Affirmative Action, RIP

 

Sometimes, losing, like parting, is such sweet sorrow.

So it is with the case of affirmative action, which so many of us for so long have embraced as a necessary evil, but which will not be mourned for long.

Three basic arguments have been made for providing for exceptions to the rules by which meritocracy is supposed to work, namely admitting students to colleges, medical and law schools even though they did not score enough points on their own, by test scores and grades, by awarding them points for being avatars of their race, so they are admitted not because of their own personal merit, but because others of their group--a group defined by White people--have been unjustly treated in the past.

The arguments:

1. REPARATIONS:  Blacks, Negroes, African Americans, whatever you wish to call them, have been denied admission to universities and graduate schools simply because they are black, for generations, for at least 100 years, and now it's time to admit more of them simply to adjust the numbers and to make amends to this group. (Unmentioned in all this, of course, is the far more numerically important discrimination against Blacks being admitted to unions, to trades, to become firemen, policemen and other jobs which would have been numerically far more important to far more more Blacks than admissions to the 0.03% of students who get into Ivy League institutions.) But this is the case of individuals benefiting who would not have been afforded opportunity.

But the case at hand is about Affirmative Action in universities and it's about the small number of students awarded coveted places, "the glittering prize" of admission at the elite institutions of Harvard and University of North Carolina. 

2. SCHOOLS BENEFIT:  The schools themselves benefit from the presence of Black students because they provide a diversity of opinion, perception, experience. This is a harder argument for schools of engineering and medicine, of course, where the science is not much affected by life experience.

3. SOCIETY BENEFITS FROM DIVERSITY:  because schools should look more like the larger society and Black medical students will go practice in Black ghettos and Black lawyers will go help Black communities. This is the test of "a compelling governmental interest."  Under the idea of "strict scrutiny" any exception to equal protection must prove there is a compelling interest and also that the scheme devised to achieve this is "necessary" i.e., there is no other way of achieving this result.

Whenever possible, all citizens should read the actual opinions as written by the justices. When you do that, the opinions become far less jarring, and, in fact in this case, one might argue, the opinion becomes persuasive. 

Reading the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, one cannot avoid seeing his profound sympathy efforts to end racism in American society. 

1. He begins by excoriating the Supreme Court for aiding and abetting institutionalized racism by embracing "separate but equal" in Plessy v Ferguson."The inherent folly of that approach--of trying to derive equality from inequality--soon became apparent...By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal." 

As Roberts outlines the past, as it led to efforts at Affirmative Action, his sympathy for the goal of thwarting racism could not be clearer.

Of course, one of the signal victories for ending racial segregation, in the case in schools, was Brown v Board of Education, but within that decision was contained a real problem for Affirmative Action.

Brown v Board of Education posed a problem for Affirmative Action because it said you cannot use race to justify unequal treatment before the law, as the 14th amendment insisted.

If you could not use race to thwart the aspirations of any race, how could you then turn around and use race to advance the prospects of the members of a race, now favored, while diminishing prospects for members of other groups?

He outlines a series of decisions about busing, the use of public beaches, and even laws forbidding interracial marriage (Loving) which demanded that businesses and institutions serving the public be color blind. "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," Roberts concludes. "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color." (Bakke)

2. He observes that devising programs which are designed to specifically redress grievances of Black Americans has meant and will mean that other groups, like Asians, will not benefit, and, in fact, will be injured because the spaces they might have had are given instead to Blacks. 

Who are judges to judge which groups should be favored? As he notes, "By grouping together all Asian students, for instance, respondents are apparently uninterested in whether South Asian or East Asian students are adequately represented, so long as there is enough of one to compensate for a lack of the other." 

And he raises other concerns which never occurred to me: "How are applicants from Middle Eastern countries classified?...Indeed, the use of these opaque racial categories undermines, instead of promotes, respondents goals. By focusing on underrepresentation, respondents would apparently prefer a class with 15% students from Mexico over a class with 10% students from several Latin American countries."

He observes wryly, "Universities may define their mission as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours...As this Court has repeatedly reaffirmed, 'racial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification.'"

 3. "Our acceptance of race-based state action has been rare for a reason," Roberts observes. "That principle cannot be overriden except in the most extraordinary case."

4. In his Bakke decision, Justice Powell said that trying to right past wrongs meant favoring members of one racial group over another because of their race. The idea this would right past wrongs was "an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past." Which is to say, favoring Shamika today does not help her mother or grandmother who were denied college admission. 

And he shrewdly noted increasing Black medical students had never been shown to increase Black doctors in Black communities--Black doctors go where the money is, and that is not ghettos. 

And the idea that Black students added a benefit to a technical school because of their life experience was hard to argue. Your life experience does not help you build a better bridge, calculate the trajectory of a rocket or remove an appendix.

Later Supreme Court cases fretted about "illegitimate stereotyping," which is to say, how do you know a particular Black student will add anything of value to a school, just because he or she is Black?

And then there is the problem of when is enough? Will Blacks still be preferred at Harvard or in medical schools 100 years from now?

5. There is also the problem of whether AA is a classic "wrong end of the funnel" solution. Which is to say, if you want more Black doctors, you cannot begin when students have fallen behind during their 4 years in college and then simply thrust them, unprepared, into medical school, or even earlier, placing unprepared students to compete at Harvard College, where the other 0.3% of accepted students have been competing from grade school and honing their skills for years before they arrived at Harvard.

6. Roberts asserts Harvard and UNC failed "to articulate a meaningful connection between the means they employ and the goals they pursue." If the idea of Affirmative Action is to make today's Black students whole, you still haven't fixed what was lost before they matriculated. If the idea is to improve life on the campus, you have to show how having more Blacks in the engineering department or the medical school has done that. And if you want to improve medical care or legal assistance in the Black community, you have to show how having more doctors at Harvard Medical School or Harvard Law has done that.

                                     ***

Of course, the big loophole Roberts left is the college can admit a person who has personally overcome adversity, shown character and resilience by growing up in a ghetto and still getting good grades, and so the applicant, who comes from the ghetto has a better life story to sell to the Admissions committee. But then he gets in not because he is Black, but because he has overcome the disadvantages of being Black.

So, in the end, Affirmative Action may morph into "Queen for a Day," that 1950's TV show where the person who told the most tear jerking sob story won a slew of prizes from the great American cornucopia if she told the most compelling story of having risen above adversity. The final shot always showed the woman with the crown on her head, tears rolling down her face, smiling through her agony. 

Oh, Those Effete, Impudent Liberals!

 

“Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as ‘The Generation Gap.’ A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” 

No, that's not Ron DeSantis.  Nope, not William F. Loeb. Not, of course, Donald J. Trump--you knew that because there are too many sophisticated words--but it just goes to show that none of these guys are really new, but they continue that long line of anti-intellectuals Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his long forgotten, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." 

Richard Hofstadter

The guy speaking those words is actually Spiro Agnew, who 90% of my fellow citizens in Hampton, NH could not identify if their lives depended on it. He was Vice President under Richard Nixon, and his use of the word effete was especially effective because most people had to go look it up--this was in 1969, before the internet, so they had to get out a book called a "dictionary." 

"Effete" was the perfect word because it carries with it the connotation of "over-refined" and infertile, pallid, exhausted of vigor. It is exactly the sort of quality Teddy Roosevelt would hold in most contempt. 

(I'm reading about Theodore Rex now, but more on that later.)

Tonight, I saw a report on the PBS News Hour which made "effete" pop up before my eyes.

Now, I love PBS News, or rather, I'm spoiled by it. I've watched it since its inception decades ago with Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil and after a few years, I simply wretch whenever I'm fed the commercial news on the broadcast channels. It's like drinking skim milk for years and then you are offered whole milk--yuck.

Anyway,  Amna Nawaz interviews this guy, Tom Lasseter, Reuters newsman who got home from an assignment overseas and was sitting around his house in Washington, DC and came up with this great idea for a story: How many American Congressmen and Presidents have slaveowners in their families? 

Lots, it turns out. Hundreds. And when Lasseter started pushing a microphone in their faces to ask about this shameful skeleton in the closet, they reacted dismissively.  

Well, it's not exactly like finding out your father was in the Gestapo, but still, not pleasant.

But many seemed to say, "Yep, doesn't surprise me to find out my great grandfather owned slaves: We're from South Carolina, for Chrissake."

But Amna, in her softest, most whimpering tone, asked Mr. Lasseter how it made him feel to learn his own family had own slaves, and he told about how he went out and found some descendant of some of those slaves and they bonded or something. I'm not sure if the word, "forgiveness" came up, but "reparations" sure did. 

And I am sitting there in oculogyric crisis trying to bring my eyes down from inside my head, groaning: "For Chrissake!"

It did make me recall two things, however:

1. On a tour of Fort Sumter some years ago, I got off the boat with a guy dressed in the typical green and gray outfit with the Smokey the Bear hat of a Park Ranger and followed this man around the fort, as the crowd from the boat shuttle split into smaller groups of a dozen tourists to a guide and listened as he extolled Robert E. Lee as a  gentleman, the best general ever not to mention the soul of the Lost Cause. I finally could contain myself no longer and said, "You know, I understand history is one long argument, but Robert E. Lee was as vicious a slaver as the South ever produced." 

The tour ended shortly thereafter as we were now free to wander around the fort, but from about 10 yards a way, our tour guide had obviously had time to think and he called out to me: "There was only one slave owner at Appomattox Court House and he was wearing blue, not gray."

(He turned out not to be a real Park Ranger, but a volunteer docent and when I emailed the Park Service, they got on him poste haste.)

Definite Vicious Slaver

Of course, this canard is one of those historical strictly speaking might be true but in essence is a deep lie: Grant, it is true owned a slave given him by his wife's slave owning father, but Grant could not stand "owning" anyone and set him free in less than a year. Lee did not, technically own the 189 slaves under his control--they were inherited by his wife, Mary Cutis Lee, but Lee whipped them when they tried to escape and then "sold them South" to even more brutal chattel slavery as punishment for trying to escape. Lee was a piece of work.  In fact, the slaves who tried to escape did so because they knew that upon the death of their real owner, Mary's father, his will said his slaves would be set free, but Robert E. Lee chose to ignore that and kept them in bondage. 

Not a Slaver

That's history for you.

2. Teddy Roosevelt

I had read plenty about Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother from from the South, and Teddy had plenty to say about inferior races, and he thought unrestricted immigration was "racial suicide" and he was thick as thieves with all those Harvard professors who founded the Immigration Restriction League and those guys in Boston and New York who were all into "eugenics" which was devoted to breeding a superior race and who read books like "The Passing of A Great Race" and Teddy was all for conquering the Filipinos who were called "niggers" by the American troops and Teddy thought the natives would take years, centuries maybe before they, as a race, would progress enough to be able to rule themselves.

Theodore Rex

But Teddy Roosevelt also appointed a Black woman as the customs official in Charleston, South Carolina and set off a storm of indignation because no Negro should be a federal government employee in the South.

And he had Booker Washington to dinner at the White House which provoked a storm of revulsion in the South, with editorials speculating that Mr. Washington might have been rubbing thighs under the dinner table with Teddy's very attractive daughter, Alice, and those Southerners always leapt right to the Negro man ravaging the pure White woman sexually.

Roosevelt said the Negroes did not choose to be brought here and we have to allow them to become part of the country and while he was chastened and retreated a little, he did not apologize for his "nigger loving" acts and he showed the strange mix of a man who believed in domination of lesser races by the superior master race, but also believed in fair play and recognizing individual virtue in particular individuals and so demonstrated the contradictory currents which can exist in the mind of White people.

He was not effete.

He jousted with wooden clubs in the White House, and he rode his stallion through Rock Creek Park in all weather and he swam naked in the Potomac, which is no tame river and he admired manly men and distained effete men.

He would have roared at Mr. Lasseter and Ms. Nawaz and grabbed the channel changer and likely switched to Fox News.

Not Effete 

Something's Dying That's Never Been Born: Democracy

 Democracy, as it has been attempted in America, never quite made it out of the shell.

And that may not be such a bad thing.

A friend--I guess I can call him a friend--a Saudi Prince I knew in Washington, DC, once remarked with his best Omar Sharif smile, "You Americans: you think everyone wants democracy, but many people do not. Many countries do not."

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first World War as a war which was meant to make the world safe for Democracy, among other things. He was half right: It had become a war between two democracies (of sorts), England and France, then America and autocratic monocracies--Germany, Austria/Hungary.  But Russia, a czarist monocracy, fought allied to the democracies, and the "democracies" of those years were far from governments of the people. That war was the death throes of monarchies, but it did not extinguish the idea of leadership of nations by strongmen, by autocrats.

Woodrow Wilson, that great champion of Democracy, purged the American government (civil service) of Blacks, and that wasn't the worst of it for Black Americans, who had virtually no say in American government since America abandoned reconstruction in the late 19th century. And Wilson rejected the idea of women voting. So American representative democracy was representative only for white males, and not even for all of them. Mostly for the middle and upper class whites, as it was in England.

Home of the Free, Land of the Brave

America, in fact, was no friend to democracy if that meant government of the people, by the people and for the people if those people happened to be Filipinos in the new American empire, or Cubans or Central Americans or people in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. 

American soldiers on bones of Filipinos

When Black veterans returned home from the horrors of the Second World War they found themselves excluded from  the GI bill which allowed their white comrades in arms to buy homes and to start acquiring the wealth home ownership would build. The democratic government of the United States conspired to keep them down.

The will of the people, American style

When Scandinavians snort at the cold heartedness of Americans who will not even extend healthcare to their own countrymen, we can ask the Swedes if they would be willing to pay for helathcare for the Portuguese, the Spanish or the Italian members of the European union. They look a bit horrified at that idea. So how "democratic" are the instincts of these liberal, socialist democracies?

Adulation Popular Will 

When I talk with the folks who stream in and out of my offices in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, I hear from people, every day, who think the government is illegitimate because it steals their money, by taxation, and give it to people who don't deserve it, like immigrants in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and while the HVAC guy pays top dollar for his medications he knows, or thinks he knows, about welfare scammers who get all their medications for free, while they sit home and watch TV, cookout on the grill while blasting their annoying Spanish music on the deck.

In my own town, a majority of voters believe that separation of church and state is ridiculous, and they agree with the current Supreme Court and Marjorie Taylor Greene that separation of church and state is unconstitutional.

The current Supreme Court, voted in with Trump, believes individual gun ownership is a right guaranteed by the Constitution because, after a hundred years of stare decisis decisions saying you had to be in a well organized militia to own a gun legally, all that went poof when gun enthusiast Antonin Scalia said guns were an inalienable right. And the idea that the rule of law involved trying to be consistent over time, being confined to legal precedent, we have entered a time when everything is now "unprecedented." 

Then again, Thomas Jefferson thought it was a bad idea to be bound by precedent. He thought the Constitution should be rewritten every 19 years to accommodate new challenges, new thinking and new realities. That was his idea of Democracy.

The voters of New Hampshire believe in open carry laws for guns, which can be carried into voting places openly, by the law of the governed, even as they close off their schools with bullet proof glass at the entrances.

The guy at the hardware store thinks immigration is an infestation and he wants the government to keep it's government hands off his Medicare and Social Security.

These are the voters who have seized control of their democracy. 

The big difference between American government and that of the Third Reich--which most people in Hampton could not actually identify if you asked them--is the violence.

Southern voters Expressing Themselves

You had guys walking around the Capitol grounds in sweatshirts that said, "The Civil War Starts Now" but they did not actually fire guns at the police. They merely bludgeoned police.

We will have actual fascism, as I understand the meaning of that word, when we have violence in the streets, and government shooting citizens--but wait we had Kent State and we've had the Pettis Bridge and Selma, and a lot of voters voted to endorse that violence.

So, I don't know. Maybe we've already made that transition.

When you look at the rule of "the people" maybe we've never really had it and now that we have "the people"--or at least 46% of them in a united mob seizing control of the democracy, maybe democracy doesn't look all that good any more. 

When Government Shows a Small, Ugly Face

My barber explained the new barber's license, which blocked part of the mirror we stare at as she cuts my hair. It has a black frame and a color passport photo of her and it is eight by eleven inches.

"Oh," I said, "You must have upped your game now--that license is much more imposing than I remember."

"Yes," she said. "I'm almost a hair stylist now with that great license. For thirty years my license was three by six inches, and I hung it over on that wall, near the window, but now I have to print it out on my computer and it has to be 8x11inches or it's a $200 fine and that other license..."--she pointed to the equally obstructive eight by eleven, black framed behemoth next to her new license--"That one is my license to operate a shop."  She continued, voice rising, "And now Joyce has to have her license up there and she has to display her license to rent a chair, right next to it. So you can hardly see your haircut as I'm cutting it, with all the licenses, and they won't let you put it on the other wall. Has to be right in front of you. And, oh, the first aide kit cannot be in the bathroom and the eyewash kit--why I need that I'll never know--has to be right next to it on that wall."

Steam was jetting out of her ears now, at least figuratively.

"The state," she continued, "Comes in here and just makes everyone miserable. And I don't even shave necks. Never use a razor. I could see if I might draw blood or something, but I use scissors and electric cutters. What the fuck?"

It made me think of going to the state Motor Vehicle Department to get my new license, which is now controlled by  federal regulations because you can use it to get on an airplane for interstate travel. You need your social security card for that one. And, boy, did I feel smug and proud to have found my social security card, which I got age 14, and carried with me through many moves up and down the East Coast, and never lost it. 

When I presented it to the clerk she took one look at it and shook her head. "Can't use that one," she said.

"Why not?"

"You laminated it."

"That card is 50 years old. It's paper. If I hadn't laminated it, it would be dust by now."

"I don't make the rules."

"Where does it say it can't be laminated?"

"It's on the form we sent you."

Sure enough, it was there, buried in print a font so small you could just make it out with a strong magnifying glass. That was the rule made by some nameless bureaucrat in the federal government, presumably, and that bureaucrat had never seen my Social Security card, issued in 1961, which says, very clearly, along the bottom in big font, "For Social Security and tax purposes. Not for identification." But, of course, I will not get to plead my case before that bureaucrat or any other. The government does what the government wants to do.

Ultimately, by some miracle, I got a new Social Security card mailed to me--can't recall what documents I had to provide for that and I got my spiffy special driver's license which allows me to fly on commercial airplanes.

But really, this is government people can hate.

Turns out, there was an actual reason the card could not be laminated: Actual, bone fide, government issued Social Security cards have a pebbled surface to them, very hard to counterfeit, and if you run your finger over them, you can feel it, but if you laminate, you cannot.

So, there was an actual reason for that one.

But why do barbers' licenses have to be eight by eleven blocking your view of your haircut?

"These people," my barber said. "They have these shitty jobs, but boy are they going to let you know who is in charge. And if I don't pass their inspection, I'm out of business. Who does that help?"

And we are talking about a small state--less than 1.4 million people--New Hampshire. 

I did not want to ask my barber if she voted for Donald Trump, but I can get the aggravation with government and petty martinets. 

MADS: MAss Delusional State

 

This weekend people who are called "subjects," living in the United Kingdom, will be glued to their screens, or lining the streets of London, while, no doubt, still glued to their iPhone screens, all gaga over the coronation/investiture/"You've Got Royal Blood" show making King Charles, officially, king of the UK and all of the realm of the Empire of Great Britain.

Barry Blitt's New Yorker cover captures the essence of the moment perfectly: A dwarf king, the product of generations of in breeding, all dressed up in a great uniform--and the uniform's the thing when it comes to British aristocracy--sits childlike in the big throne which once, 300 years ago perhaps, actually held a man or woman of consequence.

But Charles, like the rest of the British royalty is a majestic mediocrity in search of attention which is simply not deserved. If he shows any competence at all, this is celebrated as unappreciated prowess hidden from the public. In her New Yorker article about the king, Rebecca Mead relates the story of the head of a non profit devoted to preservation of big cats, who told the king the value of big cats is they are at the top of the food chain, so if tigers and lions are thriving then all the flora and fauna beneath them are doing well; it's a bell-weather of a healthy ecosystem to see big cats thriving. A few weeks later the king repeated all this on a trip to South Africa. "It told me that, when he is touched by something, it registers, and that he has a remarkable capacity to apply it."

Well, isn't that remarkable! Give the man something he is interested in and he can repeat it! And of course, the king of the jungle, top of the food chain. One would think that might register with any king. 

The Brits have, in fact, produced some splendid men and women and seminal thinkers, like Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and some pretty nifty writers, like Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austen and John LeCarre and some intensely interesting thinkers like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. Not to mention, some pretty amazing technology like radar, the CAT scanner and the MRI and, sadly, the nuclear bomb, and some discoveries like Watson and Crick's double helix model of DNA. And this does not even begin to include the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Andrew Lloyd Weber and Jesus Christ Superstar. 

All that from a smallish island with a history of ruthless selfishness, imperial arrogance and downright genocide, but somehow, that nation came out on the right side of history during the planet's most gargantuan and important apocalypse, which we now call World War Two, and despite all their meanness and criminality, that constitutional monarchy managed to engender a system called "liberal democracy" in which a loyal opposition vies with the majority party to govern with a spirit of compromise and accommodation.

All that is, we will be told again and again, captured and encapsulated in a symbolic King, the European version of the Japanese emperor.

Cocksure

 

"The trouble with the world is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt."

--Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

That quote has been on the banner of this blog since its inception and it kept welling up in my brain as I read "The Man Who Broke Capitalism," by David Gelles about Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of General Electric.

Jack Welch

Jack Welch was a small man from a small town, Peabody Massachusetts, who studied chemistry in college and rose to be the CEO of what was at the time the most important company in the world.

He was a man certain of his own greatness and firm in his convictions and he thought he knew what the rest of the 20th century was going to look like.

Welch came to power in the days when Ronald Reagan was decrying welfare queens and Reagan was saying it was once again alright to be rich, and when Milton Friedman was winning a Nobel Prize in economics for saying the only duty of a CEO and of any company is to make money for its shareholders. He was saying this when people were talking about "socially responsible investing" such as not investing in apartheid South Africa and they were protesting outside Dow Chemical for making napalm which was immolating Vietnamese children.

Profits for Dow Chemical 

Friedman was not the first to say stuff like this: George Bernard Shaw's Undershaft said much the same thing in "Major Barbara" and his point was your only moral duty in life is to not be poor and so he made munitions and explosives and wealth came his way. Of course, Undershaft shared his wealth with his workers and the community was richly supported by the profits from his deadly products; the rich living high on the death and destruction of the poor nations.

Milton Friedman

But Friedman said it so assuredly he got the Nobel prize. He said government had no business interfering with business under any circumstances, should never regulate business, which is always wrong and harmful to society.

I haven't read any of Friedman's books or articles, but I know all I need to know about him from a half hour interview I listened to in which the interviewer asked him about the FDA: Didn't we need to have the FDA to control the pharmaceutical industry? Nonsense! thundered Friedman. But what about all those potentially harmful drugs? The bad products will be discovered and the companies who make them will face liability suits and bankruptcy so the market will discipline them. No problem. Let the market play out. Let the stallions of commerce infuse the economy with energy.

Of course Professor Friedman was not asked about the two most telling examples of where his argument fails: 

1/ Thalidomide and 2/ Mad Cow Disease. 

Thalidomide was that drug pregnant women in England were given to control nausea and they gave birth to thousands of children who had no arms or legs before it was realized Thalidomide was teratogenic. The justice of the liability courts and the marketplace would have been cold comfort to those limbless children or to their parents.

And then there is Mad Cow Disease, caused by a prion which cannot be baked, cooked or barbecued out of the cow and when ingested by human beings takes 20 years to surface as sudden profound dementia and bed ridden immobility unto death. How does the liability court or the marketplace catch up with something like that 20 years later?

So the professor didn't have a clue. He was cocksure but stupid and wrong. The easiest thing for an absolutist to be is consistent. Consistent, but wrong.

Jack Welch decided manufacturing in America was doomed. Spending money on R&D and workers' wages is a loser's game. The easy money is in finance, credit cards and banking. You don't need to make scientific or engineering breakthroughs for that--you just print cash.

Get rid of all those workers. Cut your least productive workers--the lower 10% each year until you have no workforce, just computers issuing credit cards.

How, exactly you define "least productive" is another thing.

Suppose you had a superlative football team, wins championships every year, sort of the New York Yankees of the 1950's, the standard by which you measure all others, sort of like the General Electric of the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. But then you cut the least important 10% of your players after each season. What does that get you? The Washington Redskins. Or the Commanders. Or something.

But Jack Welch was a captain of industry, sure of himself, cocksure. 

He knew that the biggest drag on his company was all those lazy, entitled workers who were terminally complacent, just showed up at work to sit around and drink coffee. Sort of like welfare queens, but not living off the government, but off GE. 

Arthur T. Demoulas: A CEO for All Seasons

Contrast this with Arthur T. Demoulas, who fought off his cousins who wanted to sell out the family grocery store chain for a big pay day, vulture capitalism which would have carved up and destroyed hundreds of stores and thousands of jobs. His battle is documented in the documentary "Food Fight," and his basic article of faith was that Market Basket was not simply about who could make the most money and keep the biggest share of it. To him, this family business was about the customer and making food available at a good price, the workers and their families and communities from which they came and lastly, about making enough profit to keep the venture healthy and going, but not necessarily growing. Was Demoulas wrong, sentimental, soft headed or simply virtuous and right--that companies do not have to be simple feeding troughs for stockholders but can serve multiple purposes at once?

In Welch's eyes, he owed nothing to GE workers but the last paycheck. His only obligation was to the share holders. He bought out other companies and the first thing he did when he acquired them was to fire as many people as possible. Workers are not an asset; they are overhead. 

I've know some workers who don't want to work, but most workers I know actually care about doing a good job. But Mr. Welch knew better. So he made war on complacency and on his own workforce. He became the spider wasp of American industry: hollowed out his own company from within.

But he was cocksure. 

Me, I'm full of doubt. So what does that make me?

Why Lia Thomas Matters

 

"But it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics. With gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender, conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was gaining attention."

--The New York Times 

The story of the University of Pennsylvania swimmer, Lia Thomas, matters because the way her story has been used for political purposes. It is both important and instructive.

Of course, all ethical analysis should begin with the establishment of fact, and legal analysis typically begins this way, but political analysis does not care about fact, only perception of fact.

The swimmer known as Lia Thomas began her collegiate swimming career swimming on the Penn men's team, but then underwent some sort of gender transition therapy and began competing as a woman, where she was among the top women swimmers.

I've spent about as much time as I have patience for googling around the internet, trying to tease out some critical facts, unsuccessfully:

#1/ What, exactly, did Lia Thomas have done to herself?

I said, "some sort of transformation" because the details of what was done are nowhere I can find.

 From photos of her in her tank suit, it appears she has no testicles or penis, so I'm tentatively concluding she had an orchiectomy (removal of her testes) and resection of her penis. She also likely received estrogen and possibly other hormones to reduce her testosterone levels, likely cyproterone (which blocks testosterone binding to androgen receptors on cells), spironolactone (which also blocks androgen binding to cells and which has a slightly estrogen like structure) and estradiol patches to "feminize" cells. 

All men produce hormones which have a feminizing effect (e.g. stimulating breast cells), e.g. estrogen, and all men also produce male hormones, which reduce feminizing effects and cause "androgenization" meaning male effects, like beard growth and muscle growth and increased muscle strength. 

All women do this as well. The make both sets of hormones, androgens (male) and estrogens (female). The difference between most men and women is men tend to produce a lot more male hormone (e.g. testosterone) than female hormone (e.g. estradiol) and women do just the opposite.

Give a normal man a lot more estrogen and he'll tend to grow breasts. Give a normal woman a lot more androgen and she'll tend to grow a moustache and beard.

From her photographs, it looks like Lia Thomas no longer has male external genitalia. From NCAA rules, it seems likely she has taken enough estrogen and/or cyproterone and/or spironolactone to reduce her testosterone levels to some level enough to satisfy NCAA rules to allow her to compete as a female.

But much of this is inference. Just you try finding the details online.

I suppose this is all confidential medical information, but when you assert your rights to swim as woman, one might argue you have to provide enough information to justify your new identity. 

#2/ What happened to Lia Thomas when she entered the swimming pool as a newly minted woman? 

That is, what happened to her success rates as a woman, as opposed to her success as a man?

The short answer is that although she was marginally slower in the water, she was, compared to women, now at the top of the heap. 

Before her transition, she was only modestly successful male swimmer ranking 554th in the 200 meter freestyle, 65th in the 500 event, but as a woman she was 5th in the 200 event, and 1st in the 500 meter.

Her times for those events worsened slightly after her transition, presumably owing to the effects of lowering her testosterone levels, but small differences in times in elite competition work out to large differences in rankings. 

In sports like track and swimming, we have objective, numeric measures of performance, so we can look at the winning times--the world records for women, and compare them to those of men.  Undeniably, men swim and run faster at the elite levels. An elite woman may beat a less than elite male, but an elite male beats most elite women.

There are a thousand male runners who run faster than the women's world record holder in virtually any track event.

This is true, of course in other sports: Chris Everett was asked in a TV interview about what would happen if she played Roger Federer in a championship match, and she laughed, "I wouldn't last too long!" she said. The power and velocity of his serve alone would be annihilating, she said, not to mention his ground strokes and quickness. 

Girls do reasonably well in wrestling, until the boys hit puberty.

There is little doubt there are hormonally (testosterone) driven differences in performance between males and female athletes, which, I presume is one reason we separate male from female competitors. 

This is the same reason we have weight classes in wrestling and age group swimming and boxing is divided into weight classes. What would be the fun of watching a heavy weight boxer against a welter weight? We want to see like vs. like; we want a competitive match. How much fun would it be to watch LeBron James play in a high school basketball game?

Lia Thomas went through puberty as a male, did not do the transition until age 18 or 19, and has the bone structure, heart size, muscle bulk of a fully developed male as a result. While she may have lost some muscle bulk and strength, she had that formative experience of forming a body under the influence of male hormone levels and only some of this is reversible. Hand and foot size, tracheal depth, brow ridges, carrying angles, all sorts of musculoskeletal effects of male hormones persist, although they may be somewhat ameliorated by hormone therapy. This has always vexed transgender clinics: while you can feminize former men, you cannot undo the changes wrought by male puberty entirely, so shoulders, hands, feet, face, voice all shaped, built by testosterone remain stubbornly intact.

Should female athletes face defeat by Lia Thomas now?

Show most people photos of Lia Thomas and the answer becomes not simply intellectual, based on numbers, but there is a gut check answer.

This athlete may consider herself a woman. The NCAA may define her as a woman, but the average citizen cannot buy this person as a woman who should be competing with women who went through female puberty.

This is what makes so effective the taunt: "What is a woman? Republicans know the answer. Democrats do not!" 

Where does this leave Democrats who defend Lia Thomas and others like her participating as a woman? 

The simple answer is they look "woke," which is to say, unreasonable, trapped in a device of their own creation, to be consistent they have to say, "Yes, she is a woman and should compete as a woman," but what anyone with "common sense" would say, is, "Well, she may be a woman now, but she hasn't always been and she was a man long enough to exclude her from competing as a woman."

Consider this brain exercise for a moment, suppose there were a thriving women's wrestling program. Would a trans woman (formerly a man) be allowed to participate? What harm could she wreak on her opponents? There is women's lacrosse and even rugby: what would happen if you had former men competing in these contact sports?

The fact is, liberals try to be consistent even at the extremes of cases and extreme cases, famously,  make bad law.

An abortion at 11 weeks is still an abortion, but an "abortion" at 36 weeks looks a lot like infanticide to a lot of citizens, and Democrats should realize this and stop trying to be consistent and start saying, "Well, it's complicated." This is what happens at the extremes. When you take the extreme example of a baby headed down the birth canal and you say, "Is it okay to meet that head with a scalpel?" the pro abortion person has to say "yes" to be consistent, if all that matters is the mother's choice, or "women's health." But thirty seconds away, is a baby most people would accept as a fully formed human being, and that baby has rights. So it's not "just about women's health."

We are talking about an estimated 1.3 million people in this country who identify at any given time as transgender--the number is undoubtedly fluid and likely inaccurate, but it's the current New York Times estimate, and that comes out to roughly 0.4% of the population of a country with 330 million. 

Nobody, all Democrats ought to agree, should be harassed, demeaned, shamed or otherwise abused because of their sexuality, their sexual preferences or their own identification as to gender. But that doesn't mean we would allow a transgender to rob a grocery store. That doesn't mean we exempt transgender folks from all rules. 

At some point, Democrats can be all for protecting the rights of transgenders without allowing for extreme behavior which strikes a reasonably well informed citizen as unreasonable.

Gadansk, Poland