Obama v. Thomas: affirmative action
Yesterday I commented on a letter that president Obama wrote back in his days as Harvard Law Review president at Harvard. My post was mostly about Obama’s grammar, but the subject matter of his letter was affirmative action. Here’s what he had to say about that:
I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review’s affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized either within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review. Indeed, my election last year as President of the Review would seem to indicate that at least among Review staff, and hopefully for the majority of professors at Harvard, affirmative action in no way tarnishes the accomplishments of those who are members of historically underrepresented groups.
Yesterday I also wrote briefly about some commentary made by Walter Russell Mead on a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Today I got around to reading the Toobin piece; it contains this observation about Thomas’s attitude towards affirmative action:
The gist of Thomas’s complaint about Yale reflects his feelings about the worth of affirmative action generally. In his book, Thomas recounts his difficulties finding a job after Yale, which he attributed to “what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.” In light of this, he wrote, “Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it.” This hostility to élite institutions manifested itself at Stetson. “We talk about diversity. The real problem of our Court is that it’s all Ivy League,” Thomas said. Currently, all nine Justices attended law school at either Harvard or Yale. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there are other law schools out there,” he said. Alone among his colleagues, Thomas usually selects at least some of his law clerks from less prominent schools.
No doubt the difference between Obama’s and Thomas’s perception of affirmative action both reflected their already-held politics and helped to further and solidify each man’s politics afterward. The disparity may have also had something to do with timing: Thomas is considerably older, and graduated from law school when affirmative action was still relatively new and attitudes towards it were probably less PC (he graduated from Yale Law School in 1974, to Obama’s 1991 from Harvard Law). Plus, Thomas lacked Obama’s smooth style, the one that has appealed so mightily to many white people and has contributed to making him The One. These differences may have helped shape their divergent experiences both in law school and later in the job market.
For many years after his 1991 appointment to the Court, Thomas was portrayed in the liberal media as a simpleton Uncle Tom. The Toobin article marks a huge departure from this point of view. The portrait of Thomas it paints is of a very smart and determined man who goes his own way, and is accordingly extremely dangerous to liberal aims. I’ve long felt that Thomas’s own life story indicates an incredible drive and tenacity: his hardscrabble upbringing and the trajectory of his achievements make for an amazing story of perseverance and strength.
Also of great interest in terms of the Obama letter and its poor grammar is this biographical note from Thomas’s Wiki entry:
Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, predominantly black community founded by freedmen after the American Civil War. When he was a child, the town lacked a sewage system and paved roads. He was the second of three children born to M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of American slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language…Having spoken the Gullah language as a child, Thomas realized in college that he still sounded unpolished despite having been drilled in grammar at school, and he chose to major in English literature “to conquer the language”.
There is so much of interest in the Toobin piece that I recommend you read the whole thing. As for the question of why Toobin wrote it, my answer is that he did so to alert the liberal public to the fact that Thomas is a (to them) dangerous radical of the right, and that far from being a fool, he is a highly intelligent opponent who is to be feared rather than ridiculed. In the course of the article, Toobin also touches on a few more things to discredit Thomas: he reaffirms Anita Hill’s charges by listing a bunch of other people whose reports seem to corroborate hers, he describes Thomas’s wife’s Tea Party activities in order to underline attempts to get the dangerous Thomas to recuse himself from any case involving a challenge to Obamacare, and he attempts to put down Thomas’s originalism as “just another kind of interpretation.”
[ADDENDUM: I just noticed Michael Barone’s piece on Toobin’s article. He and I seem to agree on Toobin’s motives for writing it.]
he reaffirms Anita Hill’s charges by listing a bunch of other people whose reports seem to corroborate hers
Good God, they’re still flogging that risible non-story? They should go after him on something more substantive. I heard Thomas once tore the tag off a mattress. Liberals, charge!
Being elected Harvard Law Review president or POTUS and receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, are not accomplishments in and of themselves. They are signs that are usually associated with having accompished something, or providing a position where it is hoped the person will accomplish something. Providing the sign without accomplishment trades on the reputation, takes advantage of dupes, and cheapens the sign, like a counterfeit coin.
It is curious that the social contract of the Constitution would not be interpreted as are regular contracts in law. First plain meaning, and if ambiguous, then the intent of the parties using parol evidence. Liberal and conservative justices alike take to this construction of contract language. If one party were to try to unilaterally change the meaning of the contract, they would be found to be in breach, yet this is what liberals propose for the document underpinning our nation.
People forget that Uncle Tom was a novel designed to fight certain social issues at the time. Which, perhaps, suits Justice Thompson in a way totally foreign to what the Left thought it did.
Liberals know they are intelectually and morally superior people so if you aren’t liberal you must be stupid and evil. That’s why Obama was overestimated and Thomas underestimated. If Clarence Thomas had read a teleprompter while looking sincere and saying liberal platitudes he would have been called a genius by the liberals.
People often tell conservatives, or me, that the Left is defined by us to mean something arbitrarily political and biased due to our views. I tell them that the Left is determined by the Left. If you aren’t a Leftist, they’ll destroy you personally until you realize that fact: Zell Miller, Williams, etc.
The Left is a very good cult. And like all good cults, they weed out infiltrators and traitors very well. We don’t determine who is in that cult. The cult determines that.
Of course, originalism is an interpretation, since any understanding of an ancient text requires some interpretation. Meanings of words vary in time, which can produce mistakes if simplistic literalism is taken as approach. But this is what all historians do in such situation: they try to uncover original meaning, that is, what the authors of the text were trying to express. This is called the principle of historism in classes in ancient literature, and there is no viable alternative to this principle of interpretation, at least in phylology. Why this should be different in legal reasoning? Having chosen English literature as the main topic of his college study, Thomas should have known this all too well.
Ancient literature, Sergey? The Constitution was written just a little over 200 yrs ago, in English, actually, a language still used in some circles even today. It is perfectly intelligible and extraordinarily clear to me, as a non-phylologist. As it is to Thomas.
The twisting of its words started about 100 years ago, with the birth of progressivism.
Sergey: You’re right that the meanings of words have changed over time. It reminds me of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s brilliant rant about how liberal judges, mostly appointed by the despicable FDR, perverted the meaning of the word “regulate” in the commerce clause to concentrate more power in Washington and restrict liberty. The commerce clause states simply:
That the United States Congress shall have power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”.
Here is Judge Napolitano’s rant about how those liberal judges changed the original meaning of the word regulate to justify unconstitutional restrictions on a man’s personal freedom to grow wheat on his own land for his own personal use:
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/video-podcast-media/video-andrew-napolitano-clause-any-cause?library_node=79157
“not tarnish”
Well, tarnish comes from outside, or at least part of the compound comprising tarnish. Enough with the metaphors. But if you’re going to use this one, consider that the “tarnish” is in the eye of the beholder. A particularly oblivious individual may not notice he’s tarnished in others’ eyes.
Which is the point.
“Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it.”
In other words, Thomas thought he was as good as contemporaries. It would be interesting to see how he did at Yale.
It’s interesting that AA only works in the soft studies. There are virtually no blacks in the hard sciences or in engineering, and very few women. You can’t bs your way through school or a job when the other side is Mother Nature.
THANKS for the link, Scott. The “Wheat, Weed, and ObamaCare: How the Commerce Clause Made Congress All-Powerful with John Eastman and Erwin Chemerinksy” was good.
Obama said..””Indeed, my election last year as President of the Review would seem to indicate that at least among Review staff, and hopefully for the majority of professors at Harvard, affirmative action in no way tarnishes the accomplishments of those who are members of historically underrepresented groups.””
Sounds like he’s trying to say his privledged advancement only applied to admissions and any advancement after that was soley on merit….Because the proof is in nobody having a problem advancing him. 🙂
The case of Clarence Thomas is a sad commentary on the state of self-proclaimed civil-libertarians today.
By any rational measure, he should be their poster child. That he is not, says more than they intend. Clearly in their minds, ideology trumps achievement. Advancing while by-passing the approved path, is unacceptable.
Every day that he spends on the Court repudiates their small-minded vindictiveness. God Bless, you Justice Thomas.
With regard to Sergey’s post. I am not schooled in Philogy, but common sense suggests that he is mixing his terms by equating the language of law and government with the language of literature. If the language of law is allowed to change at the pace of changes in common usage, chaos is the inevitable result. I believe Justice Thomas is well aware of this. My understanding of “original intent” is to insure continuity in the structure of government, the powers allocated to government, and the rights of individuals relative to government. Of course interpretation is required, as the world has changed dramatically in terms of technology and the pace of life. Still it is vital to the health of the Republic that the relationships be preserved as originally designed. Is this too complex? Too simple?
What i find MOST interesting when you slam the two together and play compare contrast and go deep.
Obama is the faux indignant ex slave who was never a slave that is so popular, but often is not true at all…
African American Lives
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Lives
if not on cable, youtube has it
and
DNA rewrites history for African-Americans
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-01-dna-tests_x.htm
its a complicated situation, but the attitude that people take on, never checks any record, nor does it get it right. the details are in the specifics, but the attitude is general, and one does get castigated if one does not have it…
on the whole its a concious decision just as i watched things change in high school as kids suddenly had to be from a broken home of some sort!!!
which brings me now to Clarence… he doesn’t have it, so he is a “Uncle Tom”… however, Clarence UNLIKE Obama, and most others with attitude.. knows directly who his slave grandparents were and so on – IN DETAIL
The key is looking at the rest of his history… dirt poor early childhood, but with family, something that 76% today dont have thanks to… nevermind
then there is a fire.. so he goes to live with some other family members who have it better…
Thomas was the only black person at his high school in Savannah, where he was an honor student.
if you look carefully you realize that he went from poverty to savannah georgia to his grandparents who “built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice”
this is a point i have made over and over and almost no one believes me.. the southerners who were racist, were the southerners that had a vested interest in it… ergo democrats and progressives and the stuff they did in landry parish, and so on (during hayes tilden)
however the common man, average man was not all that racist… if they were they wouldnt have had a thriving business as ice was not something that poor black families could afford… and the history of hayes tilden wouldnt be murder in black only areas and bbq and fairs for whites where blacks were invited too and all mingled.
(go see the photos if you dont believe me and read the history… its like another oddity that no one notices.. today’s skin heads are more racist than the actual Nazis they think they are copying – a very famous book was written by a african man who loved being part of hitlers army… )
what lesson did clarence learn as he then earned honors roll in high school?
that while some people were not nice people and acted on their negative beliefs.. which we all know is true… overall that couldnt be said of the whole system and in essence he never would have gotten as far as he did if the system was that way in essence.
i guess the point i am making is that the man who knows his slave grandparents and so on… does not have the attitude of a man today who believes he has slave ancestry and is waiting for restitution to him in some way
and the man whose family were never slaves, but was raised as very very left does have that attitude… just as the left in the black community keep that history going… (so that immigrant children believe they are related to that history too)
and neo..
you missed the money quote for capping your yale points from clarence!!!!
by the way… most websites describing or talking about affirmative action judgements for the popular culture, talk about liberal this, and liberal that, and so on and so forth, and so on..
really really not all that educational… with them often bowing to the point that its a complicated thing, and that
historian Roger Wilkins pointed out, “blacks have a 375-year history on this continent: 245 involving slavery, 100 involving legalized discrimination, and only 30 involving anything else.”
which does not really jibe for history… if anyone wants to explain why, i will leave it for them
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003)
Justice Thomas, writing that the system was “illegal now”, concurred with the majority only on the point that he agreed the system would still be illegal 25 years hence.
Gratz v. Bollinger – The University of Michigan used a 150-point scale to rank applicant, with 100 points needed to guarantee admission. The University gave underrepresented ethnic groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, an automatic 20-point bonus on this scale, while a perfect SAT score was worth only 12 points.
and yet no one believes me that this bronx science guy and hard worker didnt get full degrees and move into research because he could be disenfranchised and having no connections, affiliations, contacts, money or such… was stuck…
around the time i was to go Regents of the University of California v. Bakke had been decided… but it showed that if you had no money to sue, or they could get ya, they would…
the OTHER SIDE of affirmative action is someone like me who cant get what he works hard to earn… he/she is held back…
though to obfuscate it they pick on the more helpless (as indicated in an article denoting the salaries of the protected groups, where gays earned a lot more than average oppressors, and the lowest earners were the special ones with disabilities)
in the regents case they basically were letting people in with lower scores… Allan Bakke sought remedy in the court and won…
many of us never got that… and now they crow how they have turned it, and its 61% female (and some admins are dreading it as the behaviors change when its like that)
social engineering negates self determination
there was a whole life i was denied that i will never have, get back, or taste…
all one has to do is read through the judgments to see how many are school related and violations created by schools trying to implement a policy that is socialist and not constitutional..
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education
Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School
Proposition 209 enacted in California (has education provisions)
Florida bans race as factor in college admissions.
University of Michigan’s undergrad affirmative action policy
Univ. of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policy
Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action in University Admissions
Supreme Court Rules Against Considering Race to Integrate Schools
and yet, we dont get that the school people are experimenting in peoples lives..
you cant have affirmative action / social engineering, and self determination
they are mutually exclusive… you have one, then the other is a image a cargo cult front…
Your first post/link on Thomas below by Mead was fascinating. Since you keep beating this horse—not dead—I will make a point to read Toobin’s piece as soon as I can early this fall.
Last night I went to a well attended Tea Party function in Jackson Hole. The speaker was head of Freedom Works. He clarified again that the liberal, progressive elites had three stages of attack on conservatives they hate: 1)to ignore them; 2) to make fun of and deride them; and 3) to seriously fear them.
Thomas has clearly ascended to the third rung of derision which he’s had to work hard for over a sustained length of time.
AA was and is, to enable blacks who have suffered under slavery and discrimination an EQUAL chance – a denied to them for hundreds of years in America. To be against AA is to be ignorant of history and common morality.
Anway – here’s a dose of reality for our Jewish extremist friends; some real history, not hasbara – and brought to you by some REAL JEWS.
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/antisemitism/holocaust/gedalyaLiebermann.cfm
That’s the ‘nation’ that you support. What a bunch of sick….
That’s titled, “The Role of Zionism in the Holocaust”.
Read and weep.
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A chance denied to them by Democrats, who will make good on that by promising blacks another chance at the plantation slave farm. I see how it works now.
“”AA was and is, to enable blacks who have suffered under slavery and discrimination an EQUAL chance — a denied to them for hundreds of years in America. To be against AA is to be ignorant of history and common morality.””
steve
There is nothing moral about needing to be percieved as good intentioned no matter the results it produces. Look around my friend. You have instilled suffering and misery for the very people you profess to be concerned about.
Clarence Thomas was an honors student at Holy Cross, a highly rated small college. From his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (page 51)
As Clarence Thomas was a top-notch student, he resented allegations that he needed affirmative action to get admitted to law school. Any white Alpha Sigma Nu/Phi Beta Kappa would have a distinct advantage in getting admitted to law school.
That would be page 61.
No blacks now living have been denied anything for hundreds of years: none of them are nearly that old. And that is the problem with this kind of retribution.
In his book, Thomas recounts his difficulties finding a job after Yale, which he attributed to “what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.” In light of this, he wrote, “Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it.”
Kind of reminds me of what I’ve always seen as the problem with PC neologisms: It doesn’t matter what you change the word to, it will accumulate the cruft of its actual usage.
I remember when “retarded” still used to be an acceptable clinical term for people with learning-delay mental disabilities; when it became a term of insult, people went through “disabled”, “differently-abled”, “challenged”, and a host of others. And it didn’t make any difference. We all knew what people meant, and the new word got used by rude people for mockery and abuse the same way the old one did. The only purpose for the latest neologism was to show off your PC cred in “empathy” and “tolerance”.
Gestures, no matter how noble, remain hollow if that is all we think they are.
Those of you who’ve been here a while ought to recognize our visitor, old steve/stevie our pet Canadian troll. His signature style isn’t fully intact—this thread features stevie in a relatively restrained mode, for him—but that’s who it is.
AA was and is, to enable blacks who have suffered under slavery and discrimination an EQUAL chance — a denied to them for hundreds of years in America. To be against AA is to be ignorant of history and common morality.
no.. thats the argument for consumption for idiots and innocents clubs.
here, let me tell you what social engineering a la soviet style would say..
what your paying attention to is the rule or law, or social poitn as demonstrated by ukaz…
behind the ukaz, is the “informational note” the pragmatic and unvarnished real reason in terms of power and ideas that is not for the idiots who believe.. the spravka..
AA is MOSTLY to confirm in the minds of african americans or the target audience that their suffering is real and true and valid
this is then justification
waht for?
well the nazis invented disparate impact to accuse the jews who were not a majority (ie in case you havent noticed all minorities and women together are a vast majority over the supposed oppressors!!!!! so they side with the majority against a minoroty target that is deemed to be the majority in control, or cheating)
so as in germany.. the actions taken for reparations proved to those who were taking their cues that the jews were responsible for all their misery, and if we were equal, why did they EARN more when we all would have the same outcomes if they weren tcheating or had privieleges.
cut to today USA..
the minority target is considered to have priveleges, and that AA is making reparations for past deeds and so on.
now.. if that was true, wouldnt it be limited to just those who were a part of this?
ie… why does a african immigrant who comes here in, say, 1998… intitled to the reparations?
ie.. why is a white man whose family arrived here in 1920 who is first born here, have to pay reparations for peoples actions half a world away and in which he could not even protest said actions?
when you can answer that… and still keep the answer as to the ukaz you can have a contortionists job at the circus…
the only things that EVER fit righ are the spravka…
the ukaz of feminism is liberation
the spravka is to tax womens labor and remove it from the family whose ideas and culture threaten their enslavement.
of course the spravka is often unconscionable..
but PRAGMATIC..
like exterminating political dissidents…
thats spravka…
how to justify it so the people dont react?
thats ukaz..
oh.. this:
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union
In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place. Political abuse of psychiatry is the misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention and treatment for the purposes of obstructing the fundamental human rights of certain groups and individuals in a society
ah.. you mean like broadening ADHD so that you can medicate to failure the white male kids (whose medicating the drop outs hunting whites in packs?)
or you mean like theodore adorno and his treatise on the authoritarian personality?
or maybe meade and kinsey justifying sexualizing children… (like lukaks did in hungry for a reason we ignore)
or how the socialistrs know that the outcome of the social things they sell under ukaz will do what the spravka says, not the ukaz.
so welfare didnt help poor blacks
it destroyed theri families, so there was no culture, no cohesian… which is why black national socialists and children of the ofunding members of the black panthers, took h rap browns poetry, and turned it into music
then came up with an ukaz of some myth in inner city ryming games like “your mamma” as the source.
but have you ever read the poetry of H RAP Brown?
H. Rap Brown
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Rap_Brown
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin as Hubert Gerold Brown also known as H. Rap Brown, was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, and later the Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party. He is perhaps most famous for his proclamation during that period that “violence is as American as cherry pie”, as well as once stating that “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down”. He is also known for his autobiography Die Nigger Die!. He is currently serving a life sentence for the murders of two Fulton County Sheriff’s deputies in 2000.
the music is homage to him and his ideas of race war to eradicate white oppressors.
isnt it funny the men with no families thanks to welfare and social engineering are now attacking their oppressors under that dialectic and fulfiling the concept of hegels slamming things together to make a new synthesis…
note that the discussion of clarence thomas is VERY poinient… as the black national socialists (nazis), and the panthers (race based)… are loved on the left the same way that terrorist ayers is and the terrorist feminists (see rote zora).
so now..
tell me the purpose of AA is all those reasons given to you for consumption…
for if you only knew what lenin thought of people like you, you might stop for a minute and think that maybe, just maybe…
a political bernie madoff and friends are screwing with yours and everyones heads… and ADMIT it
“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” — Margaret Sanger, letter to Clarence Gamble, Dec. 10,1939. – Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. (Dec. 10 is the correct date of the letter. There is a different date circulated, e.g. Oct. 19, 1939; but Dec. 10 is the correct date of Ms Sanger’s letter to Mr. Gamble.)
social engineering and abortion when combined is eugenics… there is nothing nice about disenfranchising people by relying on human nature while denying human nature exists so that you cant conclude thats what they are doing… and then providing free genocidal resources to end 1.5 billion yhear old lineages who think they are doing the right thing killing their kid for others.
like nancy pelosis FIVE kids…
And understand: class differences will not save you.
H. Rap Brown
But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.
H. Rap Brown
I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
If America don’t come around, we’re gonna’ burn it down.
H. Rap Brown
The only politics in this country that’s relevant to black people today is the politics of revolution… none other.
H. Rap Brown
the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them. Robin morgan feminist
may i point out that the designated oppressors are white males, who contain within that set jewish males, and that the left is now calling again, AS I SAID THEY WOULD… a second holocaust (As engels said was needed)
so the holocaust, and all that genocide
its going to happen again, becasue of people like you who think that treating groups unequally make fairness, when the soviets learned it set them against each other.
do you think the skin heads are getting more people now that they are the only group willing to protect white males, or fewer? think about it… if there is no recourse to the state to protect those designated not to be protected… where do they drive them to? the moderate organizations who stand for that group? there arent any… the left wont let reasonable ones exist and unreasonable ones will not fold against their unreason… that leaves only one place to be driven to for the idiots…
and so… it wont be long with mobs of black kids beating up with baseball restaurant patrons for leaving.. (as they did the chinese couple)… pulling people out of cars..
playing “the stomping game”
how long till the hegelian game of holding down one side, while hiding the action of the other side, will result in the two side going at each other
you tell me… because i can tell you that the idiots are getting really really stupid waiting for the state and holder to not play favorites…
oh.. i forgot to add that your zion crap..
its the OLDEST Active measure on record..
go ahead… look it up
its part of how the germans hated the jews
and fdr and stalin too (fdr signed the camps ove to stalin whoc ontinued to kill jews and others, and even after him for decades… )
your falling for the left trying to merge the victims with the hated purpetrators to make them victims again
Richard A, one of the things I’ve noticed is that the Left’s propaganda apparatus is so all encompassing, that they suffer from various negative effects from having too powerful an apparatus.
While the Soviets used psychiatry as a formal weapon, the Left has yet to do much with it, even though most therapists are Democrat allies. Maybe they’re setting that institution up to be “marched through” later on when demand meets supply.
Also technically strong armies tend to underestimate their weaker enemies and overestimate their capability to fight in all circumstances and terrains. The Left, after having sustained propaganda dominance for so long, finds it easy to believe in their own lies. A noticeable flaw which most enemies would have exploited a long time ago. But as the case happens to be, the Left is at war with America but Americans think they’re at peace with the Left. An interesting setup.