Category Archives: morality

Discrimination

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The discrimination suit against Harvard is underway, and the first day produced some interesting claims.

William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s admissions dean since 1986, defended the policy [of favoring some applicants over others on the basis of race] by saying the letters to white students in more rural states help the school recruit from areas where students may be less aware of Harvard.

This is nonsense. If student awareness were the goal, instead of sending letters to favored individuals, Harvard would advertise, would communicate with the junior high schools and high schools of those rural areas.

Race is never the reason a student is admitted or rejected from Harvard, he [William Lee, a WilmerHale partner representing Harvard] said, adding the school considers race as one of many factors, in line with Supreme Court precedents.

This is disingenuous at best. If race is never a reason, it wouldn’t be missed if it were eliminated from consideration.

In addition, there is a clear designed-in disparate impact at work here, but since it’s not an impact against a favored group of Americans, it’s not discussed.

A Quality of Education

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A Harvard junior has had the effrontery to write an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that’s critical of Harvard and its admission practice.  In the piece, he cited a criticism he gets when he’s rude enough to comment on campus.

How can you be against affirmative action? That’s racist[.]

What a sad commentary this is on the quality of education available at our colleges and universities, especially one that pretends to superiority. Plainly, Harvard, et al., are teaching nothing of logic or history, only bald ideology. Any program that carries race (and gender, as affirmative action programs do) as criteria for admission, or any other gain, is by design racist (and sexist). And, this racist and sexist design was built in at the origin of affirmative action programs, including Harvard’s.

Mao Lives

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The People’s Republic of China, the home of rule by law (not rule of law), has retroactively legalized its “internment” camps, which the government is using to jail reeducate recalcitrant Muslims in its western province of Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities in the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang on Wednesday revised legislation to permit the use of “education and training centers” to combat religious extremism.

So far—so far, mind you—a million Muslims are…housed…in those camps.

The camps are strongly reminiscent of those of President Xi Jinping’s early predecessor, Mao Tse-tung.  Mao sent 16-18 million children and millions more adults to his “reeducation” camps.

Xi is off to a good start.

Roberts’ Court

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Aside from the misnomer of the title, which is implied by the thrust of a piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal centered on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and the hoo-raw surrounding that, Chief Justice John Roberts has a problem with the perception of the Supreme Court—according to Brent Kendall and Jess Bravin, the authors of the piece.

“We don’t work as Democrats or Republicans, and I think it’s a very unfortunate perception that the public might get from the confirmation process,” CJ Roberts…2016.

The Court can’t worry about perceptions, though.  It can—should—only rule on what the Constitution or law actually says.

“Every single one of us has an obligation to think about what it is that provides the court with its legitimacy, to think about how we can be not so politically divided as some of the other political institutions in the nation,” Justice Elena Kagan said[.]

No.  What provides the court with its legitimacy is its rulings based on the text of the Constitution or the law. A Justice’s empathy, or the particular wisdom of Latinas, or the concept that a judge should take account of…the climate of an era, have no place on the bench. Nor does an automatic reach for the middle.

The handling of any of those things—and they are important (as are the social climate generally; the wisdom of non-Latinas, also; empathy)—can only be done politically, not judicially.

The Party of…Something

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The editors of the Wall Street Journal warned us last Sunday to be heads up: the Progressive-Democrats are not going to let this Kavanaugh thing go, even now that the confirmation is done.  Shamefully, neither are they going to let Dr Christine Blasey Ford go.

The Minority Leader made clear that Democrats are going to use accuser Christine Blasey Ford as a campaign prop from here to November and beyond.

Schumer, Feinstein, Hirono, Gillibrand, Durbin, Spartacus—all of these, and each of them, have abused Dr Ford nearly as badly as did her unknown assailant all those decades ago.  So has nearly every member of the Progressive-Democrat Party up for reelection this cycle.

And they intend to go on abusing her.

Dr Ford isn’t an abused woman in these Progressive-Democrats’ eyes; she isn’t even a human being. She’s just an inanimate gear for the Progressive-Democrat vote creation machine. She has expressed her desire to go back to her private life and her anonymity; these Progressive-Democrats won’t even let her do that.

The Party is utterly despicable.