged a couple of times.

The more accurate question, the more serious question, is why doesn’t Silicon Valley get Americans?

A Gordian Knot Solution

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Sometimes blunt instruments are the appropriate ones.

DoJ, while the ink was still drying on its promise of transparency and cooperation with Congress regarding the House’s Intelligence Committee investigations, welched on that promise.  Regarding the electronic communication—memo—that launched the counterintelligence investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,

Chairman Devin Nunes (R, CA) received an official response from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.
…
Upon inspection, however, [the response] looks more like an effort to distract attention from Mr Boyd’s refusal even to mention Mr Nunes’ main request of FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

That main request was for a clean, unredacted copy of the document.  Instead, the key data in the doc, the data central to the Intel Committee’s investigation, were carefully redacted.  The excuse?  The data would give up the name of the nation whose intel service is cooperating with us.  Never mind that the New York Times already has published Australia as the source for the Papadopoulos claims and that ex-CIA Director John Brennan already has bragged about Great Britain’s relationship with the FBI.

Enough stonewalling.  President Donald Trump needs formally and explicitly to declassify the memo and order the FBI to release it.

Sure, he’ll take heat from the Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally. What else is new?

“White Privilege”

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In an op-ed for Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Zachary Wood, in the course of decrying “white privilege” as an excuse for not engaging in serious discussions to address racism, made this claim:

Does white privilege exist? Sure. If you’re white and you excel at academic or other cognitively demanding endeavors, for example, the light of your success is never dimmed by speculation about whether you benefited from affirmative action.

While his heart is in the right place, he misunderstands the particulars.  This isn’t white privilege (even assuming such a nonsensical thing could be taken seriously). The stigma attaching here is the result of the racism and sexism inherent in affirmative action programs.