1. A great article on the mismatching caused by affirmative action. The authors cite many interesting statistics including the fact that black law school students fail the bar exam at four times the rate of white students. The authors argue that degree is important. They focus on “large” versus “small” preferences. At the University of Texas, for example, the average black student scores at the 52nd percentile on the SAT while the average white student scores at the 89th percentile. Besides even the racial differences, you can’t just throw these two different academic profiles into the same shark tank and expect them to gel. Liberals overestimate the impact of environment even at such a late life stage.
2. I didn’t know Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s father is a billionaire. It cracks me up that the industry which most prominently tackles social and economic inequality is filled with people who gained their positions because of their wealth. Acting, dancing, singing lessons are not cheap. The same goes for academics whose parents were typically wealthy or well-off. Hollywood and academia seem to have their own bootstrap mythology that is supposed to neutralize capitalism’s bootsrap mythology. It is now fashionable for liberals to complain about meritocracy, but a true critique of meritocracy would sweep the leg right out from under liberalism’s most effective phalanx. When you dig down, it’s all wealthy people fighting for status in different ways.
3. Heather Mac Donald is good at writing on local policies that originally come about by agitated progressives but are then flipped and used against the “status quo”. This is a great dialectical cat-and-mouse game. Here she writes on NYPD’s use of “vertical policing” in the city’s housing projects. The great paradox is that activists want increased safety for the poor and for minorities in their neighborhoods, but they don’t want the police to use the most effective tactics to achieve that result.
4. Brett Stevens on the purpose of conservatism. (h/t Matt Forney)
5. At Gawker, Hamilton Nolan seems to miss the entire point of this slobbering “diversity is good and Republicans should embrace it” blog post by Peggy Noonan. Nolan is pissy because Noonan dared to notice the various ethnicities and races of New York street vendors and shoppers. She mentions a diverse rap group performing near where her epiphany takes place. This causes Nolan to spring into the action with a full-on snark attack because only a Gawker Asset employee can write about rap. They own that turf.
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Did that Gawker piece even make one point? 100% snark, no point, except, “Haha, we all already agree, so prove you are part of the clique by mindlessly agreeing with me. Oh, and racism practiced by others sucks. Not mine, though.”
Maybe it’s for Disparate Impact lawsuits to get more gentiles Hollywood acting jobs, in contrast to those who are able to use ethnic nepotism and exclusion to “suppress” the careers of others and take a very disproportionate share of the work.
Twitter response commentary: Personally I lost interest in Breaking Bad when I realized that the writers didn’t care about Walt’s character and instead just have him do idiotic and self-destructive stuff that will cause “drama” down the line.
The first season is pretty much clear of this, but it starts in season 2 and gets into full swing in season 3. I’m in season 5 now and I pretty much put the show on and then go about my business. I want to see the show through to it’s conclusion, but it’s more of a passive desire to see if they can end the show decently or if it’ll end in a trainwreck.
Gawkers response is amazingly even more nauseatingly smug and pointless than Peggys article.
It cracks me up that the industry which most prominently tackles social and economic inequality is filled with people who gained their positions because of their wealth. Acting, dancing, singing lessons are not cheap.
Also nepotism. Dig behind the history of many actors and you find that they are someones brother’s mother’s uncle’s niece.
white men have had hundreds of years of affirmative action
racist,
what you’re hinting at isn’t affirmative action. you think your argument is solid, but it is not. affirmative action is a quota system that goes against what would otherwise be a natural choice for a given opening at a job or a school. affirmative action is a systematic overhaul of the natural methods by which decision-makers allocate these slots.
We are not happy about your absenteesm on racist comment threads where white boys post what they want while you neglect to demolish them. We could have used your intelligence in the poetry post. white boy robert snow would not last one minute in a real Poetry Slam. There will be Consequences to your abdication of responsibility to your Soldiers Anti-Racist.
At least 50% of the reason I come to GLP is to read the comments by Promoting Justice and anti-racist.
“Acting, dancing, singing lessons are not cheap.”
This is a mistake, along the same lines of those who suggest that SAT tutoring lessons are the reason why the children of middle class and above families do better on the SAT.
It’s not that people like JL-D have been given better instruction, it’s that they were more free to pursue acting as a career because they didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table. Acting, comedy, modeling, journalism, blogging, etc. are high prestige careers with low expected monetary compensation.
The reason you see so many children of the wealthy in these careers is not because they had better “lessons” than everyone else, but rather because middle class and lower people would have to risk legitimate poverty if they unsuccessfully pursued one of these careers. Whereas the children of the rich could pursue these careers supported by daddy’s money and even if they were unsuccessful they never had to worry about ending up in the poorhouse for life. The OWS folks are the living proof of how trying to emulate this life choice tends to turn out for those who aren’t born into wealth.
Completely spot on. I know an unpaid intern for CNN (unpaid for more than a year) looking to break into…something TV related. Never had a real job in her life, and was driving a brand new porsche she got from daddy as a teenager.
All of her co-workers seem to be of a similar stripe. Powdering Anderson Cooper’s nose requires one to have been born with a silver spoon in their mouth apparently.
“‘Acting, comedy, modeling, journalism, blogging, etc. are high prestige careers with low expected monetary compensation.”‘
You can add law to that list now also.
This Gawker piece is like the Platonic form of alt-culture dreck. I’ll break it down step by step:
1. Formulate a nebulous idea which, if were even possible to state it clearly, wouldn’t get past a critical reading group for adults with Down Syndrome–in this case, “it is racist to notice diversity. The only correct response to diversity is to notice and condemn the absence of it.”
2. Make sure you disguise this idea so that all your hipster readers feel like they’re decoding a secret message, which feels more special to them since the message itself is half-baked and obscure.
3. This is the tricky but crucial part: once you’ve formulated your idea (stopping short of making sure its a complete idea) and then obscured your idea with a lot of winking over your full whiskers, drop in some venom which if your grandmother or some tea-partier read it, it would only register on them as a sense that “something is being expressed here and I think it’s probably not something I like, but I can’t be sure.”
You can’t get indignant when writing a piece like this–you need to save that for the occasional Twitter outburst, which will be all the more powerful and fucking real bro because you’ve taken such pains to obscure a) your meaning and b) your feelings in your longer, Gawker-sanctioned pieces.
Follow these steps and you might really go places in the Gawker-Jezebel non-hierarchical hierarchy.