Category Archives: culture

A Thought on Fisher

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Justice Clarence Thomas has one.  Fisher v University of Texas at Austin was a case that wound up in front of the Supreme Court that involved a white woman who was denied admission as a result of UTA’s racial preference admissions system that explicitly deprecated some students and elevated others in the UTA admissions system solely on the basis of race, or so she claimed in her suit.

Monday, the Supremes took the easy way out and sent the case back to the Appellate Court on the legal technicality that that court had used the wrong criterion in reaching its decision upholding UTA’s race-based admissions system.

Justice Thomas, in his separate concurring opinion, had this to say concerning race-based discrimination, as cited in The Wall Street Journal:

While I find the theory advanced by the University to justify racial discrimination facially inadequate, I also believe that its use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity. I suspect that the University’s program is instead based on the benighted notion that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities….  The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.

Slaveholders argued that slavery was a “positive good” that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. See, e.g., Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837, in P. Finkelman, Defending Slavery 54, 58–59 (2003) (“Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually….”)

…A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. They argued, for example, that separate schools protected black children from racist white students and teachers. See, e.g., …Tr. of Oral Arg. in Bolling v. Sharpe, O.T. 1952, No. 413, p. 56 (“There was behind these [a]cts a kindly feeling [and] an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted….”)

…Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.

What he said.

Too Big to Handle

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I’ve written before about the morality of government welfare as a first resort.  Here’s a practical reason for cutting back: it’s too big to manage effectively.  Here are some failures from that too big to handle:

A postal worker who ran marathons found her race times improved after she began drawing federal disability checks for an alleged back injury.

Another disabled federal employee went scuba diving, skied in Switzerland and did flips on a trapeze.  She spent part of her $193,000 in disability payments on a boat named “Free Ride” before she was caught.

A Justice Department lawyer collected $90,000 in annual disability checks after claiming the stress of his job kept him off the job.  Apparently the cable TV show he began hosting while drawing disability pay wasn’t so stressful.

And

15,000 recipients are 66 or older.  Six of them are over the age of 100—well past retirement age.

The Federal government compounds this by being disinterested in controlling the failures and the resulting waste of taxpayer wealth being redistributed.

funding for all agencies—about $3 billion per year—is automatically appropriated and run through the Department of Labor.

And

the federal [disability] program does not require employing agencies to order a second opinion. The claimant can pick his own doctor.

If his claim is rejected, he can file for a different disability, as often as he likes.

And

The Department of Labor, which administers FECA for 70 federal entities, doesn’t track fraud referrals and convictions[.]

The program is too large to be properly controlled, and it needs drastic paring back for economic and legal reasons as well as moral.

Surveillance vs Freedom

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It is an either/or case.  We can’t have our individual freedoms with Government looking over our shoulders all the time.

To be sure, whenever men form a social compact led by a consensual government, we give up a small measure of our freedoms to that government to enable it to help us protect our freedoms.  This protection includes protecting for us that component of our freedom given over to our government for the purpose.  But that’s voluntary at the time of the compact’s formation, and it does not authorize the consensual government to arrogate ever more of our liberties—or of our responsibilities—to itself on its claimed need.

When Government does such usurping, even “for the greater good” (how Benthamite is that?), that can only come at the direct expense of individual liberty.  After a very low threshold, the trade-off becomes a zero-sum game.

“Surveillance” foiled a train plot, says an intel official.  I’ll elide here the questionable circumstances of this claim by a carefully anonymous official.*

Tim Murphy, a former No. 2 official at the FBI, says the programs [emphasis added]

have been successful in connecting the dots [to prevent attacks].  I can positively say, because of programs like this, people were identified in this country with terrorist ties, and we were able to stop possible attacks[.]

(Never mind that this logic is invalid, in the minds of many, when used to argue against gun control laws.)

On the other hand, alert citizens foiled a bomb plot in New York City.  Courageous citizens foiled an airliner-as-bomb attack on the White House.  Incompetence foiled an airliner bomb plot over Detroit.

We’ve also seen, further, that “surveillance” has been used to make direct attacks on individual Americans and groups who disagree with the present administration.  “Surveillance” has been used to directly and overtly attack our free press and individual members of that facility.  “Surveillance” also has been used to turn over personal information of American individuals and groups to foreign countries—even when the citizens or groups are wholly unrelated to the subject of the…investigation…but are simply caught in the Government’s generalized dragnet:

[T]he British government has also been secretly gathering intelligence from US Internet companies via the US National Security Agency data-mining project.

President Barack Obama has insisted this broad surveillance isn’t Big Brother in action, but then he said,

[T]he modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers and duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net it was worth us doing[.]

Phone numbers without names is an utterly disingenuous claim to make.  It’s child’s play to attach a name to a number after the number has been collected.  See White Pages, for instance, and Get Human, and Spokeo.  Those are just some of the publicly available sources.

Next, how do we know Government isn’t “looking at content?”  The process is secret.  Further, we know Government is looking at content through PRISM; that’s the purpose of that blanket surveillance.

As even The New York Times is beginning to figure out,

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.

With the demonstrated dishonesty of the present administration (in truth, the dishonesty isn’t unique to this administration—which emphasizes the danger—this one’s transgressions are just the present and most publicized ones), how is it possible to accept Government assurances of “trust us?”

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who declassified information about the programs this past week so he could defend their use, warned: “Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.”

That’s certainly a risk we run in an open, and so free, society.  The obverse, however, of keeping such invasive programs secret and away from the public’s discourse is a far more terrible risk to our security.

Again: there is no balancing our individual liberties with our security.  Additionally, the Constitution doesn’t protect our liberties “except when Government asserts a greater need.”  We have no security without our liberties.  There is a need for surveillance, under certain closely specified conditions; however, there cannot be surveillance and freedom under Obama’s cynical “trust us” conditions.

 

* This official is behaving suspiciously along two dimensions: he’s making a “trust government” claim, and he’s saying “trust me” while telling us things he’s not authorized to tell us.  On what basis do we believe him?

The Left’s Racism

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…is getting ever more blatant.

Karen Carter Peterson, Chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party and Louisiana State Senator, had this to say last week about the ongoing opposition to Obamacare:

I have talked to so many members both in the House and the Senate, and you know what?  You ready?  You ready?  What it comes down to?  It’s not about how many federal dollars we can receive, it’s not about that.  You ready?  It’s about race.  I know nobody wants to talk about that.  It’s about the race of this African-American president.

It’s not possible, you see, to criticize a policy when its proponent is black—that must be racism.  It’s not possible to criticize the man who constantly proposes such policies when the man is black.  That must be a racist criticism.

Peterson then defended her remarks:

To be clear, I didn’t call any person “racist.”  Rather, I was simply relaying the truth about conversations I’ve had with my colleagues and the factors they considered on the expansion of Medicaid.

Saying a criticism is only about race isn’t to say the criticism is racist.  No, not at all.

This from the Party of Jim Crow.

It’s Time

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…to fire some school “leadership.”

Just a few short weeks ago the Kountze High School Cheerleaders and all of America celebrated when Liberty Institute secured a victory in the famous Bible Banner Case.

But now, joining a host of radical left groups like the ACLU and the extremist Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Kountze ISD wants to eliminate the free speech rights of its students.

Faith.  Jesus Christ.  Hope.  Love—these are dirty words for students in Kountze, Texas.

Maybe not for the students, but certainly for the Kountze ISD School Board.  Or maybe not even for them, maybe joining the appeal is a measure of their timidity in the face of FFRF or ACLU pressure.

In the end, though, this assault on our religious freedom—which includes both clauses [emphasis added]

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

—must be stopped.  Groups like FFRF actively wish to deny us that second freedom—to freely exercise our religion, demanding that the only religion to be allowed to be freely exercised is the religion of atheism.

And a primary way of stopping the attack must include firing leadership that is too timid to defend the freedom or that actually agrees with the FFRFs of the country that such a freedom cannot be had.

The Kountze ISD school board must be replaced.  En masse.  Right away.