More on why I’m not too alarmed about the Syria pullout

The New Neo Posted on by

Last Thursday I wrote a post on that subject, and today I see this from Lindsay Graham, which makes me think that the speculation in that previous post is probably true:

“We’re fighting a war against ISIS. They’re still not defeated in Syria. I’m asking the president to make sure that we have troops there to protect us. Don’t outsource our national security to some foreign power. If we leave now, the Kurds are going to get into a fight with Turkey, they could get slaughtered.”

Then, later, after meeting with Trump, Graham said Trump was “reconsidering” the planned pullout, adding that Trump “told me some things I didn’t know that make me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria … He promised to destroy ISIS. He’s going to keep that promise. We’re not there yet. But as I said today, we’re inside the 10-yard line and the president understands the need to finish the job.”

Graham explained, “The last thing in the world we want is a war for Turkey and the Kurds. That takes pressure off ISIS. The last thing we want in addition to that is Iran to be the big winner here. So I think the president’s going to finish the job when it comes to ISIS. I share his goal to withdraw our forces from Syria. I just want to do it in a smart way to make sure that Iran’s not the big winner.”

It’s all rather vague, but it seems to be mostly a matter of timing.

Clips from the Yiddish “Fiddler”

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For those of you who read my recent post about the Yiddish “Fiddler on the Roof” currently playing in New York and were curious to get a taste of what it’s like, here’s a clip of very short excerpts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t contain the translations, but if you actually attend the play you won’t have trouble understanding because there are simultaneous subtitle translations as with opera.

I think you will be able to see from these short excerpts that the Yiddish language gives a special quality of intensity and authenticity to the production, and that the actor playing Tevye is superb (the rest are excellent as well, but he is really a standout):

Internet poetry fills a need

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So-called “internet poetry” is a phenomenon I knew nothing about till I saw this critique of it by Rebecca Watts. Although the author finds the genre completely abominable, nevertheless her piece contains within itself some answers to the question of why people are drawn to internet poetry.

Poetry used to be rhythmic, mostly rhyming although not always, with a music within its words. In all eras, most poetry that was written was either bad or mediocre, because genius is rare. But in the past, the great poets of the last few centuries wrote works that were neither meaningless nor obscure in meaning. They had a lot to say, and it was written in a tremendously skillful manner that was nevertheless accessible to most people with only a little effort. Even mediocre poetry of the time had some of those characteristics.

But go to almost any literary magazine these days and the vast majority of what you read will be unintelligible, perhaps offensive, and/or on a subject about which the vast majority of people simply do not care. Today’s poetry is also often prose made to scan in “poetic”-looking lines rather than being actual poetry (according to traditional definitions). Many of these newer poems could just as easily have been written as a prose paragraph—and that, oddly enough, is a characteristic of the schlocky internet poetry that Rebecca Watts criticizes so very harshly.

(As an aside, I’ll add that Watts cannot resist what I call Trump Tourette’s, the need to mention him in an essay that has zero to do with him. In fact, she is so afflicted that she mentions him three times).

I actually agree that the internet poetry Watts cites is pretty terrible. But a great many people are probably relieved to find it at all, because it satisfies a need for poetry that isn’t being filled by academic “literary” poetry. The only need most academic literary poetry of today fills is the need for professors of poetry to have something to do, and for their students to also have something to do. The need filled by internet poetry is both linguistic—to read something “poetic” rather than prosaic—and emotional—to read something that touches the heart. Literary poetry used to do both, but now very rarely does either.

I decided to look up Watts’ own work, and found four poems of hers here. They are actually quite accessible, which makes her poetry a bit unusual these days in that respect. But they are examples of what I mean when I say that many modern poems might just as well be written as prose. Who on earth would ever want to memorize these poems, and who (other than Watts herself) would feel any deep emotional connection to them?

Not me. And she is definitely one of the better poets of today in the sense that at least the meaning of her poems is not obscure.

For a contrast, take a look (for example) at the periodical Granta, a literary magazine that’s not especially pedantic but is rather typical. I defy anyone not in poetic academia to like the poems there or to care about them (as examples, see this, this, this, and this).

I originally had wanted to read all the poems on this list from Granta, but I just couldn’t get through it; my boredom with them was too profound. And I am a poetry lover and a poetry writer, and have been my entire life.

The left now hates Israel far more than the Arabs do

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Daniel Pipes observes:

MbS [Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman] versus Jeremy Corbyn symbolizes these two tectonic shifts, as does Israel now enjoying better relations with Egypt than with Sweden. The president of Chad turns up in Israel but a singer from New Zealand does not. Israel’s athletes compete in the United Arab Emirates but get banned in Spain. Muslims show increasing indifference to the breakdown in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, but Leftists express growing anger over it.

Pipes lists some reasons: “a mix of Palestinian public relations expertise and continued antisemitism” accounting for the increase in hatred for Israel on the left, and the Arab world’s growing dependence on Israel’s technology accounting for some of their increased tolerance for Israel. But I’ll add some more reasons.

Fueling some of the left’s hatred we have the fact that decades ago Israel was a very leftist country and it has been tacking to the right for a long time now. So Israel is a political changer of sorts, and political changers often raise special ire. What’s more, the left has become increasingly enamored of third-world victim groups such as the Palestinians and their propaganda, as well as their tendency towards violence and terrorism, which is seen as evidence of their terrible plight (“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”).

Fueling some of the Arab world’s growing tolerance of Israel we have the fact that the Palestinians have long been unpopular among the leaders of their Arab brethren. They were used as pawns to justify aggression towards Israel, but never because the Arab world was inordinately fond of them (see, for example, Black September as well as the Palestinian history in Lebanon). Also, after several wars against Israel, the Arab world most likely realized that conventional warfare was not going to succeed. Maybe at this point they’re just tired of that particular fight, and have realized that there is something to be gained from a more peaceful relationship with the most successful nation in the region.

Yuval Noah Harari predicts the future—sort of

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The name of Yuval Noah Harari came up recently in a conversation I had over the holidays. He seems to have become some sort of guru to a lot of people, and yet I know practically nothing about him or his work. Looking at his Wiki profile, I see that he’s 42, a historian, and someone who likes looking at the big picture—for example, questions about free will and consciousness—and making predictions about what that future will bring. Lately Harari’s been interested in “the consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world where intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so.'”

Well, that’s a mouthful. So when this interview with Harari popped up today in my Pocket recommendations, I decided to read it. I was immediately taken aback by something Harari says almost at the outset:

We began by agreeing that something feels very different about this moment in history. We are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction—it’s not clear which. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”

Now, Harari’s a historian and I’m not, but I beg to differ with those statements of his. It seems to me that many generations before ours have had the perception and even the conviction that they were “on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction.” Whether it actually will pan out that way is not clear to the people who believe that it will, because we never see the far-reaching consequences of the trends that develop in our lifetimes.

And is this really the first time in history that “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years”? First of all, Harari then proceeds to tell us how he thinks the world might look in 30 years, so he certainly has ideas about it. Although we don’t know whether his ideas are correct, that doesn’t mean people (Harari and many others) don’t have ideas. What’s more, it’s hardly the first time in history we’ve been incorrect in predicting 30 years into the future. In fact, predictions for the future have tended to be very poorly correlated with what actually occurs. History often throws us quite a curve.

For example, did the prognosticators of the 1890s and turn of the century from Nineteenth to Twentieth foresee the Great War that occurred less than 30 years later? As far as I know, they did not. In fact, that conflagration was not only generally unanticipated but, as Henry James wrote in a letter to a friend written the day after war was declared in England (and as I discussed in this 2012 post), that Great War was a great shock:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

Henry James had thought that humanity was going in one direction, and then it made a huge volta unpredicted by most people. It was both startling and disillusioning, actually shocking, and it’s a turn of history from which we have never recovered (as I argue in that post where the quote occurs).

Did Europeans predict, thirty years before it happened, the Black Death that changed Europe and its society enormously? I don’t think so, although there might have been generally apocalyptic thoughts floating around, as there often are and often were, particularly in times when people had no idea what caused such pandemics and no idea how they might be prevented or ameliorated.

Harari goes on to speculate a great deal about the effects of AI on human beings and how our fundamental nature will be changed as a result. I’ve read a lot about AI and find some of these arguments persuasive, but as with all predictions for the future I take them with a large grain of salt. For example:

What worries you about the new cyborgs?

Experiments are already under way to augment the human immune system with an inorganic, bionic system. Millions of tiny nanorobots and sensors monitor what’s happening inside your body. They could discover the beginning of cancer, or some infectious disease, and fight against these dangers for your health. The system can monitor not just what goes wrong. It can monitor your moods, your emotions, your thoughts. That means an external system can get to know you much better than you know yourself. You go to therapy for years to get in touch with your emotions, but this system, whether it belongs to Google or Amazon or the government, can monitor your emotions in ways that neither you nor your therapist can approach in any way…

Combining this with enormous amounts of data collected on you 24 hours a day can provide the best healthcare in history. It can also be the foundation of the worst dictatorial regimes in history.

Much more at the link.

Science fiction writers have been toying with these ideas for a long time. But we still have no idea whether it will happen in the predicted manner, and even Harari notes that such developments can go either way in terms of good or bad effects.

So we’re back to the usual inability to predict much of anything, and that’s not unique or different. But it’s interesting to speculate, as it always has been.

Beginning to leave the fold

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a sad article by a New Yorker named Lester Berg who’s just beginning to discover that any sort of disagreement on political matters can turn certain old friends against him.

It wasn’t that way back when Obama was president, because he and old friend “Jamie” agreed on the wondrousness of Obama:

Jamie and I would speak on the phone, discussing how refreshing it was to finally have a man of eloquence and grace in the White House. We railed against obstructionist Republicans who undermined Obama—like Joe Wilson, who shouted “you lie!” during the 2009 State of the Union address. We were living in momentous times.

Jamie is black—or rather, bi-racial like Obama—but this was no impediment until the “Age of Trump”, the non-eloquent and graceless Trump. But Jamie is by no means the only person Berg starts having problems with—as he discovers when he starts an MFA program in writing in Manhattan:

Like our old Brooklyn neighbourhood (by now, gentrified out of existence), the students varied stupendously by race and culture. I was excited at first, but soon began to sense a disconnect. Too often, their reasons for being there seemed to have little to do with a love of books. Some only read within a single genre. Others actually bragged about not reading at all. And the social climate could be tense—something I learned for the first time when a gay black classmate warned me to “be careful” before commenting on his story, which was centered on a gay black character. I thought of the verve and confidence that Jamie had always shown when discussing his identity as an author and, as politely as I could, explained that I didn’t have to be careful, because I could say whatever I wanted. Then I went on, as I’d initially intended, to praise the story for its vivid language.

A few weeks later, while scouring the racks at the school’s annual library book sale, I bumped into my professor. I held up a used hard-cover of E. L. Doctorow’s 2005 novel The March, which I’d scored for just a dollar. He looked at the book and asked, “Who’s he?” Doctorow was arguably the greatest living historical novelist in America. The professor, who taught a class on the role of history in narrative fiction, would later become the director of the school’s MFA program.

Berg drops out of the program, and things worsen with old friend Jamie, who had always sounded very full of himself but who now becomes a devotee of politically correct jargon:

“That comment,” Jamie replied. “And other things you’ve said to me…have me asking you to think more about whiteness, privilege, and how it affects every moment of our lives.” In that moment, I realized that the frank and evocative language that once had brought Jamie and me together as children had been replaced by brittle ideological boilerplate, copied and pasted from social-justice Twitter accounts.

Berg has not had any dramatic political change—yet. But what he describes are the stirrings of some sort of political change, and I believe that it’s based at least partly on the fact that the earliest of his formative years were spent in the Soviet Union. He writes:

My small acts of revolt against the political orthodoxy that now filled Jamie’s social-media world represented my first steps outside the New Faith to which the two of us had jointly pledged allegiance during the Obama years. With his stunning division of America into oppressed and oppressor, Coates seemed to be tapping into a moral world that lay beyond traditional Western ideals—a moral world that, in some respects, began to remind me of the one my Russian family had fled in the 1980s.

Berg goes on to say that while he didn’t support Trump in 2016, he had reservations about voting for Hillary, and later on:

After Trump was elected, I continued to seek the company of bookish kin, without fully realizing that they were in the process of excommunicating me. Something shifted in late 2016—and not just with Jamie. An author I’ll call Daniel, who’d solicited my critical feedback in the past, sold his novel to a top publisher, earning a huge advance. I was happy for him, and he was kind enough to thank me in the book’s acknowledgements. But the novel didn’t sell well. And Daniel found a way to blame the bad numbers on Trump’s presidency.

“I hate every Republican, good or bad, with every fibre of my being,” he declared to the world. Trump’s supporters, he said, were all “soulless troglodytes.”…

As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters. As with a massive gas giant orbiting a smaller body, the gravitational field of Trump’s symbolic presence has come to draw in the petty grievances, career anxieties and existential dread of a whole generation of intellectuals. I hate my boss: Fuck Trump! My spouse hates me: Fuck Trump! No one will buy my book: Fuck Trump! Please, I want somebody to love me: Fuck Trump! Here, at last, was somebody we could freely hate more than we hate each other or ourselves…

…I am no longer in touch with either of the two men [Jamie and another friend]. I also have parted ways with my long-time girlfriend, who got swept up in these same currents, and who once literally wept in my presence because I had made a flattering reference to Camille Paglia…

And then Berg adds something very wise and very true:

The price one pays for acceptance by the congregation is, and always will be, one’s intellectual freedom.

Berg’s article reminds me of the beginning days of my political change, when I voiced a few fairly moderate—but still outside the circle of the liberal party line—opinions to certain dear friends and relatives, and in some cases was excoriated for those thoughts. The road can be quite lonely, and I take the problem very seriously because I’ve been there. I applaud Berg, and I understand why he adds this sad statement at the end of his essay:

…I write pseudonymously, afraid to lose what little ground I have gained while taking flight from the apostles who once called themselves my friends.

[NOtE: Although I was anonymous when I began this blog, I never kept my politics a secret from friends and family. What’s more, I started using my name many years ago when I wrote articles, so I’ve not been anonymous for about a decade. But I very much understand why Berg still is anonymous.]

Chuck Schumer on immigration: then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

It should come as no surprise that just nine years ago, when Obama was president, Chuck Schumer expressed rather conventional GOP-type sentiments on illegal immigration and on what should be done about it. But pointing out Schumer’s slippery political hypocrisy, as that article I just linked purports to do, is fun for those on the right but doesn’t have much affect on anyone else, IMHO.

The argument would be that Schumer has “evolved” on the subject, much like Obama did on gay marriage. For Schumer, 2009 was then; this is now. This is not only now, it’s “the age of Trump,” and all thinking feeling moral people need to vigorously oppose every thought that comes out of Trump’s head and every idea or plan Trump has ever expressed. It’s really quite simple as a guiding principle, and applauded by vast numbers of people.

Consistency is a funny thing in politicians, and people generally seem very forgiving of a lack of it, particularly on the left. The left is all about holding power and getting “progressive” things done and saying what is necessary to do so; it’s not for nothing that Orwell portrayed leftists as being willing to say that two plus two equals five (see this post I wrote on that subject) if the party says so. Schumer is just being a good flexible leftist, and what he really believes may indeed have changed or it may not have changed.

Schumer could also quote no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in Self-Reliance:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

Schumer could just say he’s not a little statesman, he’s a big one—or even a “great soul.” Of course, people should be flexible enough to be able to change their minds with changing circumstances, as I’ve said many times here. But what actual circumstances have changed since 2009 that would justify such a change (besides the aforementioned need to oppose Trump)? I haven’t seen Schumer offer any or acknowledge his change of heart. But that’s not Schumer’s concern, because apparently it’s not the concern of those who elect him time and again because he’s a Democrat and because he’s a powerful one.

By the way, here’s Schumer in 2009, in case you wondered what he was saying on illegal immigration back when Obama was president:

Those end-of-year best-movies-of lists

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Decades ago—before videos, before Netflix, before all the myriad alternative ways to see movies—I used to go out to movie theaters quite a bit and I ended up seeing all the big movies every year and many of the smaller ones as well. But I never was what you’d call a movie buff, although I had my favorites and enthusiasms. And as a child I adored certain old movies on TV, what we now might call the classics.

But somewhere along the line I stopped going to the movies much if at all, although I still kept up with the big ones through rentals and/or streaming. But I found myself liking fewer and fewer of them, and at this point it’s extremely rare for me to want to see them at all.

No doubt this is just another sign of my getting older or maybe even Getting Old.

So I care very very little about those lists that appear at the end of every year—this person or that person’s list of the very best must-see movies of the year. But I thought I’d look at one anyway, and the list I chose (rather arbitrarily) was this at Vox. Turns out I’ve not only not seen any of the movies on the list, I’ve never even heard of any of them.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit that; it makes me seem even more out of it than I’d realized. It’s quite possible, too, that if I saw some of them I’d actually like them. But in recent years I’ve so often gone to highly-recommended and reviewed films and been either unimpressed or downright bored and/or annoyed that I’ve gotten out of the habit of trusting reviews at all.

That’s where you come in, dear readers. Seen any good films lately? Maybe I’ll even watch one, if you make a good case for it.

Why I’m not too alarmed at the Syria pullout

The New Neo Posted on by

I suspect that this may be correct;

Despite threats that they planned to release ISIS prisoners and abandon their front-line positions against the remaining pockets of ISIS fighters, Kurdish fighters of the YPG and the Syrian Democratic Forces have not fled.

Even Erdogan’s threats to march East of the Euphrates to massacre the Kurds in their defacto capital in Qarmishli were bluster, Debka argued, referring to a phone conversation between Presidents Trump and Erdogan on Dec. 14, when the Turk promised his army would not cross the Euphrates.

Trump’s White House team also told Middle East allies that the troop pullout would be phased out between four to six months. “During that time, Syria is bound to see many developments that may require Washington to revise its plans,” Debka reported.

“The US and Iraq are in advanced negotiations for the deployment to the Iraqi-Syria border of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) – the “Golden Division” – which drove ISIS out of Mosul. It will stand in the path of Iranian and Iraqi Shiite militias crossings into Syria,” Debka added.

Could Trump and/or his advisors have a plan after all? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

On the other hand, if Trump had a plan to protect the Kurds, why did Mattis resign and write this?:

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.

If Trump plans to protect the Kurds, then what are the Trump views with which Mattis is unaligned? Well, maybe it’s something connected with this:

“I would not go into Syria, but if I did it would be by surprise and not blurted all over the media like fools,” Trump had tweeted five years ago.

Trump’s actions in Syria encompass his preference for flexibility, quick strikes or withdrawals with no long term commitment. And that’s exactly what frustrates a national security establishment whose watershed moment was still the post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan. They foolishly misread Trump by confusing commitment with consistency, and unpredictability with inconsistency…

Trump understands that there’s no point in maintaining a doomed foreign colony of tens of thousands in Afghanistan, or setting one up in Syria. These colonies give meaning and purpose to their populations, experts, analysts, journalists, aid workers, who shape our foreign policy, but they don’t help America.

It still doesn’t really explain Mattis, who was not on board for nation-building. Is it a question of timing—does he think Trump announced the withdrawal too soon?

The government shutdown

The New Neo Posted on by

Or partial shutdown.

Who will blink first?

The press coverage, as you would expect, is spinning this as Trump-caused. A typical one-sided characterization can be found at Vanity Fair: “Trump is digging in, negotiations are at a standstill, and even Republicans are losing patience.”

Oh, so it’s Trump who’s the one dug in, and there really were bona fide “negotiations” that stopped? Everything I’ve ever read from the Democrats involves a refusal to budge at all. Both sides have dug in, and negotiations were always stalemated. The one part of that sentence that’s probably true is that some Republicans will be losing patience long before any Democrats do.

Here’s an article in American Thinker that suggests how the GOP can end the impasse:

Republicans in the Senate have been trying to pass funding for the border wall by ending the Democrat filibuster. This would require 60 votes in the Senate. There is no real hope of getting one Democrat in the Senate, let alone nine. As if this was not obvious enough, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has made it abundantly clear that Democrats will not permit any funding of the border wall…

President Trump, realizing that the border wall funding must pass to fulfill his campaign promise and to protect national security, called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on December 21 to use the nuclear option to pass the funding. However, Senator McConnell made it clear that Republicans don’t have the votes necessary to use the nuclear option. So the nuclear option is also not a viable option for border wall funding.

This leaves budget reconciliation as the only option to pass the $5.7 billion in border wall funding. Budget reconciliation, like the nuclear option, allows for a simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate to pass legislation, rather than the normally required 60 votes. However, unlike the nuclear option, it would not break precedent and would likely enable the border funding bill to pass.

And yet it has not been done. Why? One possible reason is that the GOP really does not want this done. Another possible reason is that just a few members of the GOP don’t want it done, but since the GOP majority is very slim (51 plus Pence in a pinch for breaking a tie) there may be enough of those members to put the kibosh on reconciliation for this purpose.

Disparate impact: DeVos and the Obama directive on school discipline

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How many people who think Trump is a tyrant because he does too much by executive decree felt the same way about Obama when he used the same tool? Does the Venn diagram of those two groups intersect at all?

Whatever one thinks about that, I think it’s crystal clear that what was done by executive fiat can be ondone by executive fiat. For example, i heartily applaud the Trump administration move under Betsy DeVos to rescind the following Obama directive;

In January 2014, a “Dear Colleague” letter was sent out that essentially required that students be disciplined in accordance with their representation in the student body. The letter states that even a race-neutral policy that results in more minority students being disciplined will be termed discriminatory and Department of Education will intervene. In fact, arrests of students by law enforcement for school related reasons could trigger federal action against the school system…

In addition to being stupid, the letter appears to be illegal.

The letter was rescinded last Friday.

The Obama administration directive was one of many that followed the dictates of what is known as “disparate impact“;

Disparate impact in United States labor law refers to practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral…

A violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of the protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class. Therefore, the disparate impact theory under Title VII prohibits employers “from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. A facially neutral employment practice is one that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face; rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect.” Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.

The application of this concept is from employment law. The doctrine of disparate impact rests on the fiction that all groups are equal and that all differences among them are the result of some sort of discrimination even if the discrimination can’t be detected and is unintentional. Although I’ve not researched its history (and don’t have a lot of time to do so right now), my guess is that the use of the disparate impact doctrine came about because equalizing the rules didn’t have the desired effect of racially and sexually proportionate hiring.

With school discipline, the Obama-era directive was absurd because it violates common sense to believe that disciplinary problems are evenly spread out among all groups. A person doesn’t have to believe such differences are innate to believe that they exist. They may indeed be mediated by cultural causes and differences, but they are real and to pretend otherwise is to let PC thought run rampant, and the people who will suffer will be the entire school system and the children in it. Those children will be both those who don’t need disciplining and those who do, because no child benefits from a chaotic classroom and fear of aggression or the ability to commit aggression without external controls. However, the left must sacrifice all those children in order to pretend that the world conforms to its vision of what should be.

I’m glad that DeVos has managed to correct this—for now. However, does anyone doubt that if a Democrat is elected president in 2020, the disparate impact directive is likely to be put in place again?