House of Eratosthenes

In the education case of Fisher v. University of Texas, at least four Supreme Court justices appear ready to strike down affirmative action.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a pivotal test of affirmative action in education, will hear arguments on December 9 for the second time that Abigail Noel Fisher was discriminated against by the University of Texas.

A blanket ruling outlawing racial and ethnic preferences entirely would follow Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2007 dictum, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” from the opinion in the 4-1-4 vote case of Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.

The Court at the time found the public high school district’s racial tiebreaker plan unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas has steadfastly supported a ban on affirmative action, but swing voter Justice Anthony Kennedy has consistently upheld the validity of the theory of affirmative action, even if he has voted to strike down specific practices as unconstitutional.

I don’t know why Justice Kennedy, or anybody else, upholds “the validity of the theory” now or at any other time. It is a so-called “theory” that unequal treatment is, when the rubber meets the road, equal treatment; it is a theory that calls for opposites to become equivalents. Any argument that persuades toward acceptance of such a theory, if effective, you’d better bottle that stuff quick and keep it around for a good long time — because that could be applied to any and all premises that are wrong, no matter how wrong they are. Such an argument, in seeking to assert that a thing is the opposite of itself, seeks to triumph against the ultimate test of delusive, mistaken arguments.

Or rather, you’ll notice, in practice it doesn’t seek any such thing; like the mold that covers your bread, it confines its existence to a picky sub-spectrum of environments in which it can hope to survive. High courts, committees, and other adjudicating bodies in some position to accurately anticipate the outcome of what limited avenues of appeal there may be, hiding behind the lectern of “Our Finding Is.” Or, in situations in which the avenues of appeal are not so limited, something more like “I/We Feel”:

Not only I don’t find affirmative action unconstitutional, I believe it’s the proper action a government should take in case there are severe disproportions in society. We can argue if present general social status of certain ethnicities is or is not a consequence resulting from slavery and oppression in the past, but the fact is both slavery and oppression took place. Let’s consider affirmative action a form of repatriation.

That’s where the argument is stated, and not only does it fail to directly address the question of “does Affirmative Action Violate the 14th Amendment?” with anything other than a flat, unreasoned “no” — it fails to address the opposing argument, that there is in fact a violation here:

Well, as you know the 14th Amendment says very clearly that “no state shall deny any person equal protection under the law.” That means that all laws passed by the 50 states have to apply to everyone, equally. Affirmative Action gives a racial preference to some Americans in hiring, in school admissions and other competitive areas. If an individual American gets a preference, then he or she is not being treated equally with everyone else. It’s simple as that.

This nets six votes, to zero for the argument of “let’s consider it a form of repatriation.” But of course six votes is not many, and there are many environments, some natural, some constructed artificially, in which it could go the other way.

Supporters of Affirmative Action, I notice, fail to see their own argument as what it is: Suspension, and therefore betrayal, of the written code to which unwavering fidelity had already been pledged. The structure of the argument is “Yeah, yeah, I know, the Constitution says that…but I want to appear compassionate. THEREFORE I FIND that this preference does not violate the written word (that it would otherwise, undeniably, be violating).” Like I said: If this stuff works, you’d better bottle it, because if it can work here it can work anywhere.

Losing argument goes on to say: “You made several very valid points where I couldn’t agree with your more. I’ll get into that later. Firstly, let me say I understand your frustration…”

Hoo, boy. Anybody ever talk with a bureaucrat, one who’s clearly in the wrong, before? They do that a lot. You point out, what you’ve just stated is the wrong answer, it’s this simple — up is up, down is down…and they come back with “I understand your frustration” as if what you just stated is feeling, not fact. Might as well say “I understand your frustration and now I’m going to add to it.” Except they seem to have missed, what you just explained was not frustration. They’re being taught how to do that, I suppose.

Anyway, getting back to the main article, there’s another passage that is not quite so much frustrating, as despairing:

The arch-supporter of affirmative action on the Supreme Court is expected to be Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a child of Puerto Rican immigrants who won acceptance and a full scholarship to Princeton based at least partially on affirmative action. In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, she stated: “Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”

To those who understand how the world, and the people in it, actually work — it inspires despair. The sentence clearly articulates exactly what the problem is that the policy is supposed to solve. First flaw in her reasoning is, the problem is unworkable because it is unmeasurable, it’s proggie leftists announcing their grievances in passive voice, yet again, no identifiable individual or group engaging in the incorrect behavior. So you can proclaim “It’s still happening” until the sun goes nova, and beyond…which is kind of the point. “Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action” — if you need a coalition to defend it, you probably intend to keep the coalition around, justifying its own existence with all sorts of legalistic hooey, forever. And why do you need a coalition to defend it, anyway? I said someone should bottle up the infinitely effective, wrong arguments, for use later, and it looks like someone did exactly that.

The second, and far greater, flaw: Affirmative Action inspires these “snickers,” in no small measure. And it’s rather useless to blame those who do the snickering. Whenever anybody of any national origin, sex preference or skin color is elevated to a position of any sort of power, it goes without saying they’re going to have to be making some decisions that someone else will not respect. Have we collectively lost sight of that point? There seem to be an awful lot of people with power, great and small, nowadays who have it on their minds “Now I have power, everyone has to respect me” — that isn’t the way it works, not even close. There will always be people who disrespect you because you have some sort of power. Because you can make your decisions stand when they think, for whatever reason, those decisions should not stand.

Affirmative Action creates an environment in which, when the white guys do this, dissenters continue to wonder endlessly “How the heck did that fuckwit get this job, anyway?” — and when someone of a different demographic does exactly the same thing, the unidentifiable dissenters mutter to themselves “Oh…I see, I get it now.” Since there always will be dissenters, no matter what decision is being made or what type of human is making it, the Sotomayor-supported solution works against the grain of the Sotomayor-stated problem.

I wonder if all of this has anything to do with the original SCOTUS reference to Affirmative Action somehow being “reinterpreted” to mean EXACTLY it’s opposite?
Now, about title IX, and “Dear Colleague….”
- CaptDMO | 12/07/2015 @ 07:30
I remember when I was working on my first degree, the ROTC ran an ad in the school newspaper that said the military was desperate for doctors. They were accepting doctors who were graduating soon with the following GPA’s: Black 2.0, “All other minorities” 2.5, Asians 3.0 and Whites 3.5.

In addition to being BLATANTLY insulting…if you were seeing that ad and needing surgery soon…would you take the individual with a 70% success rate or the individual with a 95% success rate? I can’t believe that NO ONE brought up the racism inherent in the ad at the time (1998).
- P_Ang | 12/07/2015 @ 13:04
At the risk of — yet again– being that boring, pedantic, “it all comes back to Marx” guy….

…this “theory” business kinda all comes back to Marx.

I write this as a public service, since I assume that most of your readership was smart enough to stay out of graduate school. Guys like the Supremes and their lefty enablers weren’t, though, and so when they use particular items of jargon, it means something vastly different from what the rest of us mean.

“Theory,” to us, means something like “a testable hypothesis” — it’s my theory that if I buy that girl a drink, she’ll give me her phone number. Drink bought, phone number scribbled on cocktail napkin, theory proven. To the academic Left, though, “theory” means something like “an organizing principle in lieu of reality.” Not just “the way we wish the world worked,” but something like “the policies and procedures manual for ignoring any facts which invalidate the glorious Five Year Plan.” Guys like Lenin and (especially) Mao Zedong were always going on about the need for “theory,” and how the peasants’ biggest problem was “lack of theory.”

Mao even came up with a special term for it — taking the peasantry’s inchoate socialist feelings, putting them in slogan form, and forcing them back on the peasants is called “the mass line.” Exactly like they do in college seminars — professors take spoiled suburban kids’ frustration at their parents, tell them it’s all “capitalism’s” fault, and turn out a whole new generation of little Maoists.

And that’s the system in which the Sotomayors have marinated all their lives, and in which they operate so successfully. That’s how Kennedy can agree with the theory but disagree with the practice — theory and practice* have no real relationship to each other, and theory always triumphs… if you want to avoid the gulag, or at least get an A on your Protest Studies term paper.

*[FYI, if you want bonus pretentious points — or if you want to smoke out a true university-trained leftist of the old school — the word you want to listen for is “praxis.” Not practice, praxis. They sound the same — by design, I’m sure — but they’re worlds apart. “Practice” is always superseded by theory in commie-land; “praxis” is what actually happens. So when you hear some leftie talking about “socialist praxis,” they’re making excuses for why the beloved democratic mass movement of democracy and freedom had to torture another dissident to death. “Praxis” is always making lamentable errors like that].
- Severian | 12/08/2015 @ 06:48
[…] The “Hoover Vac” Immigration Policy The Brain-Damaged Case for Progressive Taxation Bad Theory Environments Who’s Got the Database? “Republican Uncle” “Deserves to be […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/30/2015 @ 09:14

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Monday, December 7th, 2015