Because no evidence on military academies was adduced, either before SCOTUS or any lower court (this is important), no ruling could be made. The headline view, however, is that they, too, will likely fail under the 14th. Separate litigation will need to ensue, however. You can't make a court order in the absence of evidence.
A noteworthy example of the depravity, evil and lies of the academic left:
Senior leftist researcher used tainted data to support his theory that the "right" was genetically determined to be less moral and more mentally dysfunctional.
When the data was corrected, it said the opposite: genetics determine that the "left" is less moral and more mentally dysfunctional (neurotic, authoritarian).
You ask, presumably rhetorically, why you should get into university more easily just because your parents went there? It turns out that there is a simple reason: most private universities have traditionally raised the bulk of their finances, not from tuition, but from alumni donations. It is therefore very much in the university's interest to keep their alumni loyal. They do this in a number of ways, including regular mailing, sports success... and admitting the children of alumni.
It has been found, therefore, that alumni donations regularly increase during their children's high school years, in hopes of making it that much more likely for those children to be admitted, and it is largely assumed (although I've seen no data) that it is specifically the children of alumni who are large donors who have the highest chance of admission.
As if every system wasn't corrupt to some degree. In the UK there are schools and there are schools for the betters. In the US it's mostly private unis that use legacy as a factor. I think if you wish to attend higher education, you can if you can afford it. You may not be able to get into the prestige schools which are really for those needing contacts but nearly all can find some school to gain knowledge.
Wherever there is more demand than supply, some rationing takes place based on whatever rationale is needed to justify the discrimination. Explicit race bias was being used in the Court referred cases. Now they must use some other set of factors. End result likely the same. Those Asian kids try to hard and embarrass others, can't have that.
That may have been true in the 19th century and the first third of the 20th, but is no longer. The unifying factor in British governance is Oxbridge, on all sides of the political aisle.
Labour in particular has a long tradition of state (grammar) school educated working- and lower-middle-class people getting into Oxbridge and then pulling the ladder up after them (by abolishing grammar schools, what an Australian would call "state selective schools").
Sorry I miswrote regarding schools. I was thinking of Australia.
Any of the Sandstones is still a mass-producer of graduates with nothing like the cachet of Oxbridge or the Ivys. The elite networks were formed beforehand in the schools.
Isn’t it the market who should be wary of hiring students who have a high likelihood of mascarading as qualified? These two issues have much in common so I’m glad they present within the same piece.
Griggs v Duke Power Co needs to be overturned to stop affirmative action having a detrimental effect on employers. SCOTUS may do that, but requires a "proper controversy" first - ie litigation between parties with standing needs to be brought.
Helen; consider the caliber of this argument “its private” from a broad legal standpoint.
🤣
The Mafia is waiting, along with a whole prison system of private affairs that ergo aren’t corrupt, to be released from their unjust incarceration.
Every drug dealer in prison, for example.
I applaud this, because the argument advanced demonstrates perfectly the problem in America; The rules don’t apply to the elites, more importantly common sense escapes them utterly.
Not to mention these Private people have bailed themselves out to over $45 Trillion dollars in the 21st century, which moots the Private argument.
Lets try it this way; as Harvard is a Hedge Fund with a college attached, and none of them would be living indoors (except prison) without $45T in bailouts, we’ll regulate Harvard under Sarbanes Oxley, and further as the government institution with all applicable HR.
This is our caliber of elite.
It’s “Private.”
Most crime is Private. An entire new field of law, and frankly a better caliber of leadership awaits. Probably a better life, no gangster could last a moment at this level of weak idiocy.
The hard public/private distinction Americans apply to their institutions does not exist outside the US. To someone in the British tradition (Mill, Gladstone), freedom of speech rights are largely worthless if only held against the state. That's why it's easier to sack someone for their speech in the US. Here, that enlivens various bits of industrial relations legislation.
Ironically, the private schools in areas populate by the "woke" elite, the professional-managerial class, are at least as insane in their "wokeness" as public schools, maybe more so because the administrators and teachers in those "woke" private schools have to openly justify their ideology to satisfy the insane "woke" rich parents putting their kids in those schools.
A further irony is that many of the suburbs that the rich "woke" parents live in have seen massive redevelopment (green "urban in fill" lol) to appeal to rich property investors, with the result that the actual working class non-whites in those areas are forced out because they can't afford to live there anymore.
At that point the gross fraudulence of the idea that "wokeism" is supposed to help poor and working class non-whites becomes apparent.
Then why are the cops bothering those nice old men at the Ravenite social club?
🤣🤣🤣🤣
FINE
Its just that all its graduates are white shoe organized crime , and they are bankrupting the entire world, and periodically raze it by war... and now plagues...
If it’s private, its not
while we’re at it, let’s actually have MR MARKET and full Libertardian market economics , meaning the Federal Reserve is CLOSED.
MR MARKET would wipe out all the elites and Global Finance in a few seconds of trading. Its a PRIVATE problem.
One of my daughter’s best friends got a thin envelope from the top ranked school of her choice, from which her mom and grandfather had been graduated. Mom must have worked hard over the weekend, for her daughter got a phone call that Monday offering admission.
Made me that much prouder of what my daughter achieved all on her own! Well, she did have the privilege of being born to two parents from intelligent and hardworking families.
Let me see if I understand this? The University is richer if graduate's kids have better access to education than non-progeny. And the education system is improved by grading undergraduates on the basis of skin colour.
From different statistics, I learn that progeny tend to do less well than high-performing parents, and that skin colour does not denote potential for academic achievement. So to me this explains why US education has been in decline since 1970, and that the US is now 39th on the global literary scale.
Now I understand American politics. This is predicated on your education system
This is why Australians go to America and complain about how nothing works properly. It also explains US libertarianism. Americans hate their government (rightly) because it is shit.
But it need not be. It didn't used to be shit. It used to resemble Australia's, or Switzerland's. That better US government put men on the moon.
Sorry Rex, the story is a bit esoteric. In a nutshell, the US CIA delivered a coup in Australia, sacked the elected government, replaced it with a puppet proxy, then militarily invaded, took command of the Australian Defence Force, and made us the unrepresented 51st state.
One of the CIA agents, Christopher Boyce, suffered serious pand of remorse over the betrayal and blw the whistle, earning hin 22 years in prison. One day he will be offered Australian citizenship and a permanent income for life as a national ally/hero.
Like all systems based on fiddling and lies, so hard to unravel. The system in the UK when I was that age was a strong one. Pass the test. If you don't have the money, here is a grant. If you do, you pay. Such a system made the money issue go away and so opened it to being defended.
(Unfortunately behind paywall now). What the article says is 80% of recruits come from Veterans families and they’ve lost the Veterans. That is the nearly identical overlap with law enforcement (police) by the way.
We’re all the same people from the same families.
>Hilarity ensues; “We don’t do enough Veterans Outreach”.
TRUE; getting within arms reach of us would be unsafe, so they won’t be showing their faces around Veterans.
It’s over when Biden croaks.
It’s not a Revolution, it’s everyone moving away from them that wants to survive.
The closest recent historical case for what’s happening is 1911 China- the rulers fall without replacement.
There's a difference between rudeness and constructive criticism. Anyone not mired in the American system can see the problems with it. Just because you don't want to hear them doesn't mean they aren't valid.
Legacy applicants deserve better than to be used by Helen (or anyone) by being told by a privelaged writer such as herself to "fuck off". That rudeness she showed deserves for her to apologize.
I didn't read it as Helen singling out "legacies" , but a general comment about the whole system that allows and encourages it. However, even the "legacies" (or at least some of them) must be able to see that they were cheating, and did indeed have a choice not to do it.
Reading the opinion in the round (including the dissents) makes it clear that big donors - especially big donors who also went to Harvard - have been able to buy their children a place at Harvard.
Relatedly, it's clear that many of the athletes admitted (a small group, but they stand out because high intellect and athletic ability are uncorrelated) would not be admitted to any Australian or UK university. We are genuinely talking people who would misspell "cat".
It’s not a Sportsman’s pass; its a business. In America education is a business, from Kindergarten to PhD. True, until age 18 a compulsory business but that’s never been an issue historically for mankind and isn’t now.
College moves up the stakes from taxpayer to Finance aka FIN, that’s how college debt got to over $1T.
I don’t know what they’re teaching in the UK, but I have a nephew who’s doing business/finance, he’s a 3d year now; I ask basic questions; blank stare.
Apparently they do piddle around with spreadsheets, gee- which is like a week IRL for entire MS Office 365. I think he’s probably on the hook for most of the $31,000 a year.
I realize this is probably horrifying outside of the USA.
We really are different peoples separated by common language.
The most astute outside observer of another country can never tell - I wonder what the natives review of Curzon’s travels was-
Helen et al - You realize their money is all 🚁 Helicopter 💰 money for 30 years now?
Yes, their parents were better at grabbing it than the common Americans who were still laboring under the illusions of earning it, putting their own work in, putting their own money in, the old fashioned values, that sort of thing...
You should have seen the shrieking when Silicon Valley Bank didn’t get the automatic bailout they felt entitled to..
“How many businesses have you run?!” 😱
I had to explain that public financing of gambling isn’t really a business...
Same thing here.
On merit it’s over.
No more Fiat it’s over.
From shirtsleeves to Orange Jumpsuits in 2 generations.
A question of taste. Yes. That was where I derailed to show my response reflected a similar level of disgust. And not to further excuse the original topic because I find it quite an important one and outrageous one worthy of this kind of scrutiny - I will answer Apple Pie this way to further the dialogue here by saying that universities worldwide and especially in the U.S. must eventually reflect the distinction between the terms legacies and lineages. Their difference is worthy of discussions, though perhaps on a different post, because they are both worthy in terms of education. Perhaps the importance of the British monarchy might be mentioned in the separation noted in other posts between Australian, the British system, and the American sytem with regard to these issues, and the relevance to the distinction of legacy and lineage in the history of educational pursuit!
As an American who studied at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney, I applaud your perspective and quick analysis. I think you should explain the table to the mathematically challenged who will not quite get what the - very powerful - point the table makes.
Our country’s best resources are reserved for the least equipped to utilize them. They bring the dangerous entitled ideologies into the core institutions that have eaten them from the inside like a cancer.
This topic seems more impenetrable than ever for obvious reasons - nuance feels non-existant. My hope continues to be that by recapturing the aspirational word “diverse” for society at large (rather than code for a single interest group), we’ll be better able to think about and act upon policies to better address a range of adversities that contribute to greater disparity. Helen Dale is less nuanced.
There have been a number of "nuanced" critics of Affirmative Action, "diversity" and "wokeism" in general for a long time, from classical socialists like Adolph Reed to various centrist and conservative thinkers.
Musa Al-Ghabri is one of the best rising stars, a brilliant social scientist and data wonk in that category (black african-american from a 3 generation military family, muslim convert).
Al-Ghabri integrates an astonishing range of topics into his analysis, from evolutionary psychology to spirituality to economics to sociology and history to law. And of course his "lived experience" of being attacked by both the right and the "woke" "left" for daring to question the dogmas and orthodoxies on both sides. :)
Thanks. Let me be more specific .. lots of nuance from the mid-century years to the present, Jim Crow, etc. But here we are, when affirmative action no longer makes sense (as a forcing function) and in fact has become destructive - but yet, this is the statement which so many reflexively find repugnant. Helens piece is great - her reductive declaration “is what it is”, and it’s become increasing difficult to ignore. So, my comment about less nuance was supportive, not a dissent. As they say, times a’wasting.
I must confess I wasn't quite sure where you were going with your first comment, so I thought it best to leave well alone and wait for you to comment again. I try to make my pieces on here as clear and accurate as possible, but it's a bit much to expect that in the comments - either from me or anyone else. People are allowed to be casual or unsure. What I won't tolerate is rudeness or personal attacks.
Affirmative action never made sense. ALL the indices beforehand showed the black/colored community coming along in leaps and bounds. This is a cadence all the work of Thomas Sowell marches to and plenty of other black/colored intellectuals make the same point.
Whether affirmative action as written ever made sense is a legal matter as philosophical but something was necessary (and perhaps might still be broadly utilitarian) to ensure that the positive externalities of education reach far and wide. In the mid-century US, it was clear that similar opposite forces did exist to prevent “better mixing”. That’s undeniable.
My argument is not one of “tilting the scales” so much as ensuring that early childhood circumstances, post-incarceration, and other broadly systemic challenges that hit society are considered. None of this need to be race/gender specified even as some will make their correlation cases.
De-industrialization was devastating to both the black and white working and lower classes.
Liberal Democrats failed to deal with it effectively, their only "solution" was endless expansion of the welfare state and other bureaucracy, which caused even more damage (see Jay Forrester: https://reason.com/1971/07/01/counterintuitive-behavior-of-s-2/ )
After the burning of dozens of inner cities after the Kennedy and MLK Jr. assassinations, the black elites made a deal with the "white" establishment which opened up access to education and employment in exchange for the black elites calming down the violent inner city protesters.
Nixon, a Republican ("centrist" by today's standards), signed the federal law that put Affirmative Action into motion.
From what I can recall, social science data indicates that the boost of poor and working class blacks into the middle classes from the 1970s-1990s was about 20%, overall, so something like 50% of blacks stayed in the lower working classes, or in poverty. Some poor blacks moved from poverty to the lower middle classes, but de-industrialization placed limits on that.)
Sowell is correct of course that many talented, smart, honest, hard working blacks that had been held back from advancing into the middle classes prior to the 1960s moved forward, but that was not the universal experience.
And the corruption of the civil rights and social justice movements by "woke" grifters and posturers also undermined the cause of black social advances.
Muslim convert=Away with the fairies. Islam is another totalitarian ideology inimicable to the Anglosphere. Writes for the Grauniad too. Another muppet walking back to the pavilion.
Incorrect. I'm assuming you never seriously studied (and understood) Islam, it is based on the same "Axial" (Karl Jaspers) purity myths as Judaism/Christianity: the world is spiritually impure and psychological and social order are only possible through atonement and renunciation of evil and sin.
The problem is that Islamic orthodoxy marginalized innovators like Ibn al Arabi starting about 800 years ago.
There are certainly legitimate criticisms of renunciate religion, but when put in the context of evolutionary psychology (Iain McGilchrist), they have their own serious limits in terms of the problem of the "crisis of meaning" that emerged under postmodern social conditions and the suburban consumer economy.
What is Grauniad? (web search, found it.)
So what? John McWhorter writes for NYT.
The point is that there are people that are on the left/liberal/progressive end of the ideological rectum ..... errrr .... spectrum that are critical of the "woke" postmodern/neo-marxist radical extremists and the creepy transhumanist-globalists that fund "wokeism". Al Gharbi's analysis, which you completely ignore while making a stupid smear, is impressive in its inclusion of just about every major field that contains criticisms of postmodernism, neo-marxism and globalism.
The right wing tribal echo chamber is almost as mindlessly toxic as the left wing echo chamber.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Axial religion (which emerged in mostly illiterate peasant societies after the Bronze Age collapse) was a survival (defense) adaptation of the people in walled city states to marauding nomadic tribes and attacks from other walled city states or slave empires.
The short definition of Axial culture and religion: contemplative/mystical awareness, mythic religion (purity myth: sin and evil are spiritual impurities, obstacles to psychological and social order).
Contemplative awareness gave Axial cultures a psychological advantage in forming social order (including military order and organization) over "pagan" tribes, who had appropriated some of the advanced technologies
Modern rationalism (Enlightenment values, classical liberalism) pretty much just ignores the problem of spiritual order.*
Postmodern relativism rejects the concept of Axial spiritual order, at least as framed in the West, because it is "absolutist".
-----
* I don't agree with everything Wilber says here, but his summary is insightful:
The way it is now, the modern world really is divided into two major and warring camps, science and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other. And the key to getting these two camps together is first, to get religion past science, and then second, to get religion past liberalism, because both science and liberalism are deeply anti-spiritual. And it must occur in that order, because liberalism won’t even listen to spirituality unless it has first passed the scientific test. (Showing how that might happen was a major theme of my book, Sense and Soul.)
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness.
The ["woke"] Brahmins that Yarvin claims to oppose have been empowered primarily by the rise of digital capitalism and the traditional financial establishment. Additionally, the “woke” ideology (what I call “totalitarian humanism”) that presently constitutes the self-legitimating ideological superstructure of the ruling class is not the sole creation of the Brahmins alone. Every ideological superstructure has a materialist base and class base(which in the case of totalitarian humanism would be digital capital, the tech revolution, “financialization” of the kind that has emerged from neoliberalism, the expanded technocratic class which is the product of the wider degree of specialization and the division of labor rooted in increased technological sophistication).
Additionally, “wokeness” is rooted in the wider infrastructure of statecraft which can be traced, at the irreducible minimum, to the collusion between the Frankfurt School and the OSS during WW2, followed by the CIA’s creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. While elements of the ideological framework of totalitarian humanism may have their roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s/1970s, in its present form “wokeness” represents a co-optation of those cultural patterns by the liberal wing of the capitalist class ( a specific strategy that was devised by Fred Dutton as far back as 1970). The insurgent sectors of the managerial class (primarily the expanded professional class and rising middle-class sectors among traditional outgroups) became the socioeconomic foundation for this co-optation, which allowed the liberal wing of capitalism to marginalize labor unions while cultivating these rising middle-class sectors as a replacement constituency for the traditional working class.
You would think that something as morally uplifting and socially progressive as affirmative action would be more loudly celebrated by universities, in that they would publicly bestow formal AA fellowships and AA awards to the recipients, similar to other grants and scholarships.
That way us oppressors could thank those deserved awardees for the hard tasks they are undertaking and their sacrifice for making the world a better place.
That more or less do that, but using different labels, such as DEI, ESG, etc.
The "diversity" grifter industrial complex has been estimated by social scientists as being between a $1 BILLION to $8 BILLION business, depending on definitions.
There is no shortage of economic incentives for people with grievance studies degrees to take up careers as race grifters.
It's a very Australian perception, I think, which is why I'll have to discuss it in my Law & Liberty piece with a bit of care. This means acknowledging the cheating was facilitated by the universities themselves and -- until this decision -- SCOTUS itself.
Evolutionary psychologists exploring the biological origins of human morals use the word "cheating" to explain what their game-theory models told them. See Samuel Bowles' 2008 Ulam lectures, Santa Fe Institute.
Unsurprisingly for a nation in large part founded by folk transported against their will and in large part unfairly. "Body Line" and Windies fast bowling can be seen as pointed payback insofar as team sports sublimate war.
It’s demise isn’t going to be widely mourned by most, but American history in the post-war era is the essential context, and if you want to start connecting dots the original Brown (in the mid-50s) decision is your most appropriate starting point. Chief Justice Earl Warren was the driving force behind that, and had, as governor of California during WWII, played a significant role in bringing about the internment of Japanese-Americans. It was always clear that that was a racist policy, since it was only applied on the west coast- not Hawaii, for example, where it would have led to the collapse of civilian society due to the exceptionally high percentage of citizens of Japanese ancestry, or the Midwest and east where their numbers were negligible. Anyway, Warren’s remorse over the mass injustice he had helped perpetrate was a silent factor in his efforts to win a unanimous decision in Brown, and therefore it is a seminal case in the heretofore unresolved struggle over racial status that plays on the mind of thoughtful American liberals.We Yanks have a mixed and muddled federal system, as you know, but be careful before weighing in - you might end up writing a book to try to make sense of it all. Good luck sista.
It’s a very twisted story that goes off in different directions over time. The Brown decision is recognized as a landmark but southerners worked around it rather assiduously from the start. It wasn’t really all that effective long term, but has always provided a bit of a balm to liberal guilt over racism.
America wasn’t established by Anglicans but Puritans, who won the Religious Civil War of 1861-65. Military history used to teach it was the English Civil War again with New England the Puritan Victor, the South the defeated Cavaliers, even the Irish were again involved as cannon fodder on both sides, with the Scot Presbyterians making their own cameo from West Virginia and Kentucky/Tennessee (mostly on their own side). There’s a lot of truth in this and it was likely without either race or slavery being the issue -although it was.
Same again Reconstruction, same again one of Reconstructions repeat performances bringing Democracy to Iraq ⁉️
⁉️ said the Iraqi
or Afghanistan 🤣🤡
ALL HAIL PALLAS ATHENA, THE MOST BLOODTHIRSTY OF ALL THE GODS !
This isn’t law, and it’s not politics. It’s religion.
Or Prohibition.
Or Civil Rights.
It’s the REVEREND Martin Luther King, not Doctor King, or Mr. King.
It’s the worst kind of religion, they don’t know they’re religious.
Wrong. Virginia (and the slightly larger Tidewater region), the most powerful state up to the US Civil War, was Anglican, and unlike the rest of the south in a number of ways. See Albion's Seed, Colin Woodard, Kevin Phillips, etc.
A number of credible social scientists have stated that "wokeism" is a dogmatic cult and a quasi religion, including black, liberal PhD Linguistics professor John McWhorter that wrote a book recently called WOKE RACISM.
One of the basic points McWhorter makes is that the civil rights and social justice movements have been taken over by social parasites, race grifters and posturers since the 1960s, as well as a vast surveillance state bureaucracy that was created by the 1960s civil rights laws to eradicate the vestiges of Jim Crow, which was a system of state-sponsored, actually racist, terrorism between the 1880s (when post-civil war reconstruction failed) and 1960.
My late father was born in Corsicana, Texas in 1926, into a family that had ancestors on both the Union/northern side and the Confederate/southern side of the civil war.
His first memory as a small child was seeing a lynching of a black man that was "on the wrong side of town after dark" that was murdered by being burned at the stake in the town square in front a compliant citizenry. He said the stench of burning human flesh was profoundly revolting.
One of the problems with the use of laws to try to reverse Jim Crow racism was that it created a "2nd Constitution" (and as noted, a surveillance and enforcement state) that was at odds with the original Constitution and that worked against the imperfect system of popular democracy, substituting elite, bureaucratic control.
The anti-racism bureaucracy was increasingly aligned with what became postmodern-marxist "woke" ideology over time, providing funding for the education of the anti-racism work force and their careers, and various spin-offs that I call the race-grifter-industrial-complex (or woke-grifter-industrial-complex).
Economic neoliberalism and globalism was a huge boost to the race-woke-grifters, the professional-managerial class (PMC). Having stripped class conflict away from Marxism to create postmodern neo-marxism, the "woke", grifter "left" was then able to make itself useful to the globalists that were throwing the working classes under the bus by providing a cover of "anti-racist" virtue to the globalist corporate-state elites.
Musa Al-Gharbi, a black american from a family of military veterans and a Muslim convert and an excellent social scientist covers the origins of most or all of that stuff in explaining why upper middle class, college educated whites are more supportive of "wokeism" than working class non-whites, especially immigrants (who see the cruelty of things like Affirmative Action more clearly).
It is time we examined what is meant by the term "racist". It is currently used to define anybody who goes against the current orthodoxy and suggests that perhaps, certain races do not perform as well in certain arenas. For a long time the IQ test was a measure of of intelligence. True, it was flawed but it was a useful indicator. When it turned out that certain ethnicities did badly at IQ tests, what happened? "They" simply decided to move the goal posts and declare that after all, IQ tests were irrelevant and biased.
I think that any form of affirmative action is demeaning, not only to academia in general but to the very people it is designed to help.
It is a clear fact that given independence, international aid, and all the opportunities we can afford, certain ethnic groups simply cannot make the grade in certain sectors. A hard and inconvenient truth. Unfortunately it is not an acceptable position to take, and if I was an academic, my job would be on the line.
To give themselves maximum flexibility to redefine anything and everything to fit their emotive victim narratives, the "woke" hold to the (postmodern-relativist) "belief" that "reality is a social construct" (Lasch, Revolt of the Elites).
Thus, modern rationalism, classical liberalism, Enlightenment ideals, Constitutional order, all become mere "social constructs" that are tools of "white supremacy". Any arguments to the contrary are just more "proof" to the "woke" of "white supremacy".
The problem is that "wokeism" rapidly descends into chaos and insanity when faced with solving real world problems. Idiocracy was not an instruction manual.
I have to disagree. It’s not cheating if you’re playing by the rules, when you don’t also control the rules. You’re a lawyer? Of course, you’d advise your clients to work the system.
leftist rhetorical structure: memory hole, smears, deflection, gaslighting, cherry picked data to fit victim narratives, etc.
example:
brilliant, liberal, black, working class economist Roland Fryer stumbles across BML lies, publishes his findings, and is viciously attacked by the "woke" cargo cult cancel culture zombie mob.
The larger problem is that high-social-trust in social institutions (Constitutional order, banks, insurance, education, etc.), which is the foundation of the western/modern rationalist sense-making system (hierarchies of curated expertise), is being disrupted by postmodern values (relativism, nihilism, narcissism) and techno-economic innovation.
what's bizarre is the distribution for all ethnicities, for such a supposedly competitive system that there is anyone getting in from the 5th decile just seems like a messed up system
I'm assuming many of the 5th decile and below admissions must be sportspeople, although that assumption may represent the triumph of hope over experience on my part. In Australia, an individual in the 5th decile or below on the ATAR would struggle to gain admission to _any_ university - even a crappy former CAE (Australian for polytechnic).
I guess what would make the data a lot clearer would be raw numbers as well, the acceptance rate might be high if there are just very few applications of special cases.
My partner made this point. 22 per cent of the 5th decile African-American applicants to Harvard getting admitted is alarming, yes - but 22 per cent of how many would be very good to know.
I guess the other issue is the distribution of scores, I could imagine a similar chart with UCAS points or something and that doesn't actually reflect the underlying value of the school qualifications.
If you become familiar with the ugly underbelly of the federal grant system that supports "diversity" (however defined) and attempts at elevating the "disadvantaged" classes in public education, the horror at the bottom end of the system is appalling.
My late wife was a vocational counselor for a liberal county and a liberal west coast state, and because of her European (Spanish/Catalan) education, she was offered a role in a research project to do psychometric evaluations of the welfare population and pilot "solutions".
What they found, similar to other similar projects in a number of other places, was that about 50% of the welfare clients had serious to severe cognitive impairments and "learning disabilities" mostly resulting from childhood poverty, trauma, exposure to parenting failures due to alcoholism and substance abuse, poor food, and so forth.
In state funded post-secondary education (community colleges and lower tier state universities), clinical psychologists have found that almost 30% of students suffering from either PTSD or borderline personality disorder, or a combination of both.
I attended two "in service" trainings by clinical psychologists about the extreme stress that social workers in education are under in dealing with those kinds of "impossible" people.
I was astonished to realize that the personality and behavioral disorders of the "impossible" social work clients (deep personality disorders and trauma) almost exactly described the radical-extremist elements promoting "PC" in the 1980s-1990s and now "wokeism" and cancel culture mobs.
The cultural-left's promotion of the "belief" that "reality is a social construct" has created a system in which the patients have taken over the insane asylum, literally.
An example of how insane radical-extremists on the "woke" "left" viciously mob liberal , black dissidents calling for a return to sanity in the education system:
I'm not a lawyer or an Aussie, just a Yank who enjoys Helen Dale, and in the name of fun and friendship I want to offer a nudge of dissent.
I think a great explanation for so much of American politics and history is revealed by this quote from our longshoreman philosopher, Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
My point being that back in the 1960s, it must have seemed like the right thing to do to put a gentle thumb on the scale for black Americans, just as a tiebreaker or helping hand in education and employment, as they had been on the shit-end of our society for centuries (I make no claims about the legality of this, I'm just taking the claim at face value); but fast-forward 50/60 years and now "Diversity" is a $10 billion-dollar industry and what was meant to be a small help to an oppressed segment of society has somehow metastisized into a bloated system of racial classification, where extra points are doled out for Hispanics, Arabs, women, gays, etc.
My real point is more or less: if AA had been maintained as only a slight boost and only strictly for ADOS (American descendants of slaves) instead of as this massive ubiquitous scheme for social engineering via race, it may have maintained some legitimacy.
I personally will never be opposed to any policy aimed at helping black Americans (and no, not Nigerian princes who pay their way into an Ivy, and same for West Indian aristocrats), but unfortunately their historical suffering has become a pretext for a massive bureaucratic putsch. And thus, pace Hoffer, this business became a racket, and like all rackets it eventually embodied the thing it was created to oppose.
> I personally will never be opposed to any policy aimed at helping black Americans (and no, not Nigerian princes who pay their way into an Ivy, and same for West Indian aristocrats), but unfortunately their historical suffering has become a pretext for a massive bureaucratic putsch.
Please rethink this sentiment. I feel very strongly that this sentence here encapsulates the entirety of the problem, both cause and effect. Americans in general seem disconnected from the Aristotelian notion of a golden mean - to lack any sense that virtue is connected to wisdom regarding when, where, and how far to push an idea. And so the American majority (or if you prefer, the American elite) is with you, and likewise refuses to oppose any policy aimed at helping American blacks. Nothing is too bizarre or too extreme for us. Show us an ideological cliff and we will jump off of it en masse.
I think it's easy to make a case that, especially in the 1960s, Aristotle's mean would be something like what affirmative action was, if one side you placed more radical measures like strict quotas and/or cash reparations and on the other side you placed no policy at all, that is: just expecting black Americans to immediately flourish after centuries of immiseration.
And while there do appear to be many types of ideological cliff diver, I'm not sure they're all diving from the same cliff, as things like reparations or quotas don't poll well, whether today or back then. But, as I said, back then a slight nudge or finger on the scale, limited only to ADOS, and only in areas like education and employment, seemed like a fair compromise to most people. (As opposed to our current racial-classification industrial complex.)
Also, my Aristotle is a bit rusty, but I don't think anyone expects a majority to practice wisdom through virtue or vice versa—that's hard enough for a philospher! That task was for our educated elite class, who decided black people were better off used as symbols of their enlightened purity and wisdom, as weapons to use to batter their opponents with (We love black people more than you do!), instead of figuring out ways to ameliorate their poverty and misery.
The immediate problem in the mid to late 1960s was that after the Kennedys and MLK Jr. were assassinated, and dozens of inner cities had been burned in race riots, the black elites made a deal with the establishment (including Nixon) to not only to make racial hiring and educational admissions practices illegal (which the 1964 Civil Rights act did), but to do more to aggressively open employment and educational opportunities via government programs. In exchange the black elites would calm their people, to the extent possible.
As John McWhorter points out, some black radical-extremists (and many non-radicals who later took up extremist rhetoric) realized that promoting actual revolutionary politics was less profitable than posturing about social oppression to get access to grant money.
This article, by a science historian and an economic socialist that is critical of "wokeism", is one of the best descriptions of the bizarre nature of race politics of that era:
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
...
The so-called Privilege Walk, or Power Shuffle, is a workshop activity much beloved by the diversity training industry, in which a group of participants stand together on a line, then each take one step forward or backwards in response to a facilitator reading a series of statements such as: “If you’re a white male, take one step forward. If you were ever made uncomfortable by a joke about your ethnicity, gender, appearance, or sexual orientation, take one step back.” At the end participants find themselves arrayed along a continuum of “privilege.” Thus sorted, discussion ensues.
The Privilege Walk is now a standard element in the diversity training used by nonprofits, churches, universities, corporations, and even some parts of the U.S. military.1 Proponents of the Walk say it helps us “unlearn oppression” and “build alliances across difference.” Mainstream critics say the exercise propagates divisive identity politics and mock it as foundational to the Oppression Olympics.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn wrote an excellent book about all this called "Race Experts".
"The triumph of the race experts in many ways embodies the "harangue-flagellation ritual" writ large. A routine of black assertion and white submission came to the fore in the mid-1960s... This ritual cast blacks in the role of repressed, angry victims and whites in the role of oppressors who need to expiate their guilt....
....self-centeredness is promulgated in the name of social justice. Self-affirmation is equated with freedom, and freedom to elevate one's own group and one's self, even to the detriment of others, is equated with fairness and justice. In the self-esteem mentality—a mentality that, in the case of multicultural education, parades itself as the fulfillment of the civil rights revolution—personal liberation has become the goal."
All of this marks the transformation of the Old Left, concerned w wages etc, into the New Left, concerned with language manipulation and therapeutic self-esteem. Thus someone like Marcuse starts out as a European Marxist ostensibly devoted to the proletariat and ends up as an upscale guru selling "liberation" to bourgeois children. And so here we are a few generations later, with Leftism being a luxury good and the Permanent Revolution somehow always revolving around the feelings of upscale whites and their emotional needs. And, as we can see in so many spheres of life, their greatest need is to be seen as righteous and holy White Saviors.
i think her book touched too many taboos and examined too many touchy subjects for it to get the credit it deserved.
i find her dad and philip reiff to have been the best 20th century prophets of what the 21st century descent into infantile narcissism would look like.
moral narcissism—the desire to be seen as morally superior without having earned it, and most especially by preferring gooey self-satsifying sentiment over factual intellectual discourse (essentially the abdication of adulthood in favor of permanent childhood), as we see most clearly in the endless manifestations of victim mongering—is at the heart of the rot of so much of modern culture.
The elite is not monolithic, there are competing factions, some are anti-woke, some pro-woke. (see Christopher Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, 1990s.)
The main pro-woke faction are the digital, media-tech oligarchs. They are mostly backed by traditional Finance Capitalists (Democrats). The professional-managerial classes (corrupt journalists, educational bureaucrats, etc.) are the upper middle class allies of the "woke" elties. Globalist billionaires pull the strings of "woke" political puppets.
The anti-woke elites are traditional manufacturing capitalists, the Yeomanry (farmers, property owners, small businesses and their working class employees, Republicans). Their uneasy alliance with populist dissidents and nationalists (anti-globalists) is the only thing that keeps them politically viable on "red" states.
Because no evidence on military academies was adduced, either before SCOTUS or any lower court (this is important), no ruling could be made. The headline view, however, is that they, too, will likely fail under the 14th. Separate litigation will need to ensue, however. You can't make a court order in the absence of evidence.
These are some nervous people, I haven’t heard such shrieking since SV Bank went under.
Race?
WHITE LOTUS - That’s their race
https://youtu.be/Baflc_0XVfY
LMAO Black and Brown people aren’t so vested in all this
They really aren’t
Just Ken and Karen , both white
From another discussion:
TOXIC Leftist/ "woke" cancel culture / Cultural Marxist, PC left, CRT/SJW/BLM/DEI rhetoric*, explained:
00000. memory holing
0000. SMUG ARROGANCE
000. use absurd SMEARS
00. project
0. gaslight
......
1. Deflect from what was actually said/done (move goal posts)
2. Distort or lie about facts and evidence (such as straw manning)
3. Cherry pick evidence to fit the (victim/diversity) narrative / shift goal posts
4. Engage in emotive, feel good bs (special pleading) rather than use rational, objective thought
5. Use guilt by association ("you are a K-K-K/n-a-z-i") to smear people that dare to criticize PC/SJW leftist ideology.
[->] Use groupthink and scapegoating to marginalize critics of the PC left.
6. Demonize the personalities of opponents/critics.
7. Destroy the reputation, character and career of critics of the PC left
8. Use psychological violence, which could include doxxing, and threats of actual violence, against critics of the PC left.
-----
*Note: the above can be generalized to fit any ideology.
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/news/a34473/internet-troll-study-stanford-cornell/
A noteworthy example of the depravity, evil and lies of the academic left:
Senior leftist researcher used tainted data to support his theory that the "right" was genetically determined to be less moral and more mentally dysfunctional.
When the data was corrected, it said the opposite: genetics determine that the "left" is less moral and more mentally dysfunctional (neurotic, authoritarian).
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/why-it-took-social-science-years-to-correct-a-simple-error-about-psychoticism.html
re: Dictatorships of Intolerant Minorities
A classic from systems theorist Nassim Taleb that explains the rising power of the "woke" "left":
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/
You ask, presumably rhetorically, why you should get into university more easily just because your parents went there? It turns out that there is a simple reason: most private universities have traditionally raised the bulk of their finances, not from tuition, but from alumni donations. It is therefore very much in the university's interest to keep their alumni loyal. They do this in a number of ways, including regular mailing, sports success... and admitting the children of alumni.
It has been found, therefore, that alumni donations regularly increase during their children's high school years, in hopes of making it that much more likely for those children to be admitted, and it is largely assumed (although I've seen no data) that it is specifically the children of alumni who are large donors who have the highest chance of admission.
What a corrupt system.
Corruption is all they have
And there’s no THEY now
Just franchisees making individual scams from the desk
.... it’s ending, they’re cleaning out the safe.
As if every system wasn't corrupt to some degree. In the UK there are schools and there are schools for the betters. In the US it's mostly private unis that use legacy as a factor. I think if you wish to attend higher education, you can if you can afford it. You may not be able to get into the prestige schools which are really for those needing contacts but nearly all can find some school to gain knowledge.
Wherever there is more demand than supply, some rationing takes place based on whatever rationale is needed to justify the discrimination. Explicit race bias was being used in the Court referred cases. Now they must use some other set of factors. End result likely the same. Those Asian kids try to hard and embarrass others, can't have that.
This is how elite secondary schools work within the Empire isn't it?
And the nation ruling networks also form in elite schools rather than universities.
That may have been true in the 19th century and the first third of the 20th, but is no longer. The unifying factor in British governance is Oxbridge, on all sides of the political aisle.
Labour in particular has a long tradition of state (grammar) school educated working- and lower-middle-class people getting into Oxbridge and then pulling the ladder up after them (by abolishing grammar schools, what an Australian would call "state selective schools").
We say “crabs in a bucket”. Or, that cliche relating familiarity and contempt.
Sorry I miswrote regarding schools. I was thinking of Australia.
Any of the Sandstones is still a mass-producer of graduates with nothing like the cachet of Oxbridge or the Ivys. The elite networks were formed beforehand in the schools.
How about this: if it’s a private school, it’s not corrupt.
Isn’t it the market who should be wary of hiring students who have a high likelihood of mascarading as qualified? These two issues have much in common so I’m glad they present within the same piece.
Griggs v Duke Power Co needs to be overturned to stop affirmative action having a detrimental effect on employers. SCOTUS may do that, but requires a "proper controversy" first - ie litigation between parties with standing needs to be brought.
Helen; consider the caliber of this argument “its private” from a broad legal standpoint.
🤣
The Mafia is waiting, along with a whole prison system of private affairs that ergo aren’t corrupt, to be released from their unjust incarceration.
Every drug dealer in prison, for example.
I applaud this, because the argument advanced demonstrates perfectly the problem in America; The rules don’t apply to the elites, more importantly common sense escapes them utterly.
Not to mention these Private people have bailed themselves out to over $45 Trillion dollars in the 21st century, which moots the Private argument.
Lets try it this way; as Harvard is a Hedge Fund with a college attached, and none of them would be living indoors (except prison) without $45T in bailouts, we’ll regulate Harvard under Sarbanes Oxley, and further as the government institution with all applicable HR.
This is our caliber of elite.
It’s “Private.”
Most crime is Private. An entire new field of law, and frankly a better caliber of leadership awaits. Probably a better life, no gangster could last a moment at this level of weak idiocy.
Free us Helen ! Free us !
The hard public/private distinction Americans apply to their institutions does not exist outside the US. To someone in the British tradition (Mill, Gladstone), freedom of speech rights are largely worthless if only held against the state. That's why it's easier to sack someone for their speech in the US. Here, that enlivens various bits of industrial relations legislation.
Ironically, the private schools in areas populate by the "woke" elite, the professional-managerial class, are at least as insane in their "wokeness" as public schools, maybe more so because the administrators and teachers in those "woke" private schools have to openly justify their ideology to satisfy the insane "woke" rich parents putting their kids in those schools.
A further irony is that many of the suburbs that the rich "woke" parents live in have seen massive redevelopment (green "urban in fill" lol) to appeal to rich property investors, with the result that the actual working class non-whites in those areas are forced out because they can't afford to live there anymore.
At that point the gross fraudulence of the idea that "wokeism" is supposed to help poor and working class non-whites becomes apparent.
“If its private, its not corrupt “
Then why are the cops bothering those nice old men at the Ravenite social club?
🤣🤣🤣🤣
FINE
Its just that all its graduates are white shoe organized crime , and they are bankrupting the entire world, and periodically raze it by war... and now plagues...
If it’s private, its not
while we’re at it, let’s actually have MR MARKET and full Libertardian market economics , meaning the Federal Reserve is CLOSED.
MR MARKET would wipe out all the elites and Global Finance in a few seconds of trading. Its a PRIVATE problem.
The Ravenite Social Club Defense
One of my daughter’s best friends got a thin envelope from the top ranked school of her choice, from which her mom and grandfather had been graduated. Mom must have worked hard over the weekend, for her daughter got a phone call that Monday offering admission.
This absolutely boggles my mind.
Made me that much prouder of what my daughter achieved all on her own! Well, she did have the privilege of being born to two parents from intelligent and hardworking families.
Let me see if I understand this? The University is richer if graduate's kids have better access to education than non-progeny. And the education system is improved by grading undergraduates on the basis of skin colour.
From different statistics, I learn that progeny tend to do less well than high-performing parents, and that skin colour does not denote potential for academic achievement. So to me this explains why US education has been in decline since 1970, and that the US is now 39th on the global literary scale.
Now I understand American politics. This is predicated on your education system
This is why Australians go to America and complain about how nothing works properly. It also explains US libertarianism. Americans hate their government (rightly) because it is shit.
But it need not be. It didn't used to be shit. It used to resemble Australia's, or Switzerland's. That better US government put men on the moon.
That was before the Shit colonised the US Government, which then colonised us in November 1975.
What happened then, the Ford administration?
Sorry Rex, the story is a bit esoteric. In a nutshell, the US CIA delivered a coup in Australia, sacked the elected government, replaced it with a puppet proxy, then militarily invaded, took command of the Australian Defence Force, and made us the unrepresented 51st state.
One of the CIA agents, Christopher Boyce, suffered serious pand of remorse over the betrayal and blw the whistle, earning hin 22 years in prison. One day he will be offered Australian citizenship and a permanent income for life as a national ally/hero.
Holy shit.
Like all systems based on fiddling and lies, so hard to unravel. The system in the UK when I was that age was a strong one. Pass the test. If you don't have the money, here is a grant. If you do, you pay. Such a system made the money issue go away and so opened it to being defended.
Good, feel the Contempt flow through you...
... anything that undermines these STOOPID psychopaths, AKA America’s Ruling class, is GOOD.
It’s ending for them and it’s just everyone walking away.
No need to bet long on these losers, either; they’re a force based Kleptocracy that has betrayed and lost their force:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-recruiting-crisis-veterans-dont-want-their-children-to-join-510e1a25
(Unfortunately behind paywall now). What the article says is 80% of recruits come from Veterans families and they’ve lost the Veterans. That is the nearly identical overlap with law enforcement (police) by the way.
We’re all the same people from the same families.
>Hilarity ensues; “We don’t do enough Veterans Outreach”.
TRUE; getting within arms reach of us would be unsafe, so they won’t be showing their faces around Veterans.
It’s over when Biden croaks.
It’s not a Revolution, it’s everyone moving away from them that wants to survive.
The closest recent historical case for what’s happening is 1911 China- the rulers fall without replacement.
My mother taught me if you don't have something nice to say, fuck off!
There's a difference between rudeness and constructive criticism. Anyone not mired in the American system can see the problems with it. Just because you don't want to hear them doesn't mean they aren't valid.
Legacy applicants deserve better than to be used by Helen (or anyone) by being told by a privelaged writer such as herself to "fuck off". That rudeness she showed deserves for her to apologize.
I didn't read it as Helen singling out "legacies" , but a general comment about the whole system that allows and encourages it. However, even the "legacies" (or at least some of them) must be able to see that they were cheating, and did indeed have a choice not to do it.
Reading the opinion in the round (including the dissents) makes it clear that big donors - especially big donors who also went to Harvard - have been able to buy their children a place at Harvard.
Relatedly, it's clear that many of the athletes admitted (a small group, but they stand out because high intellect and athletic ability are uncorrelated) would not be admitted to any Australian or UK university. We are genuinely talking people who would misspell "cat".
Yes - the very strange (to my UK eyes at least) sportsman's pass into university has baffled me for years.
It’s not a Sportsman’s pass; its a business. In America education is a business, from Kindergarten to PhD. True, until age 18 a compulsory business but that’s never been an issue historically for mankind and isn’t now.
College moves up the stakes from taxpayer to Finance aka FIN, that’s how college debt got to over $1T.
I don’t know what they’re teaching in the UK, but I have a nephew who’s doing business/finance, he’s a 3d year now; I ask basic questions; blank stare.
Apparently they do piddle around with spreadsheets, gee- which is like a week IRL for entire MS Office 365. I think he’s probably on the hook for most of the $31,000 a year.
I realize this is probably horrifying outside of the USA.
We really are different peoples separated by common language.
The most astute outside observer of another country can never tell - I wonder what the natives review of Curzon’s travels was-
Helen et al - You realize their money is all 🚁 Helicopter 💰 money for 30 years now?
Yes, their parents were better at grabbing it than the common Americans who were still laboring under the illusions of earning it, putting their own work in, putting their own money in, the old fashioned values, that sort of thing...
You should have seen the shrieking when Silicon Valley Bank didn’t get the automatic bailout they felt entitled to..
“How many businesses have you run?!” 😱
I had to explain that public financing of gambling isn’t really a business...
Same thing here.
On merit it’s over.
No more Fiat it’s over.
From shirtsleeves to Orange Jumpsuits in 2 generations.
That’s being optimistic.
Money can’t buy you love Topaz, and legacies can’t buy you respect.
👋🏻 hi, I’m one of the 🇺🇸 Barbarians you’re Waiting For...
Honestly, just fuck off. Reality takes no account of your feels.
This thread has got a bit grumpy, folks. Dial it down, please.
So why didn't you follow this advice before posting? I don't mind reading your opinion at all, but isn't this evidence that your mother was wrong?
A question of taste. Yes. That was where I derailed to show my response reflected a similar level of disgust. And not to further excuse the original topic because I find it quite an important one and outrageous one worthy of this kind of scrutiny - I will answer Apple Pie this way to further the dialogue here by saying that universities worldwide and especially in the U.S. must eventually reflect the distinction between the terms legacies and lineages. Their difference is worthy of discussions, though perhaps on a different post, because they are both worthy in terms of education. Perhaps the importance of the British monarchy might be mentioned in the separation noted in other posts between Australian, the British system, and the American sytem with regard to these issues, and the relevance to the distinction of legacy and lineage in the history of educational pursuit!
sic. of school?
yet you couldn't follow her advice. lol
she also should have told you that if you don't have anything relevant or meaningful to say, shut up.
blocked
As an American who studied at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney, I applaud your perspective and quick analysis. I think you should explain the table to the mathematically challenged who will not quite get what the - very powerful - point the table makes.
I'll do that for Law & Liberty, using Australia's ATAR for academic decile comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Tertiary_Admission_Rank
Our country’s best resources are reserved for the least equipped to utilize them. They bring the dangerous entitled ideologies into the core institutions that have eaten them from the inside like a cancer.
Well also 🇺🇸 scams.
They’re good at scams, or they were...
This topic seems more impenetrable than ever for obvious reasons - nuance feels non-existant. My hope continues to be that by recapturing the aspirational word “diverse” for society at large (rather than code for a single interest group), we’ll be better able to think about and act upon policies to better address a range of adversities that contribute to greater disparity. Helen Dale is less nuanced.
There have been a number of "nuanced" critics of Affirmative Action, "diversity" and "wokeism" in general for a long time, from classical socialists like Adolph Reed to various centrist and conservative thinkers.
Musa Al-Ghabri is one of the best rising stars, a brilliant social scientist and data wonk in that category (black african-american from a 3 generation military family, muslim convert).
Al-Ghabri integrates an astonishing range of topics into his analysis, from evolutionary psychology to spirituality to economics to sociology and history to law. And of course his "lived experience" of being attacked by both the right and the "woke" "left" for daring to question the dogmas and orthodoxies on both sides. :)
Thanks. Let me be more specific .. lots of nuance from the mid-century years to the present, Jim Crow, etc. But here we are, when affirmative action no longer makes sense (as a forcing function) and in fact has become destructive - but yet, this is the statement which so many reflexively find repugnant. Helens piece is great - her reductive declaration “is what it is”, and it’s become increasing difficult to ignore. So, my comment about less nuance was supportive, not a dissent. As they say, times a’wasting.
I must confess I wasn't quite sure where you were going with your first comment, so I thought it best to leave well alone and wait for you to comment again. I try to make my pieces on here as clear and accurate as possible, but it's a bit much to expect that in the comments - either from me or anyone else. People are allowed to be casual or unsure. What I won't tolerate is rudeness or personal attacks.
Apologies. I can’t imagine how many comments I’ve misread over the years. Too many or not enough words. I try to be terse, but in a good way. :)
Affirmative action never made sense. ALL the indices beforehand showed the black/colored community coming along in leaps and bounds. This is a cadence all the work of Thomas Sowell marches to and plenty of other black/colored intellectuals make the same point.
Whether affirmative action as written ever made sense is a legal matter as philosophical but something was necessary (and perhaps might still be broadly utilitarian) to ensure that the positive externalities of education reach far and wide. In the mid-century US, it was clear that similar opposite forces did exist to prevent “better mixing”. That’s undeniable.
My argument is not one of “tilting the scales” so much as ensuring that early childhood circumstances, post-incarceration, and other broadly systemic challenges that hit society are considered. None of this need to be race/gender specified even as some will make their correlation cases.
De-industrialization was devastating to both the black and white working and lower classes.
Liberal Democrats failed to deal with it effectively, their only "solution" was endless expansion of the welfare state and other bureaucracy, which caused even more damage (see Jay Forrester: https://reason.com/1971/07/01/counterintuitive-behavior-of-s-2/ )
After the burning of dozens of inner cities after the Kennedy and MLK Jr. assassinations, the black elites made a deal with the "white" establishment which opened up access to education and employment in exchange for the black elites calming down the violent inner city protesters.
Nixon, a Republican ("centrist" by today's standards), signed the federal law that put Affirmative Action into motion.
From what I can recall, social science data indicates that the boost of poor and working class blacks into the middle classes from the 1970s-1990s was about 20%, overall, so something like 50% of blacks stayed in the lower working classes, or in poverty. Some poor blacks moved from poverty to the lower middle classes, but de-industrialization placed limits on that.)
Sowell is correct of course that many talented, smart, honest, hard working blacks that had been held back from advancing into the middle classes prior to the 1960s moved forward, but that was not the universal experience.
And the corruption of the civil rights and social justice movements by "woke" grifters and posturers also undermined the cause of black social advances.
Muslim convert=Away with the fairies. Islam is another totalitarian ideology inimicable to the Anglosphere. Writes for the Grauniad too. Another muppet walking back to the pavilion.
Incorrect. I'm assuming you never seriously studied (and understood) Islam, it is based on the same "Axial" (Karl Jaspers) purity myths as Judaism/Christianity: the world is spiritually impure and psychological and social order are only possible through atonement and renunciation of evil and sin.
The problem is that Islamic orthodoxy marginalized innovators like Ibn al Arabi starting about 800 years ago.
There are certainly legitimate criticisms of renunciate religion, but when put in the context of evolutionary psychology (Iain McGilchrist), they have their own serious limits in terms of the problem of the "crisis of meaning" that emerged under postmodern social conditions and the suburban consumer economy.
What is Grauniad? (web search, found it.)
So what? John McWhorter writes for NYT.
The point is that there are people that are on the left/liberal/progressive end of the ideological rectum ..... errrr .... spectrum that are critical of the "woke" postmodern/neo-marxist radical extremists and the creepy transhumanist-globalists that fund "wokeism". Al Gharbi's analysis, which you completely ignore while making a stupid smear, is impressive in its inclusion of just about every major field that contains criticisms of postmodernism, neo-marxism and globalism.
The right wing tribal echo chamber is almost as mindlessly toxic as the left wing echo chamber.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Axial religion (which emerged in mostly illiterate peasant societies after the Bronze Age collapse) was a survival (defense) adaptation of the people in walled city states to marauding nomadic tribes and attacks from other walled city states or slave empires.
The short definition of Axial culture and religion: contemplative/mystical awareness, mythic religion (purity myth: sin and evil are spiritual impurities, obstacles to psychological and social order).
Contemplative awareness gave Axial cultures a psychological advantage in forming social order (including military order and organization) over "pagan" tribes, who had appropriated some of the advanced technologies
Modern rationalism (Enlightenment values, classical liberalism) pretty much just ignores the problem of spiritual order.*
Postmodern relativism rejects the concept of Axial spiritual order, at least as framed in the West, because it is "absolutist".
-----
* I don't agree with everything Wilber says here, but his summary is insightful:
https://www.lionsroar.com/liberalism-and-religion-we-should-talk/
excerpt:
The way it is now, the modern world really is divided into two major and warring camps, science and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other. And the key to getting these two camps together is first, to get religion past science, and then second, to get religion past liberalism, because both science and liberalism are deeply anti-spiritual. And it must occur in that order, because liberalism won’t even listen to spirituality unless it has first passed the scientific test. (Showing how that might happen was a major theme of my book, Sense and Soul.)
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness.
...
If you want to talk about Yarvin ,the ENR, NRx, etc. that is a different analysis of the "right wing".
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
excerpt:
The ["woke"] Brahmins that Yarvin claims to oppose have been empowered primarily by the rise of digital capitalism and the traditional financial establishment. Additionally, the “woke” ideology (what I call “totalitarian humanism”) that presently constitutes the self-legitimating ideological superstructure of the ruling class is not the sole creation of the Brahmins alone. Every ideological superstructure has a materialist base and class base(which in the case of totalitarian humanism would be digital capital, the tech revolution, “financialization” of the kind that has emerged from neoliberalism, the expanded technocratic class which is the product of the wider degree of specialization and the division of labor rooted in increased technological sophistication).
Additionally, “wokeness” is rooted in the wider infrastructure of statecraft which can be traced, at the irreducible minimum, to the collusion between the Frankfurt School and the OSS during WW2, followed by the CIA’s creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. While elements of the ideological framework of totalitarian humanism may have their roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s/1970s, in its present form “wokeness” represents a co-optation of those cultural patterns by the liberal wing of the capitalist class ( a specific strategy that was devised by Fred Dutton as far back as 1970). The insurgent sectors of the managerial class (primarily the expanded professional class and rising middle-class sectors among traditional outgroups) became the socioeconomic foundation for this co-optation, which allowed the liberal wing of capitalism to marginalize labor unions while cultivating these rising middle-class sectors as a replacement constituency for the traditional working class.
...
You would think that something as morally uplifting and socially progressive as affirmative action would be more loudly celebrated by universities, in that they would publicly bestow formal AA fellowships and AA awards to the recipients, similar to other grants and scholarships.
That way us oppressors could thank those deserved awardees for the hard tasks they are undertaking and their sacrifice for making the world a better place.
/sarc
That more or less do that, but using different labels, such as DEI, ESG, etc.
The "diversity" grifter industrial complex has been estimated by social scientists as being between a $1 BILLION to $8 BILLION business, depending on definitions.
There is no shortage of economic incentives for people with grievance studies degrees to take up careers as race grifters.
For some reason I don't recall it ever occurring to me before that affirmative action is *cheating*. But that's it. It's the basics.
It's a very Australian perception, I think, which is why I'll have to discuss it in my Law & Liberty piece with a bit of care. This means acknowledging the cheating was facilitated by the universities themselves and -- until this decision -- SCOTUS itself.
Evolutionary psychologists exploring the biological origins of human morals use the word "cheating" to explain what their game-theory models told them. See Samuel Bowles' 2008 Ulam lectures, Santa Fe Institute.
Unsurprisingly for a nation in large part founded by folk transported against their will and in large part unfairly. "Body Line" and Windies fast bowling can be seen as pointed payback insofar as team sports sublimate war.
It’s demise isn’t going to be widely mourned by most, but American history in the post-war era is the essential context, and if you want to start connecting dots the original Brown (in the mid-50s) decision is your most appropriate starting point. Chief Justice Earl Warren was the driving force behind that, and had, as governor of California during WWII, played a significant role in bringing about the internment of Japanese-Americans. It was always clear that that was a racist policy, since it was only applied on the west coast- not Hawaii, for example, where it would have led to the collapse of civilian society due to the exceptionally high percentage of citizens of Japanese ancestry, or the Midwest and east where their numbers were negligible. Anyway, Warren’s remorse over the mass injustice he had helped perpetrate was a silent factor in his efforts to win a unanimous decision in Brown, and therefore it is a seminal case in the heretofore unresolved struggle over racial status that plays on the mind of thoughtful American liberals.We Yanks have a mixed and muddled federal system, as you know, but be careful before weighing in - you might end up writing a book to try to make sense of it all. Good luck sista.
Thomas J's concurrence discusses a lot of this dreadful history. Reading it was like having a bucket of ice water tipped over me.
It’s a very twisted story that goes off in different directions over time. The Brown decision is recognized as a landmark but southerners worked around it rather assiduously from the start. It wasn’t really all that effective long term, but has always provided a bit of a balm to liberal guilt over racism.
This isn’t politics
Its religion
America wasn’t established by Anglicans but Puritans, who won the Religious Civil War of 1861-65. Military history used to teach it was the English Civil War again with New England the Puritan Victor, the South the defeated Cavaliers, even the Irish were again involved as cannon fodder on both sides, with the Scot Presbyterians making their own cameo from West Virginia and Kentucky/Tennessee (mostly on their own side). There’s a lot of truth in this and it was likely without either race or slavery being the issue -although it was.
Same again Reconstruction, same again one of Reconstructions repeat performances bringing Democracy to Iraq ⁉️
⁉️ said the Iraqi
or Afghanistan 🤣🤡
ALL HAIL PALLAS ATHENA, THE MOST BLOODTHIRSTY OF ALL THE GODS !
This isn’t law, and it’s not politics. It’s religion.
Or Prohibition.
Or Civil Rights.
It’s the REVEREND Martin Luther King, not Doctor King, or Mr. King.
It’s the worst kind of religion, they don’t know they’re religious.
“America wasn’t established by Anglicans but Puritans” unlike Australia, for example.
Or really England since the Glorious Revolution.
Wrong. Virginia (and the slightly larger Tidewater region), the most powerful state up to the US Civil War, was Anglican, and unlike the rest of the south in a number of ways. See Albion's Seed, Colin Woodard, Kevin Phillips, etc.
A number of credible social scientists have stated that "wokeism" is a dogmatic cult and a quasi religion, including black, liberal PhD Linguistics professor John McWhorter that wrote a book recently called WOKE RACISM.
One of the basic points McWhorter makes is that the civil rights and social justice movements have been taken over by social parasites, race grifters and posturers since the 1960s, as well as a vast surveillance state bureaucracy that was created by the 1960s civil rights laws to eradicate the vestiges of Jim Crow, which was a system of state-sponsored, actually racist, terrorism between the 1880s (when post-civil war reconstruction failed) and 1960.
My late father was born in Corsicana, Texas in 1926, into a family that had ancestors on both the Union/northern side and the Confederate/southern side of the civil war.
His first memory as a small child was seeing a lynching of a black man that was "on the wrong side of town after dark" that was murdered by being burned at the stake in the town square in front a compliant citizenry. He said the stench of burning human flesh was profoundly revolting.
One of the problems with the use of laws to try to reverse Jim Crow racism was that it created a "2nd Constitution" (and as noted, a surveillance and enforcement state) that was at odds with the original Constitution and that worked against the imperfect system of popular democracy, substituting elite, bureaucratic control.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/roots-partisan-divide/
imprimis. hillsdale. edu /roots-partisan-divide/
The anti-racism bureaucracy was increasingly aligned with what became postmodern-marxist "woke" ideology over time, providing funding for the education of the anti-racism work force and their careers, and various spin-offs that I call the race-grifter-industrial-complex (or woke-grifter-industrial-complex).
Economic neoliberalism and globalism was a huge boost to the race-woke-grifters, the professional-managerial class (PMC). Having stripped class conflict away from Marxism to create postmodern neo-marxism, the "woke", grifter "left" was then able to make itself useful to the globalists that were throwing the working classes under the bus by providing a cover of "anti-racist" virtue to the globalist corporate-state elites.
Musa Al-Gharbi, a black american from a family of military veterans and a Muslim convert and an excellent social scientist covers the origins of most or all of that stuff in explaining why upper middle class, college educated whites are more supportive of "wokeism" than working class non-whites, especially immigrants (who see the cruelty of things like Affirmative Action more clearly).
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/musa-al-gharbi-academic-truth-duncan-moench
www. tabletmag. com /sections/news/articles/musa-al-gharbi-academic-truth-duncan-moench
How the social disease of postmodern neo-marxism flourished in the era of suburban consumer culture:
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/complex-relationship-between-marxism-wokeness/
newdiscourses. com /2020/07/complex-relationship-between-marxism-wokeness/
Elite control of "wokeism"
The woke-grifter-industrial-complex:
$8 BILLION business
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement
Elite control of "wokeism" and the Neo-Feudal schemes of the globalist elites:
https://joelkotkin.com/our-neo-feudal-future/
It is time we examined what is meant by the term "racist". It is currently used to define anybody who goes against the current orthodoxy and suggests that perhaps, certain races do not perform as well in certain arenas. For a long time the IQ test was a measure of of intelligence. True, it was flawed but it was a useful indicator. When it turned out that certain ethnicities did badly at IQ tests, what happened? "They" simply decided to move the goal posts and declare that after all, IQ tests were irrelevant and biased.
I think that any form of affirmative action is demeaning, not only to academia in general but to the very people it is designed to help.
It is a clear fact that given independence, international aid, and all the opportunities we can afford, certain ethnic groups simply cannot make the grade in certain sectors. A hard and inconvenient truth. Unfortunately it is not an acceptable position to take, and if I was an academic, my job would be on the line.
Cognitive dissonance hardly covers it.
To give themselves maximum flexibility to redefine anything and everything to fit their emotive victim narratives, the "woke" hold to the (postmodern-relativist) "belief" that "reality is a social construct" (Lasch, Revolt of the Elites).
Thus, modern rationalism, classical liberalism, Enlightenment ideals, Constitutional order, all become mere "social constructs" that are tools of "white supremacy". Any arguments to the contrary are just more "proof" to the "woke" of "white supremacy".
The problem is that "wokeism" rapidly descends into chaos and insanity when faced with solving real world problems. Idiocracy was not an instruction manual.
I have to disagree. It’s not cheating if you’re playing by the rules, when you don’t also control the rules. You’re a lawyer? Of course, you’d advise your clients to work the system.
incoherent blather.
leftist rhetorical structure: memory hole, smears, deflection, gaslighting, cherry picked data to fit victim narratives, etc.
example:
brilliant, liberal, black, working class economist Roland Fryer stumbles across BML lies, publishes his findings, and is viciously attacked by the "woke" cargo cult cancel culture zombie mob.
https://fairforall.substack.com/p/roland-fryer-harvard
Hmmm. Ok.
OK, Groomer.
LMAO if the rules are rigged its not cheating
If the organization is dishonest it doesn’t make knowing participation dishonest
Why would you expect a university to be honest? They’re not your friends. If you’re butthurt about it, don’t attend.
The larger problem is that high-social-trust in social institutions (Constitutional order, banks, insurance, education, etc.), which is the foundation of the western/modern rationalist sense-making system (hierarchies of curated expertise), is being disrupted by postmodern values (relativism, nihilism, narcissism) and techno-economic innovation.
https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e4781b2bd9b5
what's bizarre is the distribution for all ethnicities, for such a supposedly competitive system that there is anyone getting in from the 5th decile just seems like a messed up system
I'm assuming many of the 5th decile and below admissions must be sportspeople, although that assumption may represent the triumph of hope over experience on my part. In Australia, an individual in the 5th decile or below on the ATAR would struggle to gain admission to _any_ university - even a crappy former CAE (Australian for polytechnic).
I guess what would make the data a lot clearer would be raw numbers as well, the acceptance rate might be high if there are just very few applications of special cases.
My partner made this point. 22 per cent of the 5th decile African-American applicants to Harvard getting admitted is alarming, yes - but 22 per cent of how many would be very good to know.
I guess the other issue is the distribution of scores, I could imagine a similar chart with UCAS points or something and that doesn't actually reflect the underlying value of the school qualifications.
If you become familiar with the ugly underbelly of the federal grant system that supports "diversity" (however defined) and attempts at elevating the "disadvantaged" classes in public education, the horror at the bottom end of the system is appalling.
My late wife was a vocational counselor for a liberal county and a liberal west coast state, and because of her European (Spanish/Catalan) education, she was offered a role in a research project to do psychometric evaluations of the welfare population and pilot "solutions".
What they found, similar to other similar projects in a number of other places, was that about 50% of the welfare clients had serious to severe cognitive impairments and "learning disabilities" mostly resulting from childhood poverty, trauma, exposure to parenting failures due to alcoholism and substance abuse, poor food, and so forth.
In state funded post-secondary education (community colleges and lower tier state universities), clinical psychologists have found that almost 30% of students suffering from either PTSD or borderline personality disorder, or a combination of both.
I attended two "in service" trainings by clinical psychologists about the extreme stress that social workers in education are under in dealing with those kinds of "impossible" people.
I was astonished to realize that the personality and behavioral disorders of the "impossible" social work clients (deep personality disorders and trauma) almost exactly described the radical-extremist elements promoting "PC" in the 1980s-1990s and now "wokeism" and cancel culture mobs.
The cultural-left's promotion of the "belief" that "reality is a social construct" has created a system in which the patients have taken over the insane asylum, literally.
An example of how insane radical-extremists on the "woke" "left" viciously mob liberal , black dissidents calling for a return to sanity in the education system:
https://www.fairforall.org/dr-tabia-lee/
I'm not a lawyer or an Aussie, just a Yank who enjoys Helen Dale, and in the name of fun and friendship I want to offer a nudge of dissent.
I think a great explanation for so much of American politics and history is revealed by this quote from our longshoreman philosopher, Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
My point being that back in the 1960s, it must have seemed like the right thing to do to put a gentle thumb on the scale for black Americans, just as a tiebreaker or helping hand in education and employment, as they had been on the shit-end of our society for centuries (I make no claims about the legality of this, I'm just taking the claim at face value); but fast-forward 50/60 years and now "Diversity" is a $10 billion-dollar industry and what was meant to be a small help to an oppressed segment of society has somehow metastisized into a bloated system of racial classification, where extra points are doled out for Hispanics, Arabs, women, gays, etc.
My real point is more or less: if AA had been maintained as only a slight boost and only strictly for ADOS (American descendants of slaves) instead of as this massive ubiquitous scheme for social engineering via race, it may have maintained some legitimacy.
I personally will never be opposed to any policy aimed at helping black Americans (and no, not Nigerian princes who pay their way into an Ivy, and same for West Indian aristocrats), but unfortunately their historical suffering has become a pretext for a massive bureaucratic putsch. And thus, pace Hoffer, this business became a racket, and like all rackets it eventually embodied the thing it was created to oppose.
> I personally will never be opposed to any policy aimed at helping black Americans (and no, not Nigerian princes who pay their way into an Ivy, and same for West Indian aristocrats), but unfortunately their historical suffering has become a pretext for a massive bureaucratic putsch.
Please rethink this sentiment. I feel very strongly that this sentence here encapsulates the entirety of the problem, both cause and effect. Americans in general seem disconnected from the Aristotelian notion of a golden mean - to lack any sense that virtue is connected to wisdom regarding when, where, and how far to push an idea. And so the American majority (or if you prefer, the American elite) is with you, and likewise refuses to oppose any policy aimed at helping American blacks. Nothing is too bizarre or too extreme for us. Show us an ideological cliff and we will jump off of it en masse.
I think it's easy to make a case that, especially in the 1960s, Aristotle's mean would be something like what affirmative action was, if one side you placed more radical measures like strict quotas and/or cash reparations and on the other side you placed no policy at all, that is: just expecting black Americans to immediately flourish after centuries of immiseration.
And while there do appear to be many types of ideological cliff diver, I'm not sure they're all diving from the same cliff, as things like reparations or quotas don't poll well, whether today or back then. But, as I said, back then a slight nudge or finger on the scale, limited only to ADOS, and only in areas like education and employment, seemed like a fair compromise to most people. (As opposed to our current racial-classification industrial complex.)
Also, my Aristotle is a bit rusty, but I don't think anyone expects a majority to practice wisdom through virtue or vice versa—that's hard enough for a philospher! That task was for our educated elite class, who decided black people were better off used as symbols of their enlightened purity and wisdom, as weapons to use to batter their opponents with (We love black people more than you do!), instead of figuring out ways to ameliorate their poverty and misery.
The immediate problem in the mid to late 1960s was that after the Kennedys and MLK Jr. were assassinated, and dozens of inner cities had been burned in race riots, the black elites made a deal with the establishment (including Nixon) to not only to make racial hiring and educational admissions practices illegal (which the 1964 Civil Rights act did), but to do more to aggressively open employment and educational opportunities via government programs. In exchange the black elites would calm their people, to the extent possible.
As John McWhorter points out, some black radical-extremists (and many non-radicals who later took up extremist rhetoric) realized that promoting actual revolutionary politics was less profitable than posturing about social oppression to get access to grant money.
This article, by a science historian and an economic socialist that is critical of "wokeism", is one of the best descriptions of the bizarre nature of race politics of that era:
https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
excerpt:
The First Privilege Walk
BY CHRISTIAN PARENTI
NOVEMBER 18, 2021
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
...
The so-called Privilege Walk, or Power Shuffle, is a workshop activity much beloved by the diversity training industry, in which a group of participants stand together on a line, then each take one step forward or backwards in response to a facilitator reading a series of statements such as: “If you’re a white male, take one step forward. If you were ever made uncomfortable by a joke about your ethnicity, gender, appearance, or sexual orientation, take one step back.” At the end participants find themselves arrayed along a continuum of “privilege.” Thus sorted, discussion ensues.
The Privilege Walk is now a standard element in the diversity training used by nonprofits, churches, universities, corporations, and even some parts of the U.S. military.1 Proponents of the Walk say it helps us “unlearn oppression” and “build alliances across difference.” Mainstream critics say the exercise propagates divisive identity politics and mock it as foundational to the Oppression Olympics.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn wrote an excellent book about all this called "Race Experts".
"The triumph of the race experts in many ways embodies the "harangue-flagellation ritual" writ large. A routine of black assertion and white submission came to the fore in the mid-1960s... This ritual cast blacks in the role of repressed, angry victims and whites in the role of oppressors who need to expiate their guilt....
....self-centeredness is promulgated in the name of social justice. Self-affirmation is equated with freedom, and freedom to elevate one's own group and one's self, even to the detriment of others, is equated with fairness and justice. In the self-esteem mentality—a mentality that, in the case of multicultural education, parades itself as the fulfillment of the civil rights revolution—personal liberation has become the goal."
All of this marks the transformation of the Old Left, concerned w wages etc, into the New Left, concerned with language manipulation and therapeutic self-esteem. Thus someone like Marcuse starts out as a European Marxist ostensibly devoted to the proletariat and ends up as an upscale guru selling "liberation" to bourgeois children. And so here we are a few generations later, with Leftism being a luxury good and the Permanent Revolution somehow always revolving around the feelings of upscale whites and their emotional needs. And, as we can see in so many spheres of life, their greatest need is to be seen as righteous and holy White Saviors.
Excellent, thanks. It is great that she has carried on the legacy of her father's work.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/19/reviews/970119.19delbant.html
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/724190.Race_Experts
i think her book touched too many taboos and examined too many touchy subjects for it to get the credit it deserved.
i find her dad and philip reiff to have been the best 20th century prophets of what the 21st century descent into infantile narcissism would look like.
moral narcissism—the desire to be seen as morally superior without having earned it, and most especially by preferring gooey self-satsifying sentiment over factual intellectual discourse (essentially the abdication of adulthood in favor of permanent childhood), as we see most clearly in the endless manifestations of victim mongering—is at the heart of the rot of so much of modern culture.
The elite is not monolithic, there are competing factions, some are anti-woke, some pro-woke. (see Christopher Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, 1990s.)
The main pro-woke faction are the digital, media-tech oligarchs. They are mostly backed by traditional Finance Capitalists (Democrats). The professional-managerial classes (corrupt journalists, educational bureaucrats, etc.) are the upper middle class allies of the "woke" elties. Globalist billionaires pull the strings of "woke" political puppets.
The anti-woke elites are traditional manufacturing capitalists, the Yeomanry (farmers, property owners, small businesses and their working class employees, Republicans). Their uneasy alliance with populist dissidents and nationalists (anti-globalists) is the only thing that keeps them politically viable on "red" states.