For Spanky
 

Exactly. The SAT is arbitrary. Asking people if they can read, and write and do math is just as an arbitrary test of merit and future success than picking them based on race. Anyone that would argue that "AA is no less arbitrary an admission factor than the SAT" is a moron. Equating AA with the SAT is such a stupid idea that it is hard to know how to address someone who would even consider such a stupid assertion as having even a drop of merit.

There is no valid empirical data that shows that students accepted under Affirmative action programs do just as well as the average student. It is a given that AA students have a tougher time. Her point of view is just simple denial. Among most people that deal in this area, the question is not whether AA students have a tough time, but the question is how to keep the AA students in school. Almost every large university has set up special programs to help AA students stay in school. A friend of mine from college, all he does he travel from university to university to help them set up programs to prevent the AA students from failing out. He is a firm supporter of AA but even he would laugh at the idea that AA students perfrom just as well as average students.



Yes it is absurd because it is inherintly contradictory to every other study I have read. Other studies( most put out by liberals) show that students from lower classes, even when they do well in school, have trouble succeeding ( as the liberals like to point out) because of the inherient tendency of the "aristocracy" to help their own advance. In addition, most universities have found that the biggest donors to the university are second generation alumni. People that are both alumi and children of alumni at the same time, tend to donate more. That is why the "development offices" of universities focus on what they call "generational alumi". Now that would seem to contradict the idea that children from blue collar families (whose parents are clearly not alumni) donate more to the university.


You asked if I read the interview. You may have read it but you clearly did not comprehend it. She clearly points out the fact that since most students that enter universities are from the upper classes that that make the system "not egalitarian or democratic". It was one of the points she most emphasized in the interview.

That is not her point.

Affirmative action programs have been consistently tried all over the world. In India with the untouchables, in Malaysia favoring the Malay over the Chinese, in Belgium favoring the Walloons, etc. etc. and it never helps remedy the problem it is attempting to fix, and usually makes the problem worse. The idea behind affirmative action is absurd, and not surprisingly to anyone with any common sense, the usual consequence of affirmative action programs are a huge backlash that makes the problem worse.

Loni Guanier is a joke. The fact that anyone takes her seriously is a serious condemnation of our current academic system. Like a Christian fundamentalist she manipulates the data to fit her theories. Anyone that critisizes her methods or her reasonsing is a bigot just like anyone that critisizes the accuracy of the bible is just an anti-Christian bigot.

The academic process and critical thinking she uses to reach her conclusions is no different from Pat Robertson's or from your average holocaust denier.

George Will on our friend Lani
 

Sympathy for Guinier
By GEORGE F. WILL
Newsweek

GUINIER BELIEVES BLACKS SHOULD HAVE SPECIAL RIGHTS. WELL, WHERE SHE WORKS, THEY DO.

GEORGE F. WILL

Lani Guinier deserves some sympathy. She is an academic and a liberal Democratic activist, so she probably cannot understand what the fuss was about. She probably rarely associates with people who think her ideas are strange. (After McGovern lost 49 states in 1972, a member of Manhattan's liberal literati exclaimed in bewilderment, "But everyone I know voted for him!") Many of Guinier's ideas are extreme, undemocratic and anticonstitutional. But they also are reflections or extensions of tendencies in today's academic thinking and public policy.

She believes majority rule is inherently problematic in America's incurably racist society. She favors federal imposition on state and local governments of rules that would generate results pleasing to groups she prefers. She says existing civil rights laws demand "a results-oriented inquiry, in which roughly equal outcomes, not merely an apparently fair process, are the goals." Any process is unfair if the outcomes it produces frequently disappoint Guinier's favored groups. She says "each group has a right to have its interests satisfied a fair proportion of the time." Each group, that is, among those groups that Guinier believes merit preference. She will decide what is a "fair" proportion. Her radical proposals include weighted voting, racial vetoes of majority actions and other measures to abridge or block majority rule.

Anyone shocked by Guinier's ideas has not been paying attention to developments in the culture and in public policy. We already have moved a long way toward Guinier's goal of a nation of grievance groups exploiting the coveted status as "victims" (of America's wickedness) to claim special rights and entitlements.

Guinier, believing results more important than rules, would dilute democracy in order to promote "progressive" social outcomes. Judicial activists have been lionized for doing just that. (Impatient with democratic debate about abortion policy? Get a court to discover a new "right.") Guinier believes blacks should have special rights. Well, where she works, they do. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania where some blacks angry about a conservative columnist destroyed virtually an entire press run of the newspaper, without any punishment.

She says that blacks who are not elected primarily by black votes are not "authentic" black leaders. "Authentic" blacks have deep roots in "the community." (Guinier, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law, is a wealthy tenured Ivy League professor; and she is an arbitrator of black "authenticity." She suggests that a black Republican can be only "descriptively black.") She says "authentic" blacks have a "cultural and psychological view of group solidarity." But many of liberalism's advanced thinkers embrace the idea that groups are homogeneous and that groupthink is natural and good. Affirmative action policies often are justified as ways of including "minority perspectives," as though racial and ethnic groups have (or "authentic" members of these minorities have) uniform "perspectives." Such tribalism is premodern and morally retrograde but it is all the rage where Guinier comes from: academia.

An implication of her writings is that only blacks can properly represent blacks. That is the theory of "categorical representation," which holds that the interests of particular groups can be understood and articulated only by members of those groups. This idea was codified years ago in the Democratic Party's quota system for convention delegates. The New Republic, calling for withdrawal of the Guinier nomination, denounced her "reductionist identity politics," the premise of which is that identities, and rights, derive from group membership. But that is the idea that has produced racial "set-asides," hiring quotas and other "race-conscious remedies," including the "race norming" of test scores to prevent "disparate impacts" of employment tests. (Under race norming, scores are segmented by racial groups and individual's scores are reported not in relation to all those taking the test, but only in relation to others in the individual's racial group. Race norming was outlawed in 1991 but the Clinton administration is promoting policies very similar.)

Illegal 'prejudice': People like Guinier, who affix the label civil rights" to every bit of their political agendas, have made it an empty phrase-a classification that no longer classifies. This, too, is a consequence of a "progressive" idea-"critical race theory," which is fashionable in many law schools. It holds that America is so saturated with racism that any social problem is a civil rights problem. Guinier believes the Voting Rights Act is violated by any legislative body where measures favored by certain government-approved minorities are often defeated. She purports to believe that under the Voting Rights Act as amended in 1982, such a pattern of defeats is itself proof of illegal "prejudice" that makes mandatory her "remedial" overthrow of the rules of American democracy. But it is impossible not to detect cynicism: How can she square what she (and she virtually alone) says Congress did, in 1982, with her dogma that white-majority legislatures cannot rise above America's pandemic hostility to blacks?

Speaking of cynicism, Ralph Neas, the "civil rights activist" who ran the campaign of lies and scurrilities against Robert Bork, argued on Guinier's behalf that senators should defer to a president's personnel choices. But Neas was a leader of the successful campaign for rejection of William Lucas, Reagan's choice for the position Guinier sought, because Lucas was a particularly objectionable phenomenon-a black conservative. Still, presidents generally should get the people they want. Guinier was an exception to that rule because she aggressively misconstrues the laws she would have been responsible for enforcing.

At the end of this debacle Clinton's attorney general was still describing Guinier's nomination as "superb," Clinton was claiming that he had just that day discovered what his friend of 20 years thinks, and the usual groups (the Congressional Black Caucus, feminists, etc.) were making the usual claim that Guinier is a "victim." Just another day in the "reinvention of government" by a "New Democrat." What next? Next, this lot will "fix" the economy and "reform" the health care system. Hang on.
PHOTO: George F. Will



Copyright (c) 1993, 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Interesting campaign tactic.......
 

Exactly. I have not seen it anywhere. But how would his readers know that. This is the perfect straw man tactic.

However, on this campaign we are doing a mailing to 200,000 people. I just went and saw all the pieces before they went out. It is an impressive amount of paper and it will be a little more effecitve than this media trick.

Money talks and Bull shit walks.

Interesting campaign tactic.......
 

Seems pretty easy to rectify.

1. Have your guy do something slightly idotic, but explicable.
2. Make sure a blogger finds out.
3. Send out an e-mail railing against the liberal establishment, and maybe even accuse Kaloogian of trying to set you up.
4. Done. No more dirty illegal immigrants.

For Spanky
 

The SAT is not a test of whether someone can read, write and do math (although all of those things are necessary to acheive above a minimum score). It is a test of ones ability to reason, along with, at the high end, a test of one's vocabulary, with a emphasis on vocabulary common to east coast elites.

I think her data is valid; at least as valid as the anecdotal evidence you present. At any rate, it would be surprising if AA admissions were able to fully keep up, at least initially.

I don't see it as absurd that someone from a blue collar background, who won their place in college against tougher odds, wouldn't be more successful in life after college, nor does it seem absurd that such a person would donate more to the institution that made them what they are than someone who was otherwise advanatged and who would therefor value the contribution of their university somewhat less.

Can you imagine why my high school classmates who went to segregated elementary schools might disagree with you? Keep a boot on someone's neck long enough, and they'll never get back up without a hand. One fucking full generation is all I ask.

Play misty for me
 

Kum bah fucking yah.

Given the single parent rates in the inner cities, a "full generation" is every 15 years. So by my calculation, we've now had at least three since Nixon.

Interesting campaign tactic.......
 

The SF Chronicle carried this story today. But they didn't really call out the most interesting point -- that, according to Kaloogian, The candidate said he hadn't recognized the error because "the military asked us to use our discretion and put things on the Internet that were nondescriptive ... (because) if we posted something that was easily identifiable, it could be a target."

Doesn't this detract from his "point," that there really isn't all that much violence in Iraq and that it's the evil liberal media's fault that people think there is?

In this instance, "detract from" = "show to be utter bullshit"

Interesting campaign tactic.......
 

Do you use the "borrow and spend as much as we want, we never have to pay it back!" line on the campaign trail?


And speaking of payback, when's our next poker game?

Play misty for me
 

Balt's classmates did not go to segregated elementary schools in an inner city.

Play misty for me
 

Oh, great. Now we're going to debate busing, too.

Play misty for me
 

I'm down

Play misty for me
 

Why do you think that? I didn't go to a defacto segregated elementary school until 3rd grade; I went to an elementary school that was just plain old skool segregated. As in no blacks allowed, regardless of where they live.

Yes, bussing was part of the desegregation solution. So were magnet programs. Anybody want to discuss the inherent racism in creating a plan to get more white students to go to a majority minority school by creating an honors program (which, in this case at least, backfired in spectacular fashion: from my class, every single student but one that participated in the magnet program was a minority. Social pressures among whites to stay at the other school were just too high.)?

Play misty for me
 

Let me guess: Duke lacrosse?

Play misty for me
 

Another anecdote that has informed my position on this issue: when I was in high school, I took a math class (precalc) in summer school to free up my schedule the next year. The class was desgined to allow students at the other high school, the honors high school, who had not started on the advanced math track to catch up and take calculus their senior year. I was the only one in the class who was not taking the class for this purpose, although not everyone in the class was at the other high school.
Everyone else in the class was black or hispanic. Everyone else in the class had essentially the same story: when they enrolled in junior high school, they were automatically placed in the lower track. The smartest kid in the class (who eventually ended up with a masters degree in math) was even put into remedial math initially, the standard class for students in the English as a Second Language class. The problem? He was a native English speaker and didn't speak any Spanish. But his last name was Lopez, and his parents weren't very good at fighting the system (luckily for him, a couple of years later a teacher took notice and ramrodded the school district into correcting its mistake).

That class was clearly a form of affirmative action. I had to fight to get into the class, as I wasn't the target. If it hadn't been there, Mr. Lopez wouldn't have had the prereqs to get into the math program he eventually got into (probably, with the help of an affirmative action program at his school). The summer program was only offered one year, though. The next year's students were just SOL.

Play misty for me
 

Well, clearly that Lopez guy's parents just didn't care, and sins of the fathers, etc.