The majority in the affirmative action decision argues that universities (public or private) cannot base the use of affirmative action on its role in promoting some goal unless that goal is MEASURABLE. This seems like a really stupid requirement.
Harvard's goals: "(1) “training future leaders in the public and private sectors”; (2) preparing graduates to “adapt to an increasingly pluralistic society”; (3) “better educating its students through diversity”; and (4) “producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks.”
Jun 28, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
It's so easy to take the peaceful transition of power for granted. But it absolutely requires that losing out in a power struggle not mean that you and the people around you will die.
If you read history, it's full of monarchs killing other claimants to the throne, desperate attempts to father a male heir, etc., etc. When I was in high school, this all seemed so silly. After reading about a few civil wars prompted by rival claims to succession, not so much.
Jun 9, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
What's odd is that he does not, in fact, explain why Ukraine should be brought into NATO now. He offers three reasons:
1) "Ukraine is already receiving the equivalent of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense guarantee." That Ukraine is already getting the benefits of NATO membership is not in any obvious way a reason to make Ukraine a member. To me, it suggests that there's no pressing reason to do so.
Jun 8, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I think that people in the US have (on average) gotten less moral over the past decade or so, but that's an artifact of Trump and whatever led so many people to like him. I cannot fathom how anyone could think that we're less moral (again, on average) than we were a century ago.
A century ago, many Americans were just fine with Jim Crow lynchings, suppressing strikes not with injunctions but with violence, tarring and feathering people they disagreed with and thought were "anti-American" (Socialists, Wobblies, and the like), and on and on and on.
Jun 6, 2023 • 30 tweets • 6 min read
1/ Someone I know RTd this, so I thought I'd respond.
I think that I should feel guilty for bad things I did, not bad things that other people did. If I encouraged them to do something bad, I should feel guilty for encouraging them, not for what they did.
2/ Thus, I do not feel guilty for slavery, Jim Crow, etc. Those are not things I did. I find the idea that I *should* feel guilty for these things deeply problematic, as though all I am, really, is a part of "white people", and whatever "white people" do can be ascribed to me.
May 8, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I have not called Neely's death a murder, since I see no evidence that the person who killed him intended to do so. I imagine it must be awful to have killed someone. However:
NYC man accused of placing Jordan Neely in chokehold defends actions washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05…
Ianal, but I have always understood that self-defense requires that you actually be attacked, and that you face an imminent threat of serious bodily harm. You do not get to defend yourself against someone who is asking for water, however aggressively.
(1) 2A activists call for more attention to mental health. Yet many of them do not support red flag laws or policies like expanding Medicaid that would help expand access to mental health. Can they tell us what, exactly, they want to do?
(2) More generally: for most of our history the Second Amendment was not thought to give individuals the right to own guns outside a well-regulated militia. For all of our history it has been taken to be consistent with significant gun regulation,
May 7, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Quoting James Mattis about how to conduct yourself in a war zone is quite the commentary on how we live now.
More broadly: FDR's fourth freedom -- the freedom from fear -- is a real freedom, but one too many people are willing to sacrifice for the right to own their own arsenal
In a world in which no one had any guns except for the kind used in hunting, we'd have the freedom to turn into the wrong driveway by mistake, or knock on the wrong door, or get confused about which of two identical cars was ours.
Jan 9, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Interesting thread. I have not read the book, but: I think that if one wants to be a neoidealist, it's really important to think through its relationship to GWBush's freedom agenda.
Personally, I am all in favor of promoting democracy. But I think that precisely because it's important, it's REALLY important to understand accurately what actually promotes democracy.
The invasion of Iraq was supposed to promote democracy. Look at Iraq today.
Jan 8, 2023 • 37 tweets • 7 min read
I'm still bothered by this story about the adjunct who got fired for showing a picture of Muhammad in a global art history class. (The picture was by a Persian Muslim in the 14th century.)
nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/…
First, what a failure of leadership on the part of the Hamline University administration. Academic freedom is not an easy topic. That's all the more reason for university administrators, of all people, to try to model it in what they do.
Jan 1, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
This really is worth watching.
I have said this before, but: Zelenskyy has not only been a great wartime leader, but has also done Ukraine an immense service by embodying a better form of patriotism than previous Ukrainian political leaders.
It would be wonderful if everyone worked out for themselves what loving their country really means. But often people don't; they look to the leaders of the past, and align themselves with them.
This is a problem if those leaders were, say, Bandera.
Jan 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's a good speech. To this: "How did we come to believe that it is impossible for something to happen, that then actually happened?" I answer: no one should ever have thought that a war of aggression was impossible. Such wars have happened throughout human history.
To think they are impossible requires forgetting what an extraordinary thing it is that most of Europe, after millennia of pointless stupid bloodletting, actually figured out how to make it stop.
Dec 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Absolutely.
"Conservative" in the sense of being cautious and concerned with preserving and improving existing institutions rather than setting it all on fire, has long since parted company with "conservative" in the sense of right-wing.
I am temperamentally quite conservative, and politically quite liberal. This has never been nearly as much of a stretch as it was made out to be, but since the GOP was taken over by radicals, it's no stretch at all.
Nov 30, 2022 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
This is a very frustrating piece. For starters, it's full of claims about people's motives, often made using loaded language.
Stephen Walt: The war continues to be discussed in ways that are self-serving—and self-defeating. foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/29/the…2/ Walt never tells us who he is talking about: who the self-righteous people who substitute moral outrage for cool rational thought are. This makes it difficult to assess his claims. However, while I am surely not who he's thinking of, I do share the views he criticizes. So:
Nov 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
TIL that Putin's invasion of Ukraine was, at least in part, a "desperate defensive gamble against the advance of US military power." 🤔
US military power meaning of course NATO, which is not, contrary to popular belief, a defensive alliance that came into being when the USSR subjugated all of Eastern Europe, but "an offensive military alliance ... targeted at Moscow from the start."
Nov 26, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
For those of you who don't know much about the Holodomor (and who among us can know everything?): if you've been reading about Ukraine recently, you might have encountered references to its incredibly fertile black earth. It's some of the most fertile land in the world.
2/ Think about the fact that it was farmers of that insanely fertile soil who starved to death. How did that happen? It's like hearing that there was a famine to which restaurant chefs were peculiarly vulnerable.
It should make you think: wtf?
Nov 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Trying to understand what it would be like to go through life this way.
"This way" means both having to show admirable restraint in the face of completely unprovoked abuse, and also being the sort of person who would EVER act like that woman. To be that angry and that small.
It's not that hard to try to be decent to the people around you. It would be the right thing to do even if you didn't know that some people, like the driver, have to take people's abuse day after day, which makes the idea of adding to it for no reason that much more abhorrent.
Aug 7, 2022 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
Reading this now.
"Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer."
"“Can you hold on? My daughter is about to get in her car to leave and I need to kiss her goodbye,” one government official said as she was in the middle of describing a spreadsheet of hundreds of complaints from parents searching for their children."
Aug 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Why just fertilized eggs? Why not all the sperm and/or eggs that might form a blastocyte if the stars align?
I am sure that .@asymmetricinfo has many ova that might be fertilized. From their point of view, can a failure to have sex at the appropriate time possibly be justified?
@asymmetricinfo And contraception: if you were an egg that might become an embryo, and .@asymmetricinfo used contraception, imagine your frustration as your dreams of life vanish into nothingness.
😱
Aug 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
He says he's doing this so that the Senate can fix problems with SS/Medicare. But they can do that without making it discretionary.
ALL this change would do is require Congress to appropriate funds for SS/M every year. I.e., put seniors' income at the mercy of Rand Paul et al.
Once upon a time, when you retired, you had to depend on your savings or your children to support you. If you were poor and had no savings, too bad.
Seniors cannot and should not have to work until they die.
Jul 26, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I can't stop thinking about this guy who could think of nothing better to do with his time than to send hundreds of hateful messages to a grieving father.
How Feds Tracked Down the Trump Fanatic Accused of Bombarding Parkland Dad With Depraved Threats thedailybeast.com/how-feds-track…
The messages are just beyond vile. Some of them are reprinted in the article. It's hard to imagine even thinking of these things, let alone send them to a father whose daughter had been killed in a school shooting.
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