"AFFIRMATIVE ACTION" AND LAW SCHOOL

The essential first step to an understanding of Leftism is that Leftists do NOT care about the people they claim to care about. They care about their own personal glorification only. What they hunger after is an appearance of righteousness and wise nobility -- and an appearance of righteosness is indeed beneficial to almost anybody. Righteousness is no substitute for being right, however -- but Leftists don't care about that. Just the appearance will do them fine.

"Affirmative action" (a nice name for racial discrimination) is a perfect example of that. If Leftists really cared about minorities, they would abandon "affirmative action" immediately. Conservative commenters have been making that point for many years so all I want to do here is report a small personal example of how "affirmative action" actually works:

When I was teaching sociology in a major Australian univerrsity over two decades ago, I had in my class an Aborigine (Australian black). Just to get as far as university was a major feat for an Aborigine but the Australian government has for many decades had schemes in place to facilitiate black entry to higher education and the student I am referring to was the beneficiary of one of those schemes.

That he had got so far, however, meant that he could not be failed. Since he attended only a minority of the classes he was supposed to attend with me and showed little more than a sense of grievance in anything he said, I gave him a fail mark for the course. The School of Sociology, however, gave him a Credit mark for the year overall. His Sociology course was one that he had elected to take as one component towards a law degree but Sociology is in general vastly less demanding than Law so I shudder to think what his performance in his Law courses must have been.

He graduated, of course. And he was then immediately hired as a lawyer by a legal organization that represents blacks in court and elsewhere. They could hardly have done otherwise. Not to hire him would have been "racism". So the upshot of "affirmative action" in this case was that blacks came to be represented in court by probably the most incompetent lawyer in the whole country! Was that good for blacks?

When anybody points out ways in which "affirmative action" is bad for blacks (See, for instance, the research on law school admissions by Richard Sander -- here and here and here), however, Leftists respond not with concern about the problem but rather with rage and abuse towards the person revealing the problem -- plus attempts to deny or cover up the problem. They HAVE to respond with rage and denial. To do otherwise would be an admission of getting it grossly wrong and that would not be good for the image of wise nobility that they project for themselves. It would certainly deprive them of one of their major claims to righteousness and that would never do. Too bad about the minorities whom their policies hurt. Judge Clarence Thomas has of course recently waxed eloquent about how "affirmative action" hurt him.

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL MY AMERICAN READERS!

And eat as much as you want of whatever you want. Almost all of the food and health "wisdom" that gets preached at you daily via the media is just another form of bigotry. The balance of evidence is against most of the claims that you hear. A browse through my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog will assure you of that.

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ELSEWHERE

The revenge of the paleoconservatives: "The simple truth of economics is that not every business -- not even every American business -- deserves to survive. Bolstering economically unviable American businesses misallocates resources and deprives deserving American companies of the resources they need to stay ahead. But Buchanan and his ilk see economics in stark terms: buying American good, buying foreign bad. They ignore the fact that Americans do not have unlimited supplies of cash -- that if Americans are forced to buy poorly made, expensive American products, well-made American products may suffer the consequences. If the Republican Party embraces Buchanan-esque paleoconservative economics, it will precipitate prolonged recession. The Democratic Party will tout Keynesian economics as a response, necessitating higher taxes and massive government growth. The paleoconservative nightmare -- bigger government -- is the likely outcome of a paleoconservative economic program."

Dianne Feinstein, enemy of the left? "Last year, ultra-liberal elements within the Democratic Party waged a heated political battle against Sen. Joe Lieberman, their vice-presidential nominee of just six years earlier. But if you thought that liberal cannibalism stopped with the attack on Connecticut's junior senator, think again. The left wing has now set its sights on California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, another centrist Democrat who has failed to walk in lockstep with the increasingly puritanical left. Why are the hardcore lefties so upset with Feinstein? In August, she voted for a bill reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- a vote they interpreted as a thumbs-up for widespread, unchecked domestic spying by the Bush administration."

British bureaucrats lose even MORE files: "At least two more CDs that could leave thousands of people open to identity fraud have been reported missing by staff at HM Revenue & Customs this week, The Times has been told. Police have started an investigation into the loss of the unencrypted files, which went missing in transit from tax offices in Washington, Tyne & Wear, and contain "sensitive information" including national insurance numbers and dates of birth. They were sent to offices in London and are yet to be accounted for. The loss of these files are in addition to a series of recent blunders by HMRC, including the announcement this month that a CD-Rom that contained information on 15,000 Standard Life customers had been lost.... Further questions about the standards of data protection at HMRC were raised yesterday by a solicitor who works routinely with the prosecution arm of the HMRC. Shawn Williams, of Rose, Williams & Partners, a legal firm in Wolverhampton that deals with tax fraud cases, said that his firm frequently received discs that contained personal data from the HMRC with the password included"

Britain's latest prohibition: Baby milk: "The advertising of powdered milk for babies on television, in the national press and through a NHS leaflet given to mothers will be banned from January, as part of a new EU directive on infant formula. The ban supports the Government's policy to encourage breast-feeding."

Deceptions about poverty: "Most of the income received by people 65 years old and up is not counted statistically as earnings. Only 24 percent of their incomes are earnings. Most of their incomes are from pensions or other sources known as "unearned income," such as returns on investments. It should hardly be surprising that people who have been around a long time would have accumulated more money in the bank and maybe have a little nest egg in a mutual fund, each of which provides a stream of income during their retirement years, even if that income does not get counted as earnings. Despite a drumbeat of political rhetoric depicting the elderly as being in dire economic conditions, the actual incomes of the elderly are more than four times what their earnings statistics might suggest - or what politicians can claim, citing those statistics.... There are of course some elderly people who are poor, just as there are some poor people in every age bracket. But statistics cited by politicians, journalists, and others who inflate the number of the poor need both scrutiny and skepticism."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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