CNN says "Scalia blasts 'judge moralists'"

"Now the Senate is looking for moderate judges, mainstream judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?" he said, to laughter and applause.

Now I'm not in any particular way formally educated about matters of law, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the U.S. Constitution was written in a (purposefully?) under-determined language. I dare say that there is legitimate disagreement about the proper interpretation of many aspects of the Constitution. How can there not be room for interpretation over lines like this? -- "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

An aside: I'm partial to the Presumption of liberty

Following up on my last post, on the emerging ultra-left/ultra-right alliance, I find this piece about Stormfronters planning to protest the war in Crawford, TX:

I'm driving out to Crawford, Texas tomorrow, Friday August 26th to help put up a White Nationalist voice in the protest against Bush's War for Israel that was started by Cindy Sheehan....We don't want leftist Johnny-come-latelys who are misleadingly protesting this war as if the war is about oil (not true), or as if it's right-wing patriots who launched this war (not true) to hijack the issue from us.

We want to challenge these leftists with the fact that their leftist leaders, like Hillary Clinton, are on the same War for Israel team as the cowardly Republicans who have been bought and paid for in the Senate, House, White House, and Media by the Jewish Neocon political machine.

I know that for any political cause, people look for allies in order to make your cause seem like a popular movement, but I think the anti-war left is making a monumental error in reaching out to the radical right. To put it simply: while the WNs will join them in opposing the war the WNs hate the left and will likely harm them. It is simply in the nature of these zealots to be violent.

But, I am afraid that the ultra-left will not realize this until it is too late.

Following political movements one often finds bizarre events that are, individually, part of a greater whole. One of these movements is the forming coalition between the ultra-left and the ultra-right, and can be found by examining this article from the ultra-left wing Portland Indymedia. Got that? Right-wing Racist, David Duke, is writing for a left-wing publication. Now, on the surface, this seems bizarre, but if one remembers Duke's opposition to the war, the fact that he is anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, one can find enough commonalities to make a left-right union believable.

And remember, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader ran on the same party's ticket.

As global demand for energy increases, serious decisions need to be taken about future energy policy.

The obvious solution to many of the problems is greater use of nuclear energy. The raw materials (uranium and thorium) are abundant; and pollution to the atmosphere is minimal compared with fossil fuels. Global warming could be controlled or reversed. As a bonus, it would reduce dependence on the unstable territories of the Middle East. (Incidentally, as a puzzle for Christian fundamentalists, why did God give all the oil to the Muslims? Does he have a perverse sense of humour?)

Yet environmentalists, with honourable exceptions like James Lovelock, persist in objecting to nuclear energy. The main objection is to the hazards of nuclear waste.

I argue that the dangers of nuclear waste have been greatly exaggerated. Unnecessary fears are delaying urgent decisions, and artificially inflating the costs of the nuclear option, because excessive costs of waste disposal and decommissioning are built into the cost estimates.

Of course, there are risks, but they are relatively easily controlled. (I found a useful source of information on the health risks of radiation here.) I would make the following points:

1. In deciding on energy policy, the risks of all the options should be considered. Fossil fuels create pollution and greenhouse gases. Wind power involves building and maintaining tall structures, which is inherently risky. Or suppose it takes a million solar panels on rooftops to replace one nuclear plant. It is a safe bet that some people will be killed and injured in installing and maintaining them.

2. The dangers of radioactivity itself are not as great as popularly supposed. Monitoring in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has shown that long-term cancer rates are not much higher than normal. No increase at all has been found in birth defects. (Radiation is mutagenic, but many of the mutations are recessive.) The effects of the Chernobyl radiation leaks are also much less than popularly supposed. (To quote one lunatic comment I found on an anti-nuclear website, ‘Chernobyl is the clearest single message to humanity that Nuclear Technology is not an appropriate exercise of human intelligence. It is omnicidal [sic, meaning ‘killing everyone’]’. The reality is that out of some 5 million people seriously exposed to radiation, a few thousand cases of cancer (mainly thyroid) have been attributed to the leak, and most of these have been successfully treated. According to a BBC report. ‘Fortunately, thyroid cancer is a very treatable disease, so few of the 2,000 who have developed it as a result of Chernobyl have died’. It is difficult to get accurate figures, but if we disregard hysterical claims, the true death toll from this worst-ever peacetime nuclear incident is probably less than that of an average air crash. [Added 6 September: The New York Times has a report today here (requires free subscription) on a new study of the Chernobyl disaster. This gives an estimate of 4,000 for the ultimate death toll, mainly due to the expected long-term increase in various cancers. This remains to be seen, but in any case 4,000 deaths, though deplorable, would be far below the hysterical claims of the anti-nuclear nuts, and also below the death toll of a medium-sized natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, flood, etc). And this is the worst nuclear accident that has ever happened or is ever likely to happen.]

3. Most nuclear waste is ‘low-level’, and practically harmless, unless you sit on top of it for weeks.

4. A small proportion of waste is highly radioactive, but most of the radiation decays quickly, and the waste is only dangerous for a few years or decades, not centuries.

5. There is the threat of terrorists using nuclear waste in ‘dirty’ bombs, and security precautions would be needed to prevent this, but no more than for many other purposes. Again, the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is relevant. The idea that cities could be rendered permanently uninhabitable by a dirty bomb is absurd. Radioactive fallout in urban areas literally goes down the drain after a few days of rainfall. I would be much more worried about terrorists hijacking a fuel tanker and driving it into a crowd.

6. This leaves the problem of plutonium and a few other substances with serious long-lasting radioactivity. Plutonium is not only radioactive but highly toxic. This gives the scaremongers the opportunity to manufacture nightmare scenarios. A tiny particle of plutonium dust in the body can prove fatal. Therefore if a kilo of plutonium were ground into dust and scattered in the atmosphere, thousands of people could be killed. So the lesson is: don’t grind plutonium into dust and scatter it in the atmosphere! Of course, in pure form plutonium can also be used to make nuclear bombs, but nuclear waste contains plutonium only in low concentrations, and could not be used for bombs. One of the absurdities of the present situation is that weapons-grade plutonium has been taken out of bombs (as part of post-cold-war arms reductions) and is being held in storage because politicians cannot decide to build new nuclear plants!

7. But the trump card of the objectors is that plutonium will still be dangerous for millennia (it has a half-life of over 20,000 years). Extraordinary (and costly) measures are therefore needed to ensure that it cannot in any conceivable circumstances leak out, even in the very distant future. This seems to me wholly misconceived. It is absurd to worry about what may happen in future millennia, but there are two broad alternatives. Either civilisation will have collapsed, possibly due to nuclear war, in which case a bit more plutonium will be the least of our descendants’ worries. Or civilisation will have survived, in which case our descendants will be able to look after themselves. In particular, they will know better than we do how to extract plutonium from waste, and to cure cancer and other ailments. The responsible approach is not to bury plutonium inaccessibly deep in the ground, or in the ocean bed, but to keep it securely stored, in such a way that it can be dealt with by the appropriate authorities whenever they wish to, using future technologies we cannot yet imagine.

Well, that’s just my opinion. I don’t claim any expertise on the subject, but most of those who make kneejerk objections to nuclear energy don’t have special knowledge either. They just rely on the public’s ignorance and the prejudice against anything involving the word ‘nuclear’.

"The existing order in America - today - is intolerable and must be destroyed." - "Geoff Beck" at Majority Rights

I normally despise the Southern Poverty Law Center; no leftist organization today devotes as much energy to slandering and comparing immigration restrictionists to the most vile elements in society, while ignoring extremists on the radical-left, as they do (there is one possible exception: Political Research Associates). However, their recent Intelligence Report on terrorist incidents by the radical-right in the US over the past 10 years is extremely important and should not be ignored. I urge everyone to read it or, at the very least, browse over it.

The report is wrong to understate the threat of animal-rights-extremists like Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, simply because none of their attacks have yet resulted in any deaths. Simply because nobody was killed does not mean that it was not a terrorist incident. Many of the incidents mentioned in their report did not result in any deaths, yet they reported them anyways. This is at the height of hypocrisy and they downplayed the threat of them for a simple reason: as a leftist organization, they sympathize with many of the goals of these two groups. You see this sort of thing regularly on leftist blogs (such as this one where the ALF and ELF are simply called "activists," despite the fact that they bomb and burn various targets in order to discourage [read: terrorize] and stop activities they disagree with) and you see none of them mentioning that the ALF and ELF developed out of the Earth First! organization, which publishes materials designed to help followers develop devices to kill people and terrorize the populace. The exact same things happened with some rightists back in the 1990s when the Clinton Administration proceeded to crack down on radical militia groups and white nationalist organizations.

And, contrary to the SPLC report, the FBI and the myriad of law enforcement agencies in the US have not ignored the threat from the radical-right. The most recent Congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller devotes the same amount of space to the radical-right as they do to animal-rights radicals (three paragraphs; most of the report is focused on Islamist terrorist activity). If law enforcement has been ignoring the radical-right so much, then how come they have stopped so many of the incidents described in their report?

One thing that many have ignored is the moral support and sympathy that the radical-right [and radical-left] has provided to Islamist terrorists. Just to give you a small slice of this phenomenon, here's a quote from Walter Laqueur's article, "What to Read (and Not to Read) about Terrorism," in the Summer 2002 issue of Partisan Review (sorry, not online):

Leaders of the American neo-Nazi scene were full of admiration for the attackers of September 11. Billy Roper of the National Alliance said that he wished his followers had half as much testicular fortitude as the suicide pilots. Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) declared that 9/11 was a victory for Walhalla, because the enemy of our enemy is our friend; and he also wished that his comrades were as brave as the Arabs. Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party was quoted saying that a dozen-and-a-half very brave people were willing to die for what they believed and that it was a disgrace that among a hundred and fifty million white Aryans in America, so few were willing to do the same. Martin Lindstedt of the Missouri Militia declared that he wished the Arabs had stolen a hundred jumbo jets full of "Talmudic Khazar mamzers, criminal regimeist whiggers, niggers, gooks, beaners, etc." and crashed them into the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI building, all fifty state capitols, and the TV stations--he would have called it a damn good start. Other spokesmen of this camp recalled Blitzkrieg and the exploits of Otto Skorzeny, who had been the commander of Hitler's praetorian guard.

There was a little problem. The attackers had not, after all, been pure Aryans. But William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the bible of American neo-Nazis, overcame this difficulty. Not all people in Afghanistan were greasy, black haired, swarthy, and hooknosed. Some of these people were of Aryan origin, following the Aryan conquests and colonization of Central Asia thirty-five hundred years ago. The terrorists were obviously the descendants of the Aryans.

Holocaust deniers such as David Irving and Robert Faurisson in France pleaded that they had been right all along. Irving compared the killing of innocents in New York by "nineteen intelligent and virile young Muslims" to the killing of innocents in World War II by Allied bombings. Like Faurisson, he believed that it was all Israel's fault, with one imaginary Holocaust leading to a real one.

Thus, the great majority of American neo-Nazis took the position that the terrorists had been right. The U.S. government was the guilty party, and they welcomed the attacks. From the superpatriots of forty years ago, they have been moving to nihilism and pan-destructionism. The enemy was not just Washington, but the American people in its majority, because they were either too stupid or too lazy to share Nazi ideas. The primary loyalty of these people was no longer to their country (which was no longer theirs), certainly not to places like Washington and New York. All this would be of limited interest except for the fact that some neo-Nazis have been dabbling in terrorism. In their bookshops they sell things such as the Militiaman's Handbook and handbooks by pseudonymous authors such as "Macaba," and some of them have been trying to obtain biological agents and chemical poisons. This opens perturbing perspectives on homeland defense against future terrorist attacks, at a time when such attacks can be carried out by very small groups of people. The publications of these circles are neither in Arabic nor in Pushtu, and there is a distinct paper trail. The question is whether anyone is paying attention, even though it may amount to group profiling and a violation of human rights.

The European extreme Right and the neo-Nazis reacted similarly. Horst Mahler, once upon a time a pillar of Baader-Meinhof, today the most prominent spokesman of the German extreme Right, congratulated the terrorists and expressed solidarity. So did the Russian neo-fascists--they believed it served the Americans right for having brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union, for interfering in Chechnya, Serbia, and Central Asia. A few European neo-Nazis came out in favor of neutralism--let imperialist America and the crazy Arabs fight it out somewhere. But the consensus of the overwhelming majority of neo-Nazis from Sweden to Italy was solidarity with the terrorists.

Why has so little attention been paid to the reaction of the extreme Right and the neo-fascists? They have little access to the mass media, to be sure, and their numbers are not that great (nor are they as small as often believed). But in the age of easy access to weapons of mass destruction, large armies are not needed to launch deadly attacks. Could it be that there is an uncomfortable resemblance between anti-globalization, antiAmericanism, and anti-Zionism? The Italian Red Brigades also welcomed the attacks. In a long programmatic statement published a day after their murder of a Labour Ministry official they warmly welcomed September 11. If one were to delete certain words such as "armed struggle," "revolutionary strategy," and "permanent offensive," this could have been written by someone on the extreme Right or even one of the jihadists.

This is why these radical-right groups should not be ignored. It's only a matter of time before we start seeing the Islamist terrorists and the radical-right developing mutually beneficial relationships like they did in the past that may develop into outright collaboration in terrorist attacks. Already we see this happening with radical-right black nationalist groups like the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, Hispanic nationalists like the Nation of Aztlan, and white nationalist groupings like the Aryan Nations, Alhusseini Dynasty, and Divine Right Order.

Read the report. Know thy enemy.

Unlike many (most?) people I don't follow Iraq too closely. So what's up with this about Islam being the official religion have veto power over secular law? The veto power part sounds an awful lot like what the Iranians are trying to throw off (well, the Iranians that matter, the modern secular ones). I'm not particularly surprised...any predictions on what's going to go down in Iraq over the next few years? I mean, is it going to be a real state as opposed to three quasi-states?

Due to academic commitments over the past few months I haven't had the chance to write up any replies to any of Randy's prior posts concerning the subject of "Eurabia" or to even begin reading Bat Ye'or's book, which Randy had not read at the time of his postings. Having finally begun reading the book, I feel that it is time to begin to to dispel some of his assertions. The first is this:

For instance, searching on Google for the keywords "Euro-Arab Dialogue" returns a bit over four thousand, up from under a thousand the last time I checked, back in 2002. There's even a two references to the Euro-Arab Dialogue in the top 10 hits returned by Google which aren't Ye'or's endlessly copied articles. This compares to 33.5 million hits for "European Union," 439 thousand for "Commonwealth of Independent States," a bit over three million for "ASEAN," 3.7 million for NAFTA, and almost 1.4 million hits for "Mercosur" or "Mercosul." I'd have expected that such an important group as the Euro-Arab Dialogue--the central body behind Eurabia, after all--would have a bit of a higher presence outside of Ye'or's literature than it does. Surely more people would have noticed by now?

Then again, reading the various non-Ye'or descriptions of what the Euro-Arab Dialogue is supposed to do and what it has actually done, I begin to suspect that accepting Ye'or's thesis about the Euro-Arab Dialogue is something like believing that the Canada-Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group is actually a mechanism intended to ensure Canadian military participation in Taiwan's upcoming war of independence against China.

Contrary to what Randy is saying, the Euro-Arab Dialogue is not a formal institution and really has never been used in a formal diplomatic context. Nor is it a fantasy invention of Ye'or, as is implied in his post. Indeed, if he had of read just a few pages of Ye'or's book and looked up her citations before writing his posts, he would have found that Ye'or actually got the term from the title of Saleh al-Mani's book, The Euro-Arab Dialogue: A Study in Associative Diplomacy, published in the early 1980s. Al-Mani used the term to describe the diplomatic proceedings between the EEC/EC/EU, various Arab states, and the Arab League (which was much more prominent at the time than it is now). Ye'or uses it in the same context, citing al-Mani regularly throughout her book. This dialogue between civilizations led to the development of groups such as the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation.

Next, Randy states that Ye'or "created" the concept of "Eurabia":

Created by Bat Ye'or, "Eurabia" has come into a new vogue among conservatives (particularly Anglophone ones) who blame European reluctance to support United States foreign-policy initiatives (like, say, Iraq) on large and growing Muslim populations which will, in the end, destroy Western (read Judeo-Christian) civilization on the far shores of the Atlantic.

Again, this is simply false, as a simply Google search would have shown. Ye'or actually got the term from a defunct journal titled Eurabia, published by the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity (another part of the EAD). It is not some Nazi-ish lingual invention.

Randy regularly refers to demographics, but never discusses the question of influence. If he had read the book, he would have known that Ye'or rarely discusses demographics and certainly does not lay out any numbers in her book pretending to show that Europe is going to be dominated by a religiously-Muslim majority within a certain number of years. I know this is the context in which Bernard Lewis has used the term "Eurabia," but it is not the context in which Ye'or uses it. Ye'or's focus is on economic and political influence that has grown since the oil embargos in the 1970s. Randy's post would be a great refutation of Lewis, but it's nothing but a straw man when applied to Ye'or.

This gets me to my final (at least until I finish reading the book) point, Randy equates Ye'or to the Nazis. First, there's the title of one of his posts:

Why "Eurabia" Is Like "Jew York City"

Then there's all this:

Racism is, then, a critical element--perhaps a dominant concept--relative to these concepts. If European Muslims or New York City Jews are inherently subversive, undermining legitimate decisionmaking processes in political and social life, how can anyone who belongs to either category be allowed to participate at all? Eurabia and Jew York City are, at their roots, concepts which demand the ghettoization of the groups from which they take their names, their exclusion from any non-subordinate role. These terms' use is a good marker for some sort of highly exclusionary racism.

Resorting to racist and profoundly exclusionary rhetoric that has little connection with what's actually occurring on the ground only obscures the issues being debated. Worse, racist and profoundly exclusionary rhetoric carries its own serious set of problems. Does anyone remember what happened on the last few occasions when entire national subpopulations were deemed inherently subversive?

He continues on and on following this theme throughout numerous posts... he's basically saying that studying the influence of an ethnic or religious actor is the same as advocating the cleansing and/or genocide of minority populations. This is the exact same rhetoric used to attack those who study psychometrics, population genetics, etc. It's the idea that the study of subjects deemed politically incorrect will inevitably lead to a new Holocaust. This blog regularly discusses how absurd this is, but Randy still had the gall to say all he did. It's ultimately a fallacious argument and a nasty, ad-hominem attack upon Ye'or.

When Randy wrote these posts, he was obviously not "desperately searching" for the truth.

After looking at varied opinions concerning the Kelo v. New London decision from two months ago, I couldn't help but notice that everybody ignored the worst part of the decision: it equated taxation with the public good. But anyways, I found that looking up Roll Call vote 361 yielded the most interesting results. In the words of the bill, it expressed...

the grave disapproval of the House of Representatives regarding the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in the case of Kelo et al. v. City of New London et al. that nullifies the protections afforded private property owners in the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Surprisingly, while 33 voted against the resolution, 18 merely voted Present and 17 didn't vote at all! Of those that voted against it, 32 (97%) are Democrats (of which 14 are members of the leftist Congressional Progressive Caucus). I'm sort of curious as to why the House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, didn't vote, but she does support the Supreme Court's ruling, is a prominent member of the Progressive Caucus, and must have wanted to avoid alienating the party on this issue. Such an important leader participating in a recorded vote concerning such an unpopular decision would be disastrous for the Democrats.

Look at this comment thread on Sepia Munity (go past comment 30). It seems on the Right the aim is to prove and determine how the opposition (the Left, the mainstream, etc.) alienates, excludes and oppresses them. On the Left it seems half the time one faction tries to show how another faction alienates, excludes and oppresses them. As those on the Left side cut the baby in half as ordered by Solomon, the Right is happily sweeping past the Maginot Line, long knives ready to eviscerate Paris.

Razib's rule: any sufficiently potent quasi-intellectual sophistry concocted on the Left is eventually appropriated by the Right. See here:

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, aligned himself with President Bush on Friday when he said that the theory of intelligent design as well as evolution should be taught in public schools.

...Such an approach "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said in Nashville, according to The Associated Press. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."

"...whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Galatians, 6:7.

The Left is pure science. The Right is applied engineering.

This week British TV (Channel 4) showed a programme by black academic Robert Beckford arguing that ‘reparations’ should be paid to the descendants of African slaves in the British West Indies - Jamaica, Trinidad, and so on.

I didn’t watch the programme (life is too short), but apparently Beckford puts a figure of £7.5 trillion on his demand. Assuming that a trillion is a million million (and not the obsolete meaning of a million million million), that comes to £7,500,000,000,000, or about $13,500,000,000,000 at current exchange rates. This would be about £150,000 per head of the British population.

I think Beckford will have a long wait, but it may be worth examining the basis of such claims.

First, one might query the amount. Cumulatively there can hardly have been more than 5 million black slaves in the British West Indies, and probably only a minority of them have any living descendants. So the claim implies more than £2 million per slave ancestor, which seems a bit steep.

But the real question is whether the descendants of the slave owners owe anything at all to the descendants of the slaves.

I take it as uncontroversial that there can be no such thing as vicarious moral responsibility. No-one should be punished, or required to pay compensatory damages, if they have themselves done no wrong. [Note 1].

The absence of vicarious responsibility might seem to dispose of the question, but the matter is not quite so simple. Suppose my ancestor stole a painting from your ancestor. I have inherited it, but you would have inherited it if it had not been stolen. Am I entitled to keep it, or should I hand it over to you? I don’t know what the law says about such cases, but I think there is a strong moral case for handing the painting over. The same principle would apply if the thief was unrelated to me, and had given it to me as an arbitrary gift. The point is that I have done nothing to deserve it, and the donor had no right to pass it on to anyone, since he had no right to possess it in the first place. [Note 2]

I think the general moral principle we can extract from this example is that if person A is worse off, and B is better off, as a result of some wrongdoing, then B has some moral obligation to compensate A, even though B personally has not done anything wrong. The entitlement to compensation is not unlimited: it cannot be greater than the extent of the disadvantage suffered by A, or the advantage gained by B, whichever is the less.

But how does this apply to slavery?

In this case it may be claimed that one set of persons - the descendants of slaves - are worse off, and another set of persons - the descendants of slave owners - are better off, than they would have been otherwise. The existence of wrongdoing (the slave trade, etc.) is not in dispute. The fact that most African slaves were captured and sold by other Africans, or by Arabs, does not absolve the slave owners from guilt, though it does suggest that the descendants of West Indian or American slaves ought also to be demanding reparations from black Africans, Arabs, etc.

Of course there are some problems in determining whose ancestors were responsible for slavery. As an ordinary Englishman I suspect that most of my ancestors in the 17th and 18th centuries were peasants and labourers, who owned no slaves and were little better off than slaves themselves, in terms of diet, life expectancy, etc. Nor do I think that the average Briton now benefits from past slavery to the tune of £150,000, as required by Beckford’s figures. So if anyone wants any reparations from me, they can swivel!

But there remains the question whether the descendants of slaves have any legitimate claim on anyone. A crucial part of the argument I have outlined is that the descendants are worse off than they would have been otherwise. And in this case the ‘otherwise’ is what would have happened if their ancestors had stayed in Africa. It is very difficult to be sure what would have happened in Africa if there have been no Atlantic slave trade. We can only go by what evidence we have, which is that the descendants of Africans who stayed in Africa are, in general, far worse off than the descendants of the slaves. On this assumption the claim for reparations does not even get off the ground.

Possibly the claim for reparations could be based on some other argument than the one I have suggested. I would be interested to hear of one. Until then I conclude that the claim for reparations is just politically motivated chicanery.


Note 1: Vicarious responsibility should be distinguished from collective responsibility. Citizens of a democracy can reasonably be expected to share some responsibility for the actions of their government. Even in the absence of democracy, collective responsibility can sometimes be inferred, for example if a tightly-knit community fails to take action against notorious terrorists in its midst.

Note 2: A more difficult case arises if I have bought it from the thief for a fair price, with no reason to suspect that it is stolen. I won’t go into this.

There's a myth that the media keeps throwing around incessantly that is really getting on my nerves... the myth of a "polarized America." Lets face the facts:

- Most Americans are either in the center or drift off into the center-left and center-right.

- Most Americans are generally apolitical until election time and have better things to worry about in their lives than Bill Clinton's genitalia.

- If America were so polarized between left and right, politicians wouldn't attempt to tack to the center so often; they would instead focus on those to the left or the right of themselves.

Let me say who is really polarized in America... it's not most Americans; it's the talking heads and politicians that so litter the news. Every one of them pretend to represent mainstream public opinion when they really don't. What you see is both parties attacking their centrists by saying that their opposition to some of their party's policies makes them a threat to enacting an agenda that supposedly represents the mainstream. This is not limited to one party; both are offenders.

Now let me clarify my own position here before I go on pretending that I'm offering a super-objective centrist critique. I'm generally a right-winger, not centrist or center-right, although I regularly break with right-wingers due to my pragmatism and libertarian tendencies (libertarians drift over to the left on a slew of issues). As a result, I voted for George W. Bush... I did not vote for him enthusiastically, rather I voted for him based on the politics of lesser-evilism. If it was Evan Bayh, John Breaux, Joe Lieberman, or Harold Ford who had been the Democratic challengers, I would have voted for one of them in a heartbeat instead of Bush. Since I support having a smaller government (although not necessarily a more-limited one), the best situation would be one where a moderate Democrat was president (like Bill Clinton) with a conservative Congress. It's still not the perfect combination, but it's better than having total control of both by one side or the other, especially from a budgetary perspective.

Part of this myth is the idea that the two parties are highly unified and disciplined entities with little ideological diversity. This is simply untrue and ignorant of realities; the two parties are carefully cobbled together coalitions of various types of politicos that agree on a few select issues. Each have multiple wings, and it is somewhat difficult to split them apart at times, but they are there. Lets start with the Democrats:

- Conservative Democrats, who are either center-right or right-wing and are arrayed around the Blue Dog Coalition and tend to socialize with Republican groups far more often than the left-wing of the party likes. Gene Taylor and Zell Miller are examples of this type of Democrat. Some of these individuals are also New Democrats. They make up very little of the party, but still exert considerable influence in the House.

- New Democrats, who are basically part of the center / center-left arrayed around the Democratic Leadership Council, New Democrat Network, and the Third Way. Evan Bayh, Bill Clinton, and Joe Lieberman are exemplars of this type of Democrat. The New Republic and Blueprint are popular mags with these individuals. Probably are around 1/4 of the party.

- Traditional Liberals, who are basically part of the center-left and left-wing of the party and are arrayed around such groupings as the Economic Policy Institute, Urban Institute, and the Center for American Progress. Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, and Harry Reid (although he is socially conservative on a few social issues) are this type of Democrat. The American Prospect and The Washington Monthly are popular with them. Probably half the party are Traditional Liberals.

- Progressive Democrats, who are on the left-wing of the party and are aligned with groups like the Progressive Democrats of America, Progressive Caucus, MoveOn.org, and their positions are usually fairly similar to such groups as the Democratic Socialists of America and Green Party. Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean (as of recently; before he ran for president he was considered to be either a New Democrat or even a conservative one), and Lynn Woolsey are representative of them. The Nation and The Progressive are popular mags with them. They are about 1/4 of the party and much stronger than the Conservative Democrats.

Now on to the GOP, which is made up of:

- Moderate / Rockefeller Republicans, are of center-left / center / center-right and tend to be aligned around the It's My Party Too PAC, Republican Main Street Partnership, and regularly take positions similar to those espoused by New Democrats. Christine Todd Whitmann, Lincoln Chafee, Rudy Giuliani, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are representative of this wing. About 1/4 of the Republican Party are of this type.

- Neoconservatives, are of the center-right / right-wing and tend to be aligned around groups like the Hudson Institute, Manhattan Institute, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and especially the American Enterprise Institute. Paul Wolfowitz, David Brooks, and William Kristol are representative of this wing. The Weekly Standard, The Public Interest (now defunct), and The American Enterprise are popular with them. On a side note, while neocons are not as moderate as the above, you can regularly find them attacking right-wing hardliners in and out of the party, especially Paleoconservatives, who now espouse anti-GOP positions. Neocons make up very little of the GOP, but have a massive amount of influence.

- Traditional Conservatives, are center-right / right-wing and tend to be aligned around such groups as the Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, Hoover Institution, and American Conservative Union. Examples of these include Bill Frist, George W. Bush, and George Will. You can find them reading The American Spectator and National Review. They make up probably about 1/2 of the Republican Party.

- The Religious Right, are right-wingers and tend to be aligned with such organizations as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Christian Coalition, Discovery Institute, and Traditional Values Coalition. Examples include Tom Delay and Trent Lott. You can find them reading Human Events and First Things. They make up about 1/4 of the Republican Party.

- Libertarian Conservatives, are anything from center to right-wing and it's difficult to box them in ideologically. They hang around organizations like the Republican Liberty Caucus, Institute for Justice, Annapolis Center, Cato Institute and Independent Institute. Examples include Ron Paul, Neal Boortz, and (dare I say?) had an extremely heavy influence on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (who was a member of the hardcore libertarian Foundation for Economic Education). You can find them reading things like Reason and Tech Central Station. A good portion of Traditional Conservatives are fusionists and are libertarians in many respects.

Now that we know how I break down the parties, lets get back on topic.

The New Democrats were dominant in the Democratic Party in the 90s and sought to force the Progressives out of it, believing that it was their fault that they lost the Congress in 1994, which is why the Green Party gradually became stronger. They intended to recreate the Democratic Party as the party of the political center, willing to take ideas from both sides in order to create a unifying agenda that could be agreed upon by both parties, calling their "beyond left-or-right" approach the "Third Way." They were ruthlessly attacked by both sides of the isle as unprincipled political opportunists; they were either thinly veiled left-wingers or thinly veiled right-wingers. Al Gore, once a New Democrat, tacked to the left during the 2000 election and alienated the DLC while failing to win the Progressives who thought he was being an opportunist and was still a New Democrat at heart. In 2004, the Democrats ran a New Democrat who agreed with few of the positions of the DLC and was a Traditional Liberal in all but name: John Kerry. After tacking to the left to quell Dean's Progressive insurgency, he attempted to move to the political center, but his earlier left-tack came back to haunt him. Now the Progressives, who had been silenced since the early 90s and still sure of themselves that both Gore and Kerry were New Democrats, are attempting to take over the Democratic Party and move it to the left under the auspices that the DLC approach has failed and that it is time to try something else. Centrists, or anybody else that dares go near the DLC or, heaven forbid, work with the GOP, are considered by them to be right-wingers in Democratic clothing and think the center should be ignored.

On the other hand, the Republican Party has become so successful as of late that the right-wing of the party, in particular the Religious Right, thinks that they can forget about the center completely because they believe they already have enough support to begin enacting their agenda. They think they can ignore the Moderate Republicans that are elected on the West Coast and in New England (and to a certain extent, Florida). They think the centrists in the party waver too often on the issues they find to be most important, which are mostly social issues (much of the Religious Right are one-issue voters). This single-mindedness presents numerous problems, because it alienates the so-called "Reagan Democrats" and, more recently, "Bush Democrats" that have been so critical to GOP success in the past 25 years. They also underestimate just how critical the Moderate Republicans in the Senate are and constantly attack them if they dare waver from the Religious Right's agenda, especially people like Arlen Specter and George Voinovich. The Religious Right ignores traditional Republican positions on fiscal policy and immigration policy as long as they deliver with socially conservative policies. This not only alienates the centrists, but it also alienates the libertarians. The Republican Party is not nearly as strong as many think, it's still on wobbly ground, and the "coming Republican majority" is far from assured. In order to win the states necessary to bring about a conservative agenda around the Great Lakes and in southern New England, the center of the party must become more influential. Only then can they take advantage of the decline of the New Democrats. However, if the Religious Right continues its pressure, the concept of the "coming Republican majority" is dead-in-the-water.

When the centrists of both parties are ignored, the American people are forced into the politics of lesser-evilism. I did not vote for George W. Bush enthusiastically; I voted for him because I perceived him to be the lesser-evil of two evils. I can't say that I know that many people who voted for either candidate enthusiastically. Of course, there's a slew of enthusiastic partisans in activist circles, but they are not representative of the country. Lesser-evilism alienates voters and creates [more] distrust for the government. Both parties must make an attempt to move back to the center.

The Green Party and the Constitution Party attract the nuts that are outside of the mainstream. Leave them be and reach for the middle.

NOTE: This was basically a rant that I had to get out... I know I didn't post any links, but I thought it should be said regardless.

How is it that hordes of people can inhabit the "Reality-Based Community" and yet act like ignorant, superstitious villagers marching with their torchlights to the home of the the devil possessed child.

Do these denizens of the "Reality-Based Community" know how to read? I thought they were the enlightened ones who compared themselves favorably to the knuckle-dragging, closeminded church goers on the Right of the political spectrum.

First, a man is forced to resign his job for using proper English:

The director of D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams's constituent services office resigned after being accused of using a racial slur, the mayor's office said yesterday.

David Howard, head of the Office of Public Advocate, said he used the word "niggardly" in a Jan. 15 conversation about funding with two employees.

"I used the word 'niggardly' in reference to my administration of a fund," Howard said in a written statement yesterday. "Although the word, which is defined as miserly, does not have any racial connotations, I realize that staff members present were offended by the word.

Then, a commentator in the Holiest of Holies is taken to task and accused of being in touch his his inner Klansman for using the word snigger.

It's a good thing that those who are "in touch with reality" didn't have access to this poor fellow's contact information for I'm sure they would have helped him along in his re-education quite willingly. Where's the GULAG when you really need it?

However, when a poster at Red State used the word "Media Whore" to describe the protest tactics of a greiving mother of a fallen soldier, Cindy Sheehan, all hell was unleashed upon him because the inquisitors couldn't distinguish the difference between "Media Whore" and "Whore."

First, my voicemail at the office filled up. Then the office email system exploded with moonbats. Then some guy named Bill McColl called the house while my wife was home and left a lengthy diatribe on the answering machine. His voice mail was nicer than his email.

Now this from some anonymous sicko.

During the war in Yugoslavia, a squad of eight Serbs captured a famous Muslim soccer player, his wife and their two young daughters.

The chained the player to a radiator pipe and sliced off his eyelids. Then, they repeatedly raped his wife and daughters, aged six and nine.

When all eight Serbs were could no longer come, they gutted the mother and children as though they were, say, trout and let them bleed to death.

The soccer player begged them to kill him, but they laughed and released him to wander the country.

This is what I wish for you and your family.

Here is more from Red State on how well the "Reality-Based Community" deals with the reality of language. Here is the source of the infection that sparked the mob. Note the lack of class with which they try to muzzle those braying at the moon - they can't let their reprimand stand on its own, note how they didn't even have the class to apologize, and instead we see the need to re-energize the mob to target the buffoons O'Reilly and Malkin for their sins.

Update [2005-8-12 16:29:51 by Armando]: Please do not call Erick's office. That is way out of bounds. I understand he retracted the "whore" comment, but even if he did not, that is just wrong. Do not call people at their work or home. That is really wrong.

We have seen Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin stoop to smearing a grieving mother, whose son, Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq. And the very fringe Right blogs stop at nothing. Add Red State to the fringe list:

If you're a member of the "Reality Based Community" do you really need the sugar with the cod-liver oil? Is it so hard to swallow the thought of issuing a reprimand and an apology to stand alone and apart from another call to attack?

Here is some interesting data from Christian pollster George Barna:

...A large majority of evangelicals (70%) report believing that moral truth is absolute. But a minority of non-evangelical born again adults (42%) holds that same view, and even fewer of the notional Christians (25%), people associated with non-Christian faiths (16%) and those who claim to be atheist or agnostic (27%) embrace moral absolutes.

So what's up with "atheist and agnostic" people being more absolutest than those who are "non-Christian." Barna's standards for "Christianity" are pretty high, and "notional Christians" would probably fall under the rubric of mainline Protestants and other liberal and moderate believers who reject literalism and are not "Born Again." When one thinks of non-Christian faiths one assumes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc., but I suspect Barna has slotted the large number of Americans who are New Age and "Spiritual," who claim no specific religion but believe in God, into this group. And this explains the rejection of moral absolutes. Atheists and agnostics might be relativists, but for the term "atheist" to be intelligible my impression is that you need to have a traditional Enlightenment view of objective reality and truths, which I think is why they are less likely to reject moral absolutes (they simply don't accept conservative Christian moral absolutes, they often have their own alternatives).

A week ago I had a chat with an old friend who is a political activist, and definitely on the Left side of things. He mentioned to me that recently he's been plagued a sense of ennui about "the cause," in his case, gender and sexual politics (ie; the core being gay rights, but extending outward). He recounted to me recent interactions he'd had with transgender folks and their supporters, and the fact that they'd reworked English pronouns so that it wouldn't be so heterosexist (for example, adding a third, or more, gender identifiers for those who were one of the various transexual identities). My friend is well versed in these things, and he keeps track of them, and on a fundamental level he does think there needs to be a modern day "reformation of manners" so that we are more inclusive. But even for him, enough is enough, at some point the ideals of the cause took a back seat to the minutiae of the means. In another conversation I had (this time via e-mail) I explained to a friend of mine that I would view equal-pay-for-equal work more positively if I saw activists (and the sympathetic media) focusing on the millions of secretaries as much as the hundreds of thousands of professors. It seemed to me that in the interests of a laudable goal (equity) particular class interests were being furthered, or at least prioritized, so that a utilitarian calculus made the idealistic and principled arguments rather ludicrous.

This is in many ways my personal problem with modern day liberalism, or progressivism, or whatever name that is bandied about. There was a time when the Left implied a broad and general thrust toward personal liberty and economic equity. The Right implied adherence to social custom and tradition and economic liberalism (in the United States at least!). There of course are others like libertarians and the socially conservative New Dealers who put a kink into the dichotomies, but for the half aproximation the duality works. The "problem" for someone like me, who isn't an activist, but who lives in Leftish areas and socializes exclusively with Leftish folk is that liberalism, at least the social kind which has a high profile, seems to have fractured into a thousand "causes," each with their own check lists of "do's" and "don'ts." Whereas a political movement, to my mind, should be about setting the framework for the free expression of individual, and ultimately group, choice, it seems that many lifestyle liberals have flipped the equation, and individual and group choice in their particulars have become the movement. Liberty to choose has now become demands for liberation.

There are two problems I see with this. First, it is nearly impossible to check every demand of the various columns in the lifestyle army. Some of them are mutually contradictory (disabled activists vs. right-to-die). Some of them are not practically feasible, or at least contextual. For example, I strong suspected that Al Sharpton was going to ask Howard Dean about the dearth of blacks in his employ as governor of Vermont (one must not only not be discriminatory, but deviation from proportionalism is prima facie evidence for bias!), because I have been to Vermont and there simply aren't enough blacks to make it plausible that Dean would have many in his immediate employ. Sharpton surely knew this, but it made a nice rhetorical jab because the columns demand utopian perfection! Second, for people like me who are pretty average, and don't need, for example, third-sex bathrooms, or become offended by heterosexist assumptions in language, liberalism starts to sound like a bizarre joke on humanity. I am well aware that people who demand that you purge heterosexism from your language (use of gendered pronouns in contexts where they are not necessary) are a tiny minority of liberals, but they are loud, and the rhetorical assault that they make on day to day life (the very language you speak, or, your sexual preference) of the vast majority of Americans is pretty scary sometimes.

There was a time that intellectuals buttressed and clarified broad political movements. Enlightenment classical liberalism was a response to yearnings of the rising middle classes throughout the Western world for liberty and equality before the law. Socialism was a response to the oppression of the working classes in the sweatshops of the industrialized world. Feminism was a response to the injustice that women, who had tasted freedom during World War II, felt at the constriction of their choice during the 1950s. But today it seems that the intellectual braintrust of liberalism has swallowed, and outrun, the inclinations of the populace. The American public is now shifting toward an attitude of toleration for homosexuals, but "the movement" is now already mooting ideas like transgenderism that the public barely comprehends. Feminism has won the basic legal rights that they strived for in the 1960s, but today most young women would demur that they are feminists because of the negative cultural associations with the movement which has radicalized and splintered into warring factions. Now that legally sanctioned racialism is a thing of the past there nevertheless seems to be a proliferation of racial identity groups and organizations, from the older black ones to new Latino ones (La Raza) and Asian Americans, and intercine conflicts due to the public policy implemented to further the goal of "diversity" (ie; Southeast Asians demanding to not be counted as Asians in UC admissions, black leaders demanding that multiracials not be included on the Census, the assumption on the part of some Latino leaders that American should become bilingual because "their" language is just as authentically American and normative as English).

As a libertarian, I dissent from both main camps of American politics. I sympathized with Bush in 2000 (though I eventually voted for Harry Browne), and this time I voted for Kerry (though I voted Republican for congress). My own planks and inclinations are not on the table, and I make due. That being said, engaging the Right is in some ways far easier because there seem only a few, and highly correlated, unpleasant demands made by social conservatives to comprehend. When I look Leftward, the culture warriors seem to be a many-headed chimera of a thousand demands, a thousand reformations. While on the cultural Right I see individuals who wish to curtail liberty, who wish to constrain freedoms and joys which give color and verve to life, on the Left I feel that some wish to overturn the very nature of man and revolt against living itself.

I grant freely that most liberals do not fit this caricature. But I write this because I suspect that many libertarians feel as I do, many who are not comfortable with an alliance with the Right are driven in that direction through sheer disorientation at the blazing profusion of disparate demands that some of the Left seem to be making. I voted for Kerry in 2004 because the alternative was unpalatable. The negative case of the Democratic candidate, that the Bush administration was making a mess of this country, was persuasive. But I most certainly did not vote for Kerry because I believe that the Left has a true foundational and coherent vision for this country. I do spy a clear and consistent negative vision, that this is a nation founded by "dead white men" and steeped in "oppression" and "injustice" and built on "imperialism" and forwarded in the interests of "corporations." There does seem to be a core subset of negative values which Democrats can agree upon, which the far Left elucidates most eloquently. But sometime in the 1970s the old vision of a just and fair society, free of legal racism and committed to economic equity withered in the face of further "progress," sexier causes, more radical reformation of the "system". Instead of repairing the system, it was like liberals realized that they could "make it better," that they "had the technology." But instead of a new city on the hill what came in its stead were a thousand hamlets scattered across the horizon on innumerable hills, their denizens chattering away and shouting down upon us plebs threateningly for not adhering to their thousand visions.

Cross-posted at Dean Nation.

Professor Ian Reifowitz, writing in The New Republic (subscription required), argues that the religious right and radical multiculturalists have something in common. He tells of a tale of two Pennsylvania cities:

Over the past year, two very different cities in Pennsylvania have added new requirements to their respective public high school curricula. Last October, Dover required that ninth grade biology students learn that "intelligent design"..., as well as evolution, may explain the development of species over time. ... In Philadelphia the school board voted in early June to require that all students take a yearlong course in African and African-American history. ...

Despite the apparent differences on the surface between the decisions taken by these two Pennsylvania school boards, they share a similar logic. The proponents of each justify its new requirement because it reflects (and by extension reinforces) the culture or religion of one particular group that happens to be the majority community in its school district. The decisions exemplify the parallels between the theocratic Christian right and radical multiculturalism, both of which reject the notion that Americans form a pluralistic yet unified nation. The Christian right is anti-pluralist; radical multiculturalism is hyper-pluralist.

This seems to be another instantiation of the extreme left-extreme right convergence, or if you prefer: the religious right borrowing tactics from the multiculturalist left.

Related: The Turning of the Tide

Iraq's porn dealers risk wrath of religious right:

"Sex movies from Lebanon and other Arab countries are the most popular. But we have all kinds of movies," he said.

Even in the simplest systems our actions can have unintended consequences, and the importance of context and perspective are critical issues whenever one engages in a conversation relating to political issues. Consider this comment over at Sepia Mutiny:

Well, as an interested observer, I've got serious issues with ummah politics too. But as a new grand narrative of liberation, offering a utopian vision and a set of strategies for action (not all are violent), I can see its appeal....

Another reader took umbrage at the tone:

Yeah I know what the appeal of Islamist politics is to those who dream of Master Race fantasies - I can also see the appeal of Khalistan and the Pure Aryan Nation and Ram Raj - so what? There is no easy demarcation between those who propose essentially fascist solutions to societal problems - working 'peacefully' towards it is rhetorics and sophistry - the idea that Islamism is an 'anti imperialist' ideology is laughable....

To which the initial commenter responded:

I don't think that Islamists are fascists, but I've posted that elsewhere. But you would also deny them their basic human faculties in making political choices. I think that's a mistake. But leaving that aside, my point is that there is nothing much out there competing with this narrative of liberation in the marketplace of political ideas. Don't you think that's a really important problem?

I too believe that one should analyze and examine political movements and issues in a bloodless manner if you are to get far. Ultimately, a rational decomposition of the rise of the Nazi regime is probably fruitful if you perceive that fascist totalitarianism is a generic response to a particular fixed set of conditions. Nevertheless, I think problems crop up because people tend to privilege their analytic and emotive responses dependent on their own political biases. The
second comment tends to put the issue starkly: the need to "reason" or "understand" is not often extended to other groups or movements.

Via Steve, here is a piece in The Washington Post about the admissions process to the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (mean SAT score 1482 out of 1600 for graduates). The story focuses on the race angle, and the relative dearth of blacks and Latinos. Here is the current breakdown for the fall of 2005:

52.9% - White
32.3% - Asian
3.8% - Hispancs
2.4% - Blacks
0.6% - Native American
6.3% - Multiracial
1.6% - Other

For comparison, here the numbers for Fairfax county:


69.9% - White
13.3% - Asian
11.0% - Hispancs
8.6% - Blacks
0.1% - Native American
3.7% - Multiracial
4.5% - Other

The two data sets are not equivalent, as no doubt some students come from outside Fairfax county, the younger age brackets skew toward non-whites, and "Hispanics" are likely the preponderance of the "Other" category from the Census (and am I the only one to be a bit suspicious of "Native Americans?").

Specifically, on to the piece, here are some snippets:

At that point, Lodal described the number of blacks and Hispanics being admitted to TJ as "indefensible on every level." Now heading into her sixth year running TJ, the ebullient Texas native, who studied math and physics at Rice University, has been an outspoken advocate for increasing the presence of those minorities.

...

Using data amassed through the Freedom of Information Act, he found that 91 percent of African Americans who passed to the second round were admitted to the Class of 2006, or 10 of 11 students. Meanwhile, 49 percent of white students in the second round were admitted, or 249 of 507 students. Cohen accused the school of having a policy of surreptitious racial preferences. He called it "invidious racial discrimination."

...

It was estimated that 1,500 students might now make the second round. The idea was to pass as many applicants as seemed reasonably qualified to the second round, where they could be judged on more subjective criteria, particularly essays and teacher recommendations.

...

Kiara Savage was riding home on the school bus one day, not long after receiving her letter from TJ, when she overheard another student talking about the school. "They made the admissions process easier so black people and Hispanic people can get into the school," she recalled hearing the boy say.

She tapped him on the shoulder. Excuse me, she said. TJ is a very prestigious school. The people who run it would not lower the standards just so they could add 50 more African Americans to their school.

Trying not to lose her cool, she reminded herself of her 4.0 GPA, the countless hours she'd spent on the basketball court and soccer field, her two years of extracurricular math and science courses. She'd thrived on hard work -- and for all those reasons, she explained to the boy, she deserved every nod that came her way.

"Are you calling me a racist?" the boy demanded.

Please note that Kiara did make the cut into TJHS in the fall, and even if there were slightly relaxed standards for her acceptance it seems that she is highly bright (in fact, there weren't that many more black students in the fall than the previous year, so it seems plausible there wasn't a great relaxation of standards). That is why her assertion is a bit baffling on the analytic level, because it seems that if 10 out of 11 African American students who made it to the second round were admitted, it seems there are two rational inferences one could make

1) the sieving process was harder on African Americans in the first round, making the second round applicants far more qualified (explaining the higher frequency of acceptance).

2) once the students make it past the metrically more objective first round other "subjective" factors kicked in to make the African Americans a shoe in.

It seems that the American administrative class demands diversity. The natural implication of this is that people will conclude that the "proactive efforts" are simply code for relaxed standards for certain groups. Those who feel their have been excluded or left on the outside while those "less qualified than them" have become insiders will naturally cast aspersions. When elites decide to remold society and shift group attainments, the fruit of this will be in part a great deal of individual resentment. Scarcity is a fact of life, and when finite resources are divided there will always be complaints, and when there is a perception that objective metrics are subborned in the interests of a subjective social good, than those resentments will simply enter the zeitgeist as "conventional wisdom."

In the short term I see no sign that the goal of proportional racial diversity will be rolled back in the interests of the meritocracy. That of course means that black Americans (and now Latinos) will all continue to live under the cloud of "set asides," no matter their instrinsic aptitudes, because the perception is that their individual identity and worth is secondary to their symbolic and concrete expression of a particular group identity. When people talk about a different perspective being brought to a classroom, it is not in the context of individual experiences, but the higher order experiences of group identity that someone brings to the table (ie; you could switch black person A and black person B, they would still bring the same "diversity" because their individual variation in experience is irrelevant). Nevertheless, there is also the need to engage in doublethink, where you make it pretty clear that you wish to achieve ends X by-any-means-possible, but continue to assert that the process, the means, have not be distorted or demoted in their primacy within the system. In the public domain people will of course dissemble and continue to assert that diversity and objective meritocracy can coexist, and that the latter is only supplemented by the former, but as you see above, in the private domain people will not hesitate to call bullshit if they feel that the situation warrants it.