Category Archives: morality

College Entrance Discrimination

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of racial discrimination, at least as practiced by Harvard, in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case.

If the plaintiffs…win, you can bet that elite college- and graduate-admissions offices around the country will establish workarounds to assure that opportunities remain for admittance of significant numbers of underrepresented minorities.

Therefore, he asserts,

The justices would be wise to take a pass on the Harvard case, or to affirm the lower courts’ decisions.

Which decisions upheld Harvard’s practice of racial discrimination for admission to its ivy-coated halls.

Harvard, to the letter writer’s first plaint, already uses “workarounds”—opaque and obscure criteria for assessing admissions “essays” and “descriptions of what this means to me” for starters—in selecting entrants on the basis of race while nonselecting other entrants on the basis of race.

Were the letter writer serious, he’d stop demanding free passes for the “underrepresented minorities” solely on the basis of their under-representation; that’s just racism under another guise. They’re underrepresented because they’re not qualified.

The solution is not free passes at the late date of college admissions applications, it’s getting these high school “graduates” actually educated and qualified.

More importantly, the solution is working to correct the K-12 systems and broken families that are the cause of unqualified-ness. But that takes actual work, and it’ll be a generational struggle to correct the ills so deeply embedded in what we’re pleased to call our education system. That solution is not the feel-good quick fix of which the Left is so enamored.

Another letter writer, however, takes a markedly differ view of the matter.

It [The Supreme Court] ought to take this case and apply strict scrutiny to the rationales advanced to justify treating some students more favorably than others merely on account of their ancestry.

But that doesn’t go far enough. As Chief Justice John Roberts already has said, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. On this, he’s right.

There is no justification for discriminating on “account of ancestry.” No more strict scrutiny; end the use of race as a discriminant, no matter how far down the list of selection criteria. Any—any—use of race as a selection criterion is rank racism.

Full stop.

Privacy—and Trust

Posted on by
Reply

Parents of children in the People’s Republic of China have a new “aid.”

ByteDance is peddling a “study lamp” that lets teachers and parents constantly monitor children, ostensibly while the children are doing their schoolwork.

The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.

What else, though, is ByteDance monitoring, what other data is ByteDance collecting about the kids, the things they’re doing, with whom they’re doing it, parents’ handling of their kids? And passing it on to the PRC’s intelligence community under that 2017 law?

There’s also the question of trust. Not trust in Big Brother—or Uncle Xi—but trust between children and parents, and the ability of children to trust at all. What message are parents sending to their own children when the parents—and other authority figures, known to the children to be there at the parents’ request—insist on being, constantly and immediately, over the kids’ shoulders to be sure those kids are behaving properly? That the kids are fundamentally untrustworthy, maybe? That they’re unworthy in some way?

And there’s the creation of dependency on instant answers.

Some Chinese media outlets and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children as they study, warning that the lamp would make children accustomed to seeking easy answers from technology.

And what brave new world for us when ByteDance brings these…devices…to America?

Biden, Planned Parenthood, and Abortion

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden’s (D) fleshed out budget proposal will have an indication of his fiscal attitude toward abortion and taxpayer dollars.

It’s an important indication, too, as Melanie Newman, Senior Vice President of Communications and Culture for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was cited in the article as noting:

removing the [Hyde] amendment from the budget “would send a clear signal from the president of the United States that our federal laws should support everyone’s ability to access comprehensive healthcare services, including safe, legal abortion.”

But what about the babies’ ability to have access to comprehensive healthcare services, including safe, legal birth, and life?

Oh, wait—babies don’t vote.

Nor do babies donate to Planned Parenthood.

Race as a Discriminant of Merit

Posted on by
Reply

A Wall Street Journal editorial gets at this as the editors urge the Supreme Court to take up Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, a case in which Harvard uses race explicitly as a meritorious discriminant for admission.

Harvard personnel actually insist they aren’t discriminating against Americans of Asian descent; they’re merely favoring Americans with black or brown skin. Anyone not chewing the halls’ ivy can see the obvious disingenuousness of that claim; the WSJ‘s editors are entirely correct to push the Court to take up the case.

The larger stakes are whether the Supreme Court will wink as America divides in ways that have proved so destructive in the past.

And

In America today the principle that drove the civil-rights movement—equality for all—is fast giving way to the view that race must be a dominant factor in every decision from college admission to eligibility for a federal farm program to the makeup of corporate boards to who gets priority for a Covid vaccine.

But then the editors wander astray.

It is true that the racial discrimination alleged in Harvard isn’t the same as that of the Jim Crow South. In that era federal government intervention was required to break the state-enforced discrimination against black Americans. Race preferences were rooted then in the false claim of African-American inferiority.
No one thinks Harvard is discriminating because of animosity toward Asian-Americans, much less because it believes they are inferior.

The discrimination is so closely related, though, as to be a conjoined Siamese twin of Jim Crow. Harvard management personnel are setting race-based preference in favor of blacks, rather than against them, precisely because those school managers still believe the claim of African-American inferiority; the school’s management personnel still believe[] [blacks] are inferior.

Law and Order Candidates

Posted on by
Reply

Call up into your memories, no matter the pain, of the rioting, looting, arson, murders all last summer in Progressive-Democrat-run jurisdictions: Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, New York City, Atlanta, and on and on.

Recall the move by those same Progressive-Democrats, and increasingly by their colleagues in other jurisdictions, to defund the police, to reduce the number of police on the payroll, to “reimagine” policing. And the ensuing rise in murders in those cities.

Especially pertinent to that last, is the newly elected St Louis Mayor, Tishaura Jones (D), coming into office with an ongoing rise in homicides to the highest rate in 50 years. Her answer to that rise?

[D]efund the city’s police budget by $4 million and to eliminate nearly 100 vacant officer positions.

Now we get the Progressive-Democrat Left making clear that they want even more of this. Here’s Ezra Klein, Left journalist, making that desire explicit:

Klein posted several examples of Democrats facing political hurdles over an increase in crime and then concluded the backlash could help Trump win back the Oval Office in 2024, should he run again.
“The politics of this could really tip, and not just in cities—if these numbers keep getting worse, then as with Nixon and Reagan in the ’70s and ’80s, it could bring ‘law and order’ conservatives (including Trump) back to power in 2024[.]”

Klein tried to disguise his—the Left’s—fear of law and order as a fear of the return of authoritarianism and outright racism. He’s misleading with that, given that it’s the Progressive-Democrats who ruled by a “phone and a pen,” and today by unilateral, don’t want to negotiate with Republicans, Party fiat.

Klein also ignored, in his pious disguise, the openly racist policies of the Left, from their selection criteria for school admission that use race (and gender), their critical race “theory,” their identity politics.

Klein also ignored, particularly regarding policing, the murders of black police officers by Party’s supporters antifa and BLM during those riots and lootings, and the black-on-black homicide rates, the latter which don’t have the cachet of race that the Left so desperately need for their narrative.

Klein also carefully ignored Party icons like Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) actively inciting riot and trying to intimidate the jury in the Chauvin murder trial before the jury was sequestered.

Racism and authoritarianism, indeed.

Thus, the left’s fear: we’ll be faced with law and order candidates in 2022 and 2024.

The horror.