Links to Consider, 8/1
Wesley Yang and Adam Mortara on Scotus on Harvard; Daniel Gordis on Israel's apocalypse; Peter Gray on letting children play; Sanjana Friedman and Brandon Gorrell on self-driving cars
Of all of the post-mortems on the Supreme Court ruling on Harvard’s affirmative action policy, the one I liked the best was from Adam Mortara, interviewed by Wesley Yang.
this is either a 9.5 or 9.9, out of 10, of what Students for Fair Admissions was asking for. That was more than I expected, even after the argument. There were essentially zero qualifications. The one thing that we knew was coming, was the statements made in Part 6 of the majority opinion about essays. And then it's immediately taken back with “Don't you dare construct an essay bypass route to this decision.” The next two sentences are just fabulous. More than we could possibly have asked for. There's an opinion from Justice Kavanaugh and you think to yourself “Oh, my gosh, what is he saying is okay?” And he's not saying anything is okay. There's nothing taken back. The concurring opinions of Justice Thomas is a tour de force which will go unrecognized by the mainstream for all the reasons that he is so maligned. It's incredible. I had my 12-year-old daughter reading it. And then, on a rather personal note, I called my wife and she couldn't even understand me, because I was bawling. I'm in tears
My hope is that this decision marks a societal milestone. Go back to Brown vs. Board of Education, in 1954. One can argue that Brown reflected the deeper mood of the country, which was that it was time for racial segregation to end. Southern governors resisted, in Little Rock in 1957 and in Birmingham in 1963, but the cultural tide had turned against them.
The parallel I am suggesting is that much of the country supports the latest Supreme Court ruling. The time has come to end racial set-aside systems, including minority contracting rules, corporate plans for specific numbers of minority hires, and so on. No doubt the Presidents of Harvard and Princeton will stand in the doorway, trying to block race-blind admissions, but the cultural tide has turned against the progressives on this one.
Daniel Gordis wrote last week,
It no longer matters what side any of us were or are on. Israel as we once knew it no longer exists. It may heal, it may not. …
Yes, we needed judicial reform. Almost everyone knows that. But we needed unity more than that. And we could have had both.
And today, any semblance of unity, or even the possibility of restoring unity, died. More precisely, Israeli society as we knew it was murdered.
By the time this post goes up, there probably will have been more developments. I expect that the same apocalyptic sentiments would emerge in the U.S. if Mr. Trump were to win in 2024.
Research also reveals that children consider play to be activity that they themselves initiate and control. If an adult is directing it, it’s not play. The joy of play is the joy of freedom from adult control. Other research reveals that the rates of emotional breakdowns and suicides among school-aged children decline markedly every summer when schools shut down and rise again when schools open.
Pointer from Jonathan Haidt.
Sanjana Friedman and Brandon Gorrell write,
Given the data unambiguously shows AVs are safer than human drivers by several factors, and thus have significant life-saving potential, why are local activists, officials, and agencies in such vehement opposition? … what if opposition to AVs has nothing to do with safety at all?
Organized labor stands in lock-step opposition to the AV rollout, ostensibly for safety concerns. But it’s worth noting a successful rollout of the technology would mean less human labor on the road.
AV means “autonomous vehicle,” aka self-driving car. Imagine that the political process we have now had been in place in 1900. Would we still be traveling by horse and buggy?
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Gordis wrote:
"Yes, we needed judicial reform. Almost everyone knows that. But we needed unity more than that. And we could have had both."
"And today, any semblance of unity, or even the possibility of restoring unity, died. More precisely, Israeli society as we knew it was murdered."
Gordis, a man of the Left, is not only semi-hysterical, he fails to explain just how Israel "could have had both" reform and unity. Over time the self-perpetuating Israeli Supreme Court, in a country which lacks a written constitution, has arrogated powers to itself which properly belong to the legislature and executive. The Left, having been eclipsed politically as a result of the Oslo Accords and Gaza withdrawal disasters, and the displacement of Leftist Ashkenazim by more conservative Sephardim and Mizrahim, clings to power through its continued control of the media, the universities, and above all, the judiciary and the legal bar. They never tried to reform the judiciary when they could have. They refused to participate in good faith in reforming it, and are not going to accede to reining it in and confining it to its proper function, the interpretation (where needed) and application of the law, rather than making ex cathedra pronouncement on laws' "reasonableness" without reference to any legally established standards, only unstated Left policy preferences of the day. Even Gordis admits the situation is untenable, he evidently just wishes that a left-controlled legislature could have made cosmetic changes that wouldn't have really upset Left institutional control. He seems to be quite OK with what was the highly undemocratic status quo.
The larger problem than affirmative action in university admissions is a multi-billion dollar diversity industry pushing toxic nonsense that feeds into ESG scores and provides, through civil rights lawfare and activist mobbing, an enforcement mechanism for cartelising corporate finance. Yes, the Bakke basis for such lawfare is now closed, but the Griggs v Duke Power “disparate impact” jurisprudence is still operative.