Daily Derp: Fox Made Me Do It

Let's open up with the really good stuff.

This exchange of private letters between Macklin Fleming, Justice of the Court of Appeal, State of California at Los Angeles, and Louis Pollak, Dean of the Yale Law School, seems to us to raise important issues affecting the public interest. We are grateful to Justice Fleming and Dean PoUak for permission to publish the correspondence--Eds. 

That public interest being quotas.

Fleming nailed it.

If you only have time to read one link here make it this one.

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To expand on the above.

"As that essay was going to press, Heterodox Academy member Amy Wax sent us the text of an astonishing letter written in 1969, at the dawn of racial preferences, from Macklin Fleming, Justice of the California Court of Appeal. Judge Fleming had written a personal letter to Louis Pollak, the dean of Yale Law School. Fleming was concerned about the plan Dean Pollak had recently announced under which Yale would essentially implement a racial quota – 10% of each entering class would be composed of black students. To achieve this goal, Yale had just admitted 43 black students, only five of whom had qualified under their normal standards. (The exchange of letters was later made public with the consent of both parties; you can read the full text of both letters here.)

Judge Fleming explained why he believed this new policy was a dangerous experiment that was likely to causeharmful stereotypes, rather than reduce them. His argument is essentially the one that Jussim and I made 47 years later. Here is what he wrote:

The immediate damage to the standards of Yale Law School needs no elaboration. But beyond this, it seems to me the admission policy adopted by the Law School faculty will serve to perpetuate the very ideas and prejudices it is designed to combat. If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students. Such a pairing in the same school of the brightest white students in the country with black students of mediocre academic qualifications is social experiment with loaded dice and a stacked deck. The faculty can talk around the clock about disadvantaged background, and it can excuse inferior performance because of poverty, environment, inadequate cultural tradition, lack of educational opportunity, etc. The fact remains that black and white students will be exposed to each other under circumstances in which demonstrated intellectual superiority rests with the whites.

But Judge Fleming went much further. He made specific predictions about what the new policy would do to black students over the years, and how they would react. Here is his prophecy:

No one can be expected to accept an inferior status willingly. The black students, unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression. This is likely to take two forms. First, agitation to change the environment from one in which they are unable to compete to one in which they can. Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training. Second, it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies. Since the common denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands–the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards."

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Where were we? Right, the derp.

Soooo, will Obama blame Republicans and Fox for this?

Obama backer, Democratic fundraiser Terry Bean charged in sexual abuse case

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Oh look. Democrats being honest. Not.


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Scarborough is starting to grow on me. I like self-awareness and sober honesty.


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CBS News 

✔@CBSNews

"President-elect Trump is going to be inheriting the worse fiscal situation of any president other than President Truman.."

11:47 AM - 20 Nov 2016

For eight years all we heard was how Obama 'inherited a mess'. Well, let's accept for a minute the premise and ask:

What exactly did he do to improve it?

The two areas said to have been bad was the economy and foreign policy. Neither has improved nor have they been put on a proper track.

Of course, he just couldn't get things done as he wanted because the GOP engaged in obstructionism. I mean, it had little to do with him from the start basically saying he'd never work with the GOP. Why bother?

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Energy poverty kills people more than climate change ever will.

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The woods will die!

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America dodged a huge bullet not buying into the Hillary myth.

And they called her bull shit.

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I can't for the life of me can't understand why a sound and sensible mind would think Elizabeth Warren is intelligent leadership.

Woman unhinged, brah.

So much for respecting outcomes, huh.

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Sigh. Another day, another faux-intellectual left-winger making vacuous arguments against freedom.

I'm not a big fan of Shapiro, but where liberty is concerned he's correct - at least here.

We have to expose and challenge them at every turn.

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President not my fault was more of a lecturer than statesman or leader. He's not a man of action and as a result, people who are in the trenches didn't connect to him. By contrast, Trump is an alpha-male man of action. We'll see how this plays into the American psyche soon enough.

I don't mean this as an insult (poking fun is just fun to us laymen). Some people are just not meant to be natural leaders. My impression, as  his Presidency sunsets, is he spent too much time doing things Americans didn't want or need and pushing a view they didn't really connect to. It's not because they were racist or dumb. After all, they did give him a shot. But progressivism has its limits is all and he did what he had to do to bring it to Washington.

Another example of him not leading choosing instead to lead from behind is with his recent comments on marijuana.

"I will have the opportunity as a private citizen to describe where I think we need to go."

Like with gay marriage, he just can't bring himself to take a principled stance and make it happen.

Always looking for an out.

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What's in Trudeau's head? Quote: "Intellectual heft of Cotton Candy"

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Maybe I should write for Fox. At the very least, I wouldn't make obvious mistakes:

"If not for the tragic plane crash earlier this week, the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final was supposed to kick off tonight. Atletico Nacional and Chapecoense were supposed to be contesting one of South America's biggest prizes, but CONMEBOL understandably suspended the matches in the wake of the tragedy."

Of course, the bigger picture of this tragic story is extraordinary gesture by Colombia's Atletico Nacional asking CONMEBOL bestow the title to Chapecoense. 

But. Copa Sudamericana isn't South America's biggest prize.

Copa Libertadores is.

RIP to those who lost their lives.