As I watch and read political stuff, it occurs to me that the much-remarked polarization of politics is fueled by paranoia on both sides. (Not that they’re not out to get one another, of course.)
The Left fears any rollback of the sexual revolution, to be sure, and seemingly fears the loss of things like “affirmative action” and the ability of the feds to subjugate the south forever under the Voting Rights Act. Those remedial measures are at risk precisely because they seem to have worked their intended remedies, and their rationales are fading into historical memory. But how can The Left feel righteous if they’re not protecting the oppressed from the forces of evil and reaction, conveniently concentrated in the region of the country that once tried to secede in defense of its right to maintain slavery?
The Right seems to fear all sorts of things, including redistributionism in a time when the “rich” can’t afford it. I got a turgid instance of this fear by e-mail from an old friend recently. It was exceedingly annoying in its repetition of “the people who get free stuff” and “the people who pay for free stuff,” and in its formatting, which put just one or two words on each line, 2/3 or the way across the page from the left margin. I guess crackpots think funky formatting makes crackpottery look like poetry.
Meanwhile, back at the funny farm, an acquaintance of mine is marveling at the eloquence – yes, the eloquence – of this screed from Freedom Outposts (which didn’t have funky formatting, by the way):
- Are you BLEEPING kidding me?
- We are slowly being subjugated, bit by bit, little by little.
- today that betrayal has reared its ugly hydra-head once again in a monstrosity that lays over anything done so far.
- A storm is coming people, and it is dark and terrible; in fact, it is knocking at your doorstep as you read this.
- You are standing upon a cliff, and the tide is coming to wash you away.
Ya gotta love the ads on the page, too – a nice litmus test for whether an article is aimed at the incorriglbly gullible.
James Taranto editorializes on an affirmative action case argument in the U.S. Supreme Court:
At the beginning of her oral argument, Driver had this exchange with Justice Antonin Scalia:
Driver: We ask this Court to uphold the Sixth Circuit decision to reaffirm the doctrine that’s expressed in Hunter-Seattle, and to bring the 14th Amendment back to its original purpose and meaning, which is to protect minority rights against a white majority, which did not occur in this case.
Scalia: My goodness, I thought we’ve–we’ve held that the 14th Amendment protects all races. I mean, that was the argument in the early years, that it protected only–only the blacks. But I thought we rejected that. You–you say now that we have to proceed as though its purpose is not to protect whites, only to protect minorities?
Driver: I think it is–it’s a measure that’s an antidiscrimination measure.
Scalia: Right.
Driver: And it’s a measure in which the question of discrimination is determined not just by–by power, by who has privilege in this society, and those minorities that are oppressed, be they religious or racial, need protection from a more privileged majority.
Scalia: And unless that exists, the 14th Amendment is not violated; is that right? So if you have a banding together of various minority groups who discriminate against–against whites, that’s okay?
Driver: I think that–
Scalia: Do you have any case of ours that propounds that view of the 14th Amendment, that it protects only minorities? Any case?
Driver: No case of yours.
…
[W]hile Driver’s position is far outside the legal mainstream, it is well accepted within academia. It is the basis for the diversity industry, which seeks to counter so-called white privilege …
One oddity of the Driver-Scalia exchange is that while he is often identified as a constitutional “originalist”–one who believes constitutional provisions should be understood as they were at the time they were ratified–it is she who purports to be arguing for an originalist interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.
That circle is easily enough squared: Scalia is also a “textualist,” meaning he looks to the plain language of the Constitution rather than hunting for “emanations” and “penumbras.” The Driver interpretation of “equal protection” as mandating unequal treatment is so at war with the plain meaning of the text as to be Orwellian.
(Emphasis added)
Elsewhere on the Wall Street Journal Opinion page:
Is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission above the law? That’s the extraordinary claim that EEOC general counsel David Lopez and his attorneys are making of late when companies challenge how the agency conciliates disputes (or in some cases, doesn’t even try). Thankfully, judges aren’t buying it.
The latest brushback came earlier this month in Houston, via U.S. District Court Judge Keith P. Ellison in EEOC v. Bass Pro Outdoor World. The agency accused the company of hiring too few minorities, and Bass said the EEOC tried to bully the company into a settlement. The EEOC countered that its pre-suit procedures aren’t subject to judicial review, citing the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution’s separation of powers.
… By law, the EEOC must investigate a discrimination claim and conciliate the dispute in good faith before deciding to sue a private company.
Fortunately, the courts aren’t buying this theory. I say “fortunately” because buying the theory would allow the EEOC to extort “voluntary” settlements from companies much as Eliot Spitzer did to advance his political career: charge a company with a novel crime (or, in the EEOC case, a novel discrimination), threaten them with a lawsuit bankrolled by the feds’ bottomless (as of October 17) resources, get them to “settle” and then cite their settlement as precedent in negotiation with other employers.
Thus do we become ever more authoritarian, with the authority coming from unelected regulators’ unreviewable “conciliation” powers. But the courts are saying no, thank goodness.
I guess another way to put it would be to say that as long as the EEOC gets a settlement by conciliation, it doesn’t want anybody questioning whether it really was acting in good faith rather than as the aggressive agent of some administrator’s political ambitions.
“Technology and the internet have given birth to countless tools and resources for us as students to take control of our learning.”
(“Given birth to countless tools”? Thank God for epidurals.)
In an age when you can’t even get teachers to take control of learning (probably a good thing: “let’s all sit in a circle and talk about how the categorical imperative makes us feel”), I can’t see how turning one problem into two is a solution.
But of course this nonsense is everywhere and growing fast. It’s the obsession of powerful administrative tails that wag effete institutional dogs. Such tails include the assessment movement, the Higher Learning Commission, presidents, provosts, deans, associate deans, assistant associate deans, and directors of institutional research—which is to say people “tasked” with work in search of justification—all the way on down to magpie professors who, lacking any normal evidence of their effectiveness (such as students buzzed after every lecture on the intoxicants of actual learning), agree to “identify outcomes” and who are in a great rush to quantify everything. (I’ve seen a recent attempt to quantify “wonder.”)
It makes a guy want to stand up in a committee meeting and say, “Hey! Who wrote gullible on the ceiling?”
…
If you’re a teacher, and if you don’t know whether you’re any good, you probably aren’t. You don’t need assessment data. You don’t need “outcomes.” You don’t need Top Shelf or any other tech company eager to see you part with your money. What you need is other work–say, as an “evangelist” for a tech company.
Do you want to teach well? Believe in something that is good, true, and beautiful. Have something to say. Know how to say it.
(Jason Peters, The Bar Jester, on Educational Assessments)
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 