More Change
The fight for racial preferences is alive and well in America. Via PLF, here’s the newest member of Magna Cum Blogroll – Discriminations:
Is there anyone left in America (other than a recently arrived traveler or two from outer space) who believes that the Obama administration favors post-racial policies? If so, and if they’re able to read (which is doubtful), they should take a look at the brief the administration recently filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit supporting the University of Texas’s desire to return to “race-conscious” admissions. As noted by Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity (which along with the Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a brief opposing this return to racial discrimination)
[t]he brief is a full-throated endorsement of such discrimination, and it goes out of its way to say that the administration will support it at the K-12 level, too, as well as throughout university admissions: “In view of the importance of diversity in educational institutions, the United States, through the Departments of Education and Justice, supports the efforts of school systems and post-secondary educational institutions that wish to develop admissions policies that endeavor to achieve the educational benefits of diversity in accordance with [the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision upholding the use of preferences by the University of Michigan law school].”
There is, for anyone who has followed Obama’s career before the campaign and after the election, nothing surprising here. Nor is there anything surprising about the fact that the usual suspects of the higher education establishment are supporting UT, arguing in their brief that universities have a First Amendment right to discriminate in admissions if such a policies “best meet their needs.” The value of “inclusiveness” is so great, in their view, that they support the right of universities to exclude some applicants who would have been admitted but for their race.Those same groups (for the most part), however, do not believe that religious student organizations have a First Amendment right to admit members (or not) based on whether applicants share the religious beliefs around which the groups are organized. The education organizations believe that the First Amendment rights of the education institutions trump whatever rights their students may have to organize groups that reflect their views.
The journalist A.J. Liebling famously said that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” To the grandees of American higher education, apparently, the First Amendment belongs only to the institutions that ladle it out as they see fit.
Why not treat every citizen of the United States of America equally, without exception, and without regard to color, class, or creed, that we may all enjoy the dignity of rising, falling, failing, and achieving on our own fortune and merit? In short, equal treatment:
Life is many things. For instance, it is famously ironic – no one escapes alive. But life is not fair. Humanity is inherently unequal. To wit, the same God who made Brad Pitt made Danny Devito.
Fairness is a subjective illusion. No two individuals or environments are equal. Attempts to create fairness only shift unfairness’ burden. Even where necessary or justifiable – and there is never a consensus as to when shifting the burden of unfairness is justifiable – doing so is nevertheless unfair.
In an unfair world equal treatment is the least unfair policy, and may be the only equality, and dignity, society can provide. Equal treatment should be the policy of individuals and private institutions. Equal treatment must be the policy of local, state, and federal governments, as well as public institutions. Equal treatment rises above every brutish form of collectivism and treats people as individuals. We can neither give nor ask for more.
I suppose equal treatment doesn’t leve enough room for political graft, as Instapundit would say.
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” That’s a good lede for this disturbing bit of change news, via Reason’s Matt Welch, who informs that mainstream media wonks are pushing “for an unprecedented federal government intrusion into the free press. And its alarming proposals are gaining a sympathetic audience on Capitol Hill.”
In March 2009, McChesney and John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation, penned a widely circulated story for the progressive weekly calling for a journalism “stimulus” costing $60 billion over the next three years. Provisions included a $200 tax credit for newspaper subscriptions, the elimination of postage rates for magazines receiving less than 20 percent of their revenue from advertising, and taxpayer support for “a well-funded student newspaper and a low-power FM radio station” at “every middle school, high school and college.”
In 2005 the same duo had published a book whose subtitle complained that the American media “destroy democracy.” Now they pitched their plan to save the media as a way to “sustain” the country’s “democratic infrastructure.” Apparently a lot can change in just four years. “Only government,” McChesney and Nichols concluded in the Nation piece, “can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.”
McChesney and Nichols have expanded their argument to book length in The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. As the title implies, the authors see the current crisis—during which several major media companies have declared bankruptcy and shuttered century-old newspapers—as a cleared site on which central planners can construct the kind of journalism McChesney and Nichols pined for when savaging the corporate media. “Journalism,” they claim, “is a public good that is no longer commercially viable. If we want journalism, it will require public subsidies and enlightened policies.”
Emphasis added. Also added: my opinions that racial preferences entrench the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism, and government colluding with mainstream media is statist garbage.
The sad thing is that when the large insurance companies start gaining momentum and the small ones close, people will misconstrue it as, not a result of this health car bill, but as proof of a need for more regulation.
I can only try my best to laugh at the absurdity of people… what a strange and wondrously foolish species.
this wound up on the wrong thread… damn.
John calls humans Hairless Apes with Car Keys. I think he’s right.
From Mark Levin at PJmedia:
“Tocqueville foresaw a slow death of freedom. He feared that the power of the central government would gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives, and he was afraid that we would welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we controlled it.
Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…
The tyranny he foresaw for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.” The vision and even the language anticipated Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville described the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to regulate every aspect of our lives.
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
Tocqueville thought we would not be bludgeoned into submission; we would be seduced. He foresaw the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that would ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state. His nightmare vision is brilliantly and terrifyingly prescient:
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Roger all that. Tocqueville had it right, and it’s exactly what has happened on his old continent. Europe has fallen under precisely that sort of tyranny, and our would-be tyrants thought they could do the same here.”