Unsettled Law

Before you begin your thinkpiece, the Supreme Court DID NOT strike down Affirmative Action

Admission preferences for legacies, donors, employee families and special recommendations are still allowed

The Court struck down Affirmative Action For everyone except WHITE PEOPLE

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) June 29, 2023

Thanks for the heads up, Michael.

Pretty weird to be out again wanting to defend an institution when I don't even think it should exist—or maybe I just think it should be nationalized, like Oxford and Cambridge, except for the law school and business school, those have to go. But it's not really about Harvard, anyway. North Carolina is probably a much more important example, because what will happen there is that Black and Latin people will have less chance to go to Chapel Hill and fall into the less prestigious campuses of the state's system, where they will be less likely to graduate, less likely to go on to postgraduate studies, and overall make less money in the course of their careers. While the white and presumable Asian students who replace them in Chapel Hill won't actually do any better there than they would have done at Asheville or Wake Forest or wherever, because this is what my man Zachary Bleemer found when he looked at the corresponding situation at the University of California when they abandoned affirmative action after a state referendum, Prop 209, ordered them to:

Today in Conservatives Are Too Emotional

 

Image by Ben Allan/Political Quarterly UK.

Listen, I know it's a huge challenge to ask a conservative to think mathematically, but just make an effort for once. The reason it's called "affirmative action" is that it's not negative. It doesn't take anything away from anybody. https://t.co/w4mRTykC7Q

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 8, 2023

For the Record: Affirmative Action

InterTribal Youth/Young Native Scholars visiting UC San Diego and a La Jolla beach, July 2014, via UCSD News. 

That is, they think it's a way of giving a leg up to non-white people who aren't as good as white people. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Affirmative action is meant to find talented people at all levels whose talent is masked by systemic discrimination

— Swami Vivi-ka-Newman (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2020

second-rate white people get an advantage over talented minority members, and it's not only unfair but bad for society as a whole. Affirmative action is meant to correct for those biases and make things better.

— Swami Vivi-ka-Newman (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2020

Warren again

Undated map, via..

Jordan wrote, in comments (read the whole thing).

This whole thing confounds me terribly, because the only operative question, the only one that means anything at all, is Should Warren have done this, and as far as I'm concerned the answer is a blindingly obvious Yes, but according to nearly everyone on the Left and the Right, the answer is No....

In terms of political expediency I don't even know where to start. She got Trump on the defensive, rocking back and sputtering, and I don't understand why people still don't understand how difficult and important that is.

I wonder. My first response was delight, and then I got perturbed by the Cherokee Nation statement, and more of that on NPR in the morning, and then I started working through it, as reported on Tuesday, and got a kind of sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing, and that exhaustion that gets at us all lately all the time, like what's the point. I agree that she absolutely did the right thing, and it's great that the test came out with dispositive evidence, but for one thing it's not going to stop them, the smarter ones have just been moving the goalposts all week.

The latest (a scandal that was raised by Boston radio personality Howie Carr in 2012, so "latest" is likely not the right word—my version, Britlaundered from Breitbart, is that of the Daily Mail, but wingnuts have been trotting it out for a revival all week) is that a couple of the recipes published under Warren's name in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook in 1984 turned out to have been lifted, from old Pierre Franey's New York Times column in 1979, credited to Henri Soule of Le Pavillon, which makes a lot of sense, given that they're both rather elegant recipes featuring crab, and the Cherokee, whose ancestral homeland was the Great Smoky Mountains before they were driven west, can't have had a big cultural affinity with crab, which comes, you know, from the sea.

Stupid Economist Tricks: Hurricane Pricing

Image via The Pediatric Insider.

On September 5 professional economist Tyler Cowen was explaining over at Bloomberg (via Edroso's Twitter feed) about how

Price Gouging Can Be a Type of Hurricane Aid

Higher prices can help resources get to the people who need them most.

And on September 6 we began hearing about airlines dealing with the advent of Irma by jacking prices up almost exactly 900%:

Totally unacceptable, a $358 flight from Miami to NYC went up to $3578. Why should expect anything decent from these airlines??? F ing RATS! https://t.co/rjdH6J0yOL

— Joseph Pep Nodarse (@joerileyhudson) September 6, 2017

Because who needs a flight out of Miami most? The one who can afford to pay $3600 for the privilege. By Paul Ryan's famous definition of freedom—

Sessions of sweet silent thought

Image via.

Some small encouragement in the story on the Sessions Justice Department push to get rid of affirmative action in college admissions once for all, in Charlie Savage's report:

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

In the first place, the obvious suggestion, that Sessions can't trust the career personnel to do what he wants; not necessarily because they're left, but just because they're professional; Sessions hasn't managed to bleed all the honesty out of DOJ, the way Tillerson seems to have blown the expertise out of State.

The tale of little white Rambo

Update (error corrected, h/t Tim)

"Funny attractive Mr. Suicide bathtub plug".

Somebody dropped an annoying turd in the comments today, and here is the story.

Last May blogger Feministconservative, a PhD candidate in political science at an unnamed university, got her degree and then took a summer job at the university's admissions office.

I must say it doesn't look like a very substantial dissertation, and I wouldn't be too impressed with the school that gave her a degree for it, or too surprised if it [jump]