1st Circuit Establishes The “Harvard Says So” Doctrine

When Allan Bakke claimed he was the victim of reverse discrimination, the Supreme Court held that affirmative action, using race as one of many factors to achieve the overarching pedagogical good of having a diverse student body, a compelling state interest as was expressly held in Fischer, was not unlawful. Not because it was reparations for past discrimination, and not a quota.

At the time, it was highly controversial, enough so to cause a fractured plurality opinion, but the use of race as a consideration, among others, seemed on the right side of a line that prohibited discrimination based on race. Back then, the argument that discrimination favoring an “oppressed” race was itself a favored goal. The idea would have been considered ludicrous and unlawful. But Bakke never drew a real line between the use of race as a “plus” factor and unlawful discrimination. Continue reading →

The Last Vote Cast

Biden won. Get over it. And so it begins that credit for the win is claimed, and with that credit comes the demands.

One Black woman—historic, dope, progressive, passionate and competent, though she is—is not a sufficient salve for the festering wounds of American racism and sexism. . . .

Meanwhile Black communities will demand that she represent an actual progressive agenda on race and gender justice. In the end, her job as Vice-President is to support Biden in delivering on the policy promises he made, and to push him to do more. Her presence begins rather than ends a conversation about what America owes Black women.

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Toobin’s Fall From Grace

Conor Friedersdorf saw the issue as a spectacular confluence of errors combined with one disingenuous curiosity. Why, in this age of putative sexual freedom but for hysterical sexual repression, did an act of masturbation become the yank of death?

“When Occam’s Razor suggests someone humiliated himself through a combo of technological error, pandemic circumstances, bad judgment, & bad luck, it seems like we should react w/ empathy, politeness, & forgiveness, as we would want to be treated, rather than punitive mockery,” Atlantic staff writer Conor Friedersdorf tweeted. In a tweet, CNN’s Brian Stelter sympathetically clucked that Toobin had “been sidelined at a pivotal moment in the run-up to the presidential election” (despite CNN having hundreds of talking heads who could theoretically also serve Toobin’s role). Vox reporter German Lopez said in a now-deleted tweet, “Not sure someone getting caught doing something almost everyone does should be a national story”; he then, inexplicably, went on to compare the media’s treatment of Toobin to the issue of mass incarceration.

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When Reason Seemed Obvious

Since the rise of social justice as a religion, and accelerating after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, some folks have “awoken” more than others. My old pal, Radley Balko, is one them, having had an epiphany along the way. Once the Agitator, he surprisingly, yet not at all surprisingly, took his former roomies and colleagues at the libertarian magazine Reason to task. Radley, a long-time libertarian, had a beef.

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Dear Altice

At 5:16 am, the internet died. Not for you, perhaps, but at Casa de SJ. No reason. It was just gone, which wasn’t exactly shocking as it disappears three or four times a week, for an hour or so, regularly. It’s been this way since Altice USA purchased Cablevision in 2016.

They still call the service Optimum, but the name is aspirational. It’s not a matter of a cable company being callous toward its customers, as was the hallmark of Cablevision’s service, but that they no longer deliver. The downside of a connected world is when the company you pay to provide the connection simply fails to deliver regularly, there isn’t much to be done. Continue reading →

Covid And The Hangover

At the end of The Candidate, Robert Redford, playing Bill McKay, who wins an improbable election, turns to his campaign manager and asks the question, “What do we do now?” For many who spent the last four years obsessed with hating Trump, this isn’t their concern. After all, Trump lost, which was enough. For others, there’s still a nation to deal with, and among a great many concerns, we’re still in an again-increasing pandemic.

So Joe Biden, what do we do now? Continue reading →

The Spare

In Great Britain, they call it “an heir and a spare,” the queen’s duty to produce two boys, just in case something bad happens to the elder. We don’t birth our spares in America. We elect them, although we do so in tandem with the main event, so unless they’re Sarah Palin, so wholly unfit for office that the spare can be an unbearable weight on maybe the last statesman in our lifetime, they are more suffered than chosen.

The other big news of Joe Biden’s election is that we elected the first woman, and as it happens, a Woman of Color, that awful phrase that obscures the person behind the identity. Continue reading →

Short Take: Not “All Cops,” But This Cop

There are good cops. There are bad cops. They are often the same cop, but not always. But there is a deeper problem embedded in cop culture, dealing with what they perceive as society’s “mutts,” and it causes cops to perceive their fellow Americans, neighbors, human beings, as something less than human.

This has been thrown around as “systemic racism,” but it’s a worthless phrase that contributes nothing to finding a solution. It reinforces, instead, the “all cops are bastards” view, which is not only wrong and simplistic, but furthers the divide between police and the public they exist to serve. Is the objective to improve the relationship between police and the public? Is the objective to remind police that we’re all citizens, humans, neighbors? Continue reading →