One of the means that BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) uses to fight efforts to end racial preferences is to lie about what such efforts involve.

A good example is a flyer it has published on its web site and distributed to its mailing lists calling on supporters to picket the Michigan Court of Appeals today (June 8) when it considers the appeal of a lower court ruling invalidating the petitions being circulated by Ward Connerly's Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a proposal modeled on California's Proposition 209 that would ban preferences based on race.

Thus it calls the MCRI "pro-segregation"; says that Connerly's followers are "segregationist"; and claims that the MCRI is "aimed to ban all affirmative action and integration measures in Michigan."

Claiming that a ban against discriminating on the basis of race is intended to, or would, ban all integration measures is of course absurd, as is the claim that those of us who favor such a ban are segregationists. The claim that MCRI would ban all affirmative action measures is more interesting, however, since it seems to assert something that most of us anti-preferentialists do not, namely, that all affirmative action involves racial preference.

Liberal Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley) law students and outside liberal organizations are continuing their demand that conservative law prof John Yoo resign his position because of a legal memo about the status of prisoners that he wrote while serving in the Bush Justice Dept. (This controversy has been discussed on Volokh, with links and very well, here, here, and here.)

Briefly (and superficially), Yoo argued that neither al Qaeda nor Taliban prisoners come under the protections of the Geneva Convention because they do not serve in the army of a nation at war. I have not studied this issue and so have no opinion on the substance of his argument. I do, however, have an opinion about his critics, who argue that he is not fit to teach at Boalt whether or not his legal advice was sound.

According to Michael Anderson, who just graduated from Boalt and is leading the petition drive against Yoo,

Even if Yoo is right and terrorists aren't covered by the Geneva conventions, he induced the military to commit war crimes with his advice.

clearly a major contributor to the environment that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.... He not only excused the violation of rights of prisoners at Guantanamo, which was wrong in itself, but he set in motion the legal loopholes that led to coercion on a broad scale.

Wait, I have an idea. Maybe Roth should resign his executive directorship and Anderson return his diploma because both of them are contributing to an environment that will foreseeably cause the devaluation of academic freedom and legal rules (dismissed by Human Watcher Roth as "loopholes").

Not long ago there was a flurry of blog discussion about a hate/fake hate incident at Claremont McKenna College. (My contributions, with many interesting comments, can be found here, here, here, and here.) Now Bill Duryea of the St. Petersburg Times has written what may be the definitive article on the subject, at least until Kerri Dunn's trial is over.

There he goes again. For the second time, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond blasts Republicans as terrorists. (Thanks to Stuart Buck)

"Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side," Bond told a cheering audience. "They've written a new constitution for Iraq and ignore the Constitution here at home. They draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban wing of American politics. Now they want to write bigotry back into the Constitution."

There was one other hopeful item in his speech, hopeful in the sense that, if he means what he said, there may be some basis for peaceful existence between blacks and Republicans. I refer to the following comment:

Bond called the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 two of America's greatest achievement[s].

SEC. 201. (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

SEC. 202. All persons shall be entitled to be free, at any establishment or place, from discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin, if such discrimination or segregation is or purports to be required by any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, rule, or order of a State or any agency or political subdivision thereof.

SEC. 401.(b) "Desegregation" means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but "desegregation" shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.

SEC. 601. No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer--

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Ever since we went into Iraq (and even before) I have argued that our debates about that war (and other wars) turn on our predictions of how the future will look back upon it.

No one today, for example, would argue that the world is a better place because of what we did in Vietnam. One could argue that our motives were pure, that our intervention was just, that knowing what we knew at the time intervening was the right thing to do, etc., etc., but I don't believe that, knowing what we now know of how things turned out, anyone could argue that we, Vietnam, or anyone else is better off as a result of what we did. (Well, maybe John Kerry is better off, but that's another story.)

Thus those of us who support our war in Iraq do so at least in part (and I believe in very large part) because we believe that if we succeed there both the U.S. and Iraq itself, the middle east, and indeed the whole world will be better off as a result of our actions. We are predicting, in short, that reasonable people looking back on this conflict in five, ten, fifteen, sixty years will conclude that our efforts were justified. If the future results of this war are deemed positive, I would go even farther and say that that judgment would hold even if "smoking gun" evidence turned up that "Bush lied."

On the other hand, if Iraq goes to hell in a handbasket, as the war's critics both predict and to varying degrees hope, then our policies will be judged to have been unwise, wrong, criminal.

I was thus pleased to see that Samuel Hynes, in his lead OpEd in today's New York Times, took precisely this approach to wars then and now. The one bold pull quote from his essay, referring to Iraq, asks, "60 years from now, how will we feel about this war?" But since this did appear in the New York Times, after all, my pleasure with Hynes's question was quickly replaced by the sadly predictable nature of his answer:

American wars since the Second World War have been different: lost, or not won or even finished, or trivial, and morally ambiguous at best, though brave men fought in them. The Second World War was our last just and victorious war, the last war a man could come home from with any expectation of glory.

The old men must be thinking about that as they gather together, must be glad that their time of testing came when it did, in a war where the Americans were the good guys beyond question, and the bad guys were absolutely evil. Perhaps that new memorial down on the Mall is our national monument to that last time of national goodness, before we lost our way.

I try to imagine a day 60 years from now, when the veterans of our present conflict — old men themselves by then — gather at their brand-new war memorial, somewhere down on the Mall, to commemorate their own D-Day (that would be March 20, 2063). What will that new generation of old soldiers have in their minds that day? Not the certainty and confidence that today's old men have. Nor the sense of having served in a democratic war that every young man fought in and all the folks at home supported. They'll remember their buddies, and the good times and the bad ones, and wish, perhaps, that their sad war had been worthy of them.

They, I'm betting, unlike Hynes today, will regard neither Afghanistan nor Iraq as either lost or trivial; they will regard, with good reason, themselves and their comrades as "the good guys beyond question" and their Taliban, Saddamist, and terrorist foes as "absolutely evil." They, I'm betting, are likely to feel that it is not they but their sanctimonious critics in places like the editorial offices of the New York Times who have lost their way.

The last review in the same issue of the New York Times Book Review discussed in the immediately preceding post is rife with another increasingly frequent form of cultural bias, Bush-bashing.

The author of the review, Douglas McGrath, is identified as a film writer and director and co-author with Woody Allen of "Bullets Over Broadway." Perhaps the appearance of the word "bullets" in that title is why the editors of the book review found him qualified to review a book about U.S. Grant and his epochal struggle to write his memoirs before succumbing to cancer.

Whatever the reasons for his selection, McGrath's review, in true Woody Allen fashion, tells much more about McGrath than it does about Grant, even down to the Allen-like snide cuteness. Here's how it begins:

When people speak of the "weight of history," I am not moved. The McGrath head has never been bowed with worry as President Kennedy's must have been during the Cuban missile crisis or as President George W. Bush's surely was when gas prices briefly dipped below $2 a gallon, weakening key stocks in his trust fund.

What stays in the mind is Grant -- a man who, when faced with the twin assaults of death and poverty, raced against one to outwit the other. If Perry's lovely book inspires us today it is not only because of Grant's heroism, but because of the shaming contrast his life offers with the people who guard and guide us now. They use the words he lived by -- patriotism, honor and responsibility -- as masks for their dark mischief, and they twist the language in a way that is a cancer all its own.

Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.

A very interesting letter by a black author in today's New York Times Book Review accuses the no-doubt sensitive, liberal reviewer of his book of Strom Thurmond-like racism. What was the nature of his alleged racist offense? Mentioning the author's race, which some of us might describe as practicing racial consciousness rather than color blindness.

After some 17 books and 23 years publishing fiction in this country, I am little affected by reviews good or bad. In fact, as a rule, I don't read them. But several people have drawn my attention to the review of my novel ''American Desert'' written by Sven Birkerts (May 9). One of those people remarked on the amazing restraint exhibited by Birkerts as he waited until the ''second'' sentence of his piece to mention that I am African-American. I feel confident in stating that the color of my skin has little to do with that novel. I also feel confident in stating that I am sure that Birkerts in previous reviews has not found it necessary to identify other authors as European-American or white.

To tell the truth, I simply am tired of people connected with publishing and art in this culture being so amazed that anyone not white can create a work that race is all they can see. I will not waste my energy discussing this kind of insidious racism, but will say only that this brand, often practiced by those who in all things else would consider themselves liberal, progressive and intellectual, makes one appreciate the overt brand of bigotry practiced by the likes of the late Strom Thurmond.

I am not familiar with the work of the author, Percival Everett, or of the reviewer, Sven Birkerts, but I am heartened that both of them so strongly endorse the colorblind principle. Given that strong endorsement, I suspect one or both of them must oppose racial preferences in English departments, writing programs, and the editorial pracitices of literary publishers. Please pass along any examples you run across.

It is often alleged that the importance of racial preferences in higher education is exaggerated since such a small percentage of American colleges have selective admissions policies.

That point, while true, ignores all the racial preferences in hiring, both of faculty and staff, engaged in by colleges large and small, selective and open. And this discriminatory hiring has apparently become an issue at Austin Community College in Texas, where 28 year conservative activist Marc Levin is in a runoff election for a seat on the board of trustees.

"I want to make sure ACC doesn't discriminate, and it should cast a wide net in looking for candidates, and should recruit from historically black colleges," said Levin. "But I don't support preferential treatment in hiring and promotion. It creates hostility and animosity among faculty and staff."

This stance "worries some faculty," who fear the impact a turn toward non-discrimination would have on "diversity."

According to an article in the Financial Times, foreign employers in India "fear an affirmative action employment plan contained in the new government's economic agenda" that contains "job quotas" for "people from lower-caste or tribal classes."

Mahesh Vyas, chief executive of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a leading think-tank, said: "In the past, affirmative action has had a positive impact on backward classes.
....
[The Indian state of] Maharashtra's legislature is debating a law that could mandate companies to employ up to half their staff from "backward" castes.

According to a report in the Economic Times, India's finance minister has been forced to take active measures "to dispel a growing horror" that his government would require companies to hire "more people from backward classes."

“People are not conscious about religion now. Reservation can again bring to the fore class issues which can vitiate the working atmosphere in the private sector,” said the CEO of a Bangalore-based company on the condition of anonymity.

Another top corporate executive said that a large number of people from the backward communities are succeeding in the private sector due to sheer hard work. “By introducing reservations, you are actually bringing in inefficiency,” he added.

Here we are in the City by the Bay for our second annual couple of weeks in June of house-sitting duties (!) in San Francisco. The weather has been magical, the people so weird that normal people stand out and seem out of place. We love it.

Snippets:

Yesterday we had dinner with an old friend who confided that we were the only people he'd ever spoken with who supported Bush on Iraq. I allowed as how, based on what we've seen and heard, if you enclosed an area by drawing a line southeast from, say, Mendocino southwest to the middle of Sacramento and then southwest to the coast below Carmel we might well be among the dozen of so people in that area who did.

Another old friend said she'd never been so ashamed of her country. Ashamed of what exactly? I asked. Well, what we're doing in Iraq, she said. But what are we doing that you find so shameful? I asked. Well, killing people and making more Arabs mad at us, she said. Curiously, though she hates Bush and Ashcroft, she added that she couldn't really criticize what she took to be Ashcroft's policy of rounding up several thousand Muslim likely suspects and throwing them in jail because that might well have prevented more terrorist acts.

And then there's the San Francisco Chronicle. It seems to revel in bad news from Iraq, but is forced to stretch to find the silver lining in the cloud of good news when it arrive. Example? Headline on a news story today about the booming economy: "For Voters, War May Outweigh Surge in Jobs."

the problem for Bush is that good news on the economy is swamped by bad news from Iraq, political analysts said. That presents Bush with the reverse of the problem his father faced heading into his re-election defeat 12 years ago, an irony given Bush's intense drive for tax cuts to revive the economy and avoid his father's fate.
"He's facing the opposite dilemma of his father," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "What his father would have given for this economy in 1992, what he would have given for his father's good sense in Iraq."

The Letters to the Editor are also always entertaining in the Chronicle. Here's a good one today from one Irving Waldorf of San Francisco:

Editor -- There was a time when reading Letters to the Editor was enlightening and enjoyable, even when disagreeing with some points raised, especially by the far right. But these days as the quality of life in the Bay Area has gone down, so too has the quality of some of the letters, especially from the far right.

The hubris of such people as Rick Schmitto (Letters, "Culture clash, " June 4 ) is pathetic as is his god, Dubya. I do not hate President Bush. I just disagree with what he has done and feel that he plays with less than a full deck. I am a registered Democrat who has voted for Republicans in the past and could do so in the future, so I am not locked into any specific ideology.

Too bad some people in this otherwise wonderful section of the country can't take off their blinders and see what is really going on around them and be willing to listen to differing viewpoints. They need to stop calling people names as children would do and act as adults and offer solutions to our problems

A day or so ago an obviously odd Berkeleyan wrote to complain that his was the only American flag he saw displayed anywhere, except on a bumper sticker that declared "These colors don't run ... the world." This produced a torrent of letters in reply, which the Chronicle published Saturday under its heading of "Berkeley's True Patriots." (For some reason these letters don't appear in the online edition.) Here are some selections from some of them:

I guess the price we pay for living in a university city is enduring our flagless, bumper-sticking neighbors' raging tolerance. Personally I'm heartened by how many United Nations flags I've seen around town.

... there are many ways to show your appreciation for what this country provides: One would be challenging the injustices that are perpetuated in its name.... Another would be consideraing what a shallow gesture mounting a flag is, especially when it has come to mean misery and oppression for much of the world.

I, for one, am a devout Christian and truly love Bush, but evidence shows he is too fatuous and narrow-minded to lead our great and diverse country, including Larkspur.

For women:

The High Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that local authorities must provide women's sports teams with 150 percent higher budgets than municipal men's teams receive in an precedent-setting affirmative action move.

The High Court obligated the Ramat Hasharon Local Council, together with all local councils across the country who fund local sports teams, to adopt criterion set by the Ministry of Science and Sport that say women's teams must receive additional budgets in an act of affirmative action.

MK Ahmad Tibi (Hadash) is demanding affirmative action for Arabs at Bank of Israel and other public sector institutions.
....
"Bank of Israel hires according to criteria of merit, and ignores differences in religion, sex, race or nationality," wrote [Bank of Israel Governor David] Klein.

Tibi said he would not be placated by Klein s promises. "I want a systematic change in employment policy," he said.

I think it is becoming increasingly clear that "diversity" often obscures and even obstructs needed efforts to eliminate discrimination. A good example of what I mean can be seen in this article about a racial incident in a suburban hospital near Philadelphia (thanks to Dave Huber).

A number of months ago the husband of a maternity patient prevailed upon hospital administrators to keep blacks out of his wife's room.

For several days in September, supervisors told African American employees to keep out of a woman's room because her husband, who was white, insisted that only white employees assist in the delivery of his child.

Staffers said they were only trying to prevent a confrontation with the man. But the decision violated the hospital's antidiscrimination policy and prompted outrage among employees and community groups.

It seems to me that the only cultural incompetence on display here is the hospital administrators' inability to recognize that what they need to do is simple, not complicated. They do not need to worry about such politically correct gaseous euphemisms as "cultural competence" or even "diversity." Instead, they should simply enforce their already existing non-discrimination policy.

Indeed, trying to solve a discrimination problem by insisting on "diversity" is rather like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. If the hospital followed the "diversity" solution that is now an article of faith in higher education, it would have to ensure that all patients are served by a racially representative group of doctors, nurses, and attendants.

Mickey Kaus, on the liberal objection to hiring or promoting friends:

So the idea is that all treatment is to be meted out according to what? Merit? Isn't that the argument made by the anti-affirmative-action Bakke crowd--that college admissions should be done strictly by grades and test scores, etc? Isn't the smart, liberal pro-preference position that you can't really rank everyone by an objective "merit" scale--that all sorts of arbitrary factors are at play so race might as well be another one?

Is the liberal position really that you can't refuse to promote a white employee because you don't know and trust him, but you can refuse to promote him because he's white?

... I suppose others have already made these points.

Being exposed to blacks is good for the white mind, says a group of psychologists.

The study took groups of three White students with similar views on one of two issues –either child labor or capital punishment – and matched them with a White or Black collaborator acting under the instructions of the researchers. The students would discuss their issue, and the collaborator would argue along carefully prescribed guidelines either in agreement with or opposed to the group opinion.

The study found that when the collaborator was Black, the other students rated his or her ideas as more novel, even when the collaborator held the same opinion as the rest of the group. In two of the three experimental conditions, students also demonstrated more complex reasoning when the collaborator was Black. Furthermore, students who had more racially diverse friends and classmates tended to show even higher levels of thinking, suggesting that long-term exposure to racial diversity may be even more beneficial to higher-order thought than is immediate immersion in a diverse environment.

In light of these results, we can glean that the mixing pot of cultures and ideas that American colleges strive to become does more than just look good; it promotes complex thinking. Diversity of ethnicities really does promote diversity of thought.

Howell Raines (yes, the Howell Raines) poor-mouths John Kerry. (Link via InstaPundit)

According to Raines, Kerry has moved from "ponderous" to "pompous." He "radiates the feeling that he is entitled to his sense of entitlement ... and is so accustomed to privilege that he doesn't have to worry about looking goofy."

Lucky for Kerry that Raines likes and supports him.

No less noteworthy is the characteristic depth and perception Raines demonstrates when he turns to political analysis:

The difference between [Kerry] and Bush is that Kerry represents the liberal, charitable wing of the Privilege party and George W represents the conservative, greedy wing of the Privilege party.

... This time at the New Yorker.

The New York Times ran an interesting article on Tuesday about the senior thesis of Princeton student, and recent graduate, Katherine Milkman, who used sophisticated mathematical models to analyze New Yorker fiction between October 1992 and September 2001.

She was concerned, among other things, with the gender and race of both the authors of and the characters in the stories that appeared during those years. Whether or not her findings are important, or even interesting, is open to some debate, but I found the following comment in the NYT article to be significant mainly because of the lack of debate about it:

In a conclusion that will probably cause few readers to spill their evening tea, she states that "quantitative analyses revealed that New Yorker characters are not representative of Americans or New York State residents in terms of their race."

Is there any reason why New Yorker fiction editors should receive less criticism than Ivy League admissions officers or Hollywood producers when, in the exercise of their unregulated discretion, their notion of "merit" leads them to publish an ethnically unrepresentative collection of authors who populate their stories with an ethnically unrepresentative cast of characters?