The Iranian election protests have apparently sputtered out, significantly faster than the Mexican election protests of 2006 that excited far less interest in the American press. Obviously, there are a lot of specific reasons for this disparity, but I think there’s a general pattern emerging.

As English has become the world’s dominant language, it has become easier for Americans to be influenced by foreigners who are fluent in English. For example, Americans follow political controversies in Iran by reading blogs by Iranians — Iranians who like to write in English, of course, which is hardly a representative sample of Iranian opinion.

This means that the American press will tend to be biased toward political movements who represent the better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy, and more elitist elements in a foreign country (i.e., those likely to speak English well), while the American media will be less sympathetic toward parties comprised of the less educated, poorer, more xenophobic, offline, and more populist elements. (more…)

As Justice Alito’s concurring opinion in Ricci documented in amusing detail, Frank Ricci and colleagues were the victims of blatant racial discrimination by a black power broker and his allied white mayor in New Haven.

Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn’t the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it’s a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There’s a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law—Title VII—called “disparate impact” that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.

In a new Comment, Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, replies to a sampling of my articles on how “Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:”

I think we are approaching this from two entirely different universes.

I am looking for cause and effect; I want to see data that supports or detracts from the proposition at hand. PROVE TO ME that X caused Y (including actual statistics).

Your proposal of Diversity causing the housing crash reads to me as a soft philosophical argument that is by definition unprovable — and undisprovable.

At the very least, I see no proof in your writings. They are cogent arguments that leap from A to B to C — but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data.

In my belief system, I use as few assumptions as possible. I try to avoid things that are unquantifiable. Statistical back testing is just on way to do that.

But even softer analyses such as war-gaming and alternative scenarios have to have some reasonable basis for proceeding. It cant be all assumptions, beliefs guesses and hunches.

This shows heartening progress in just a few days. Before he was exposed to my work, Mr. Ritholtz was denouncing and demonizing anybody who shared my views.

Here’s a sample of what he wrote at the beginning of this week:

I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisan.

(more…)

Traditionally, the New York Times has the world’s worst Letters-to-the-Editor page, filled with credentialed but clueless poohbahs writing in to say how much they agree with the NYT’s soporific editorials, but they were disappointed that the editorial didn’t include some additional argument so dumb that not even the NYT Editorial board would fall for it.

It indicates just how badly the diversitarians got smoked intellectually on Ricci that even the NYT’s Letters-to-the-Editor section (The Firefighters’ Test: Flawed or Fair?) responding to the paper’s editorial denouncing the New Haven test is pretty good.

That Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline. By this point, lots of people have heard about the best solution: replace lifetime tenure with single 18 year terms, with the President getting to select two justices for each election he wins.

What nobody knows, as far as I know, is how to get there from here. How do you work out which Justice gets forced into retirement first to make room for new blood? This could be very hard to work out in a bipartisan manner. (If you have any technical suggestions for how the transition should be managed, please put them in the comments.)

Now that the Democrats have complete power in Congress and the White House, however, they can just go ahead an make this reform on their own. I can’t imagine they would, though.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Consider the futility of relying on clerks for a complicated topic like testing in the Ricci case. Do you think Justice Ginsburg’s clerks were told the truth about testing when they were in law school? I don’t care what your LSAT score is, to understand the reality behind Ricci, you have to do a lot of self-education and you have to learn about how the world really works. And that takes time. I moved to Chicago at age 23, and from then on I heard a lot about fireman and policeman testing, but it took me until my mid-30s to develop a mature understanding of the subject that wasn’t just based on idealistic assumptions about how things should work. And I’m still figuring out things about fireman testing that make me say, like Huxley reading The Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.”

Occasionally, we see Justices instead hiring grown-up clerks with some experience of life (Justice Thomas recently hired a clerk who had already made partner at her law firm), but the salary is only around $65,000. (Supreme Court clerks get big signing bonuses from the private law firms that hire them when their year is up, but still …)

What we need is a modest budget (say, $3 million per year across the 9 Justices) to allow each member of the Supreme Court to hire a mature Chief of Staff to manage the clerks, with, say, a three year term.

Look, Sailer, why do you keep saying that we should keep in mind that Pearl Harbor got us into World War II? Lots of other countries got into World War II without Pearl Harbor happening to them. And even if Pearl Harbor never happened to us, we probably would have gotten into World War II eventually anyway. Therefore, you should shut up, and nobody should ever mention Pearl Harbor again.

Or:

C’mon, Sailer, why are you so evil as to mention the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when discussing the Great Depression? Lots of other countries were involved in the Great Depression. And even if there hadn’t been a Wall Street Crash in 1929, the U.S. probably would have suffered in a Great Depression sooner or later anyway. Thus, logically, anybody who mentions the Wall Street Crash of 1929 should be hounded out of polite society.

The Ricci reactions have made more evident that liberals are peeved that anybody takes seriously all that language in the civil rights laws about equal protection. In the liberal mind, the specific wording of the laws was just a sham to get them approved. The laws are really simply about “Who? Whom?” Thus, the idea of civil rights laws being used by the Supreme Court to protect the civil rights of white guys like Frank Ricci is an affront against all that is holy (i.e., civil rights laws).

Consider this entry, From Washingto to New Haven, the Rules They Are A-Changin’, on the Washington Post’s XX blog by Nicole Allan, the Slate intern/Yalie who coauthored with Emily Bazelon that long article in Slate entitled The Ladder.

The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.

Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of competence for the sake of identity politics.”

It took some audacity indeed to invoke Obama in support of a lawsuit that called into question the country’s most significant civil rights statutes. …

I kept thinking about the black firefighters I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, none of whom I saw at the press conference. After decades and decades of lawsuits founded upon civil rights statutes, they have started to get ahead. Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about 60 percent of New Haven’s population, are now more or less proportionally represented within the rank and file of the city’s fire department. But their efforts to penetrate the upper management ranks have been less fruitful. Currently, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains is African-American. The anti-discrimination laws that once won them spots in New Haven’s firehouses are now the laws that have planted the smiles on Frank Ricci’s and Ben Vargas’ faces. There go the rules, changing again.

As Strobe Talbott wrote in Time in 1982:

Lenin, with his knack for hortatory pungency, reduced the past and future alike to two pronouns and a question mark: “Who—whom?” No verb was necessary. It meant who would prevail over whom? And the question was largely rhetorical, implying that the answer was never in doubt. Lenin and those who followed him would prevail over “them,” whoever they were.

The funny thing is how modern American liberals consider their Who? Whom? mindset not cynical, but sacred.

Michael Barone has a good column today on Ricci, Firefighter case shows seamy side of racial politics, which is clearly drawn from my stuff. Considering all the mean things I said about him a number of years ago, it’s big of him to be a reader.

From the comments section of my recent post offering a reading list to bring Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, up to speed on how “Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:”

Ritholtz said…My bad — I guess I am not clearly defining what I mean by “Data”.

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Half Sigma offers a lucid review of Justice Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion in Ricci:

Instead of rejoicing over the outcome of the Ricci case, the fact that four justices signed on to GInsubrg’s dissenting opinion fills me with both anger at liberals and dread that the liberal viewpoint will eventually triumph over reason and sensibility. Ginsburg writes, “The Court’s order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power.” I translate this as meaning that Obama is going to be president for another seven and a half years, so the liberals are only one heart attack away from reversing Ricci and imposing their will. It’s an unusually unsportsmanlike statement and demonstrates a disrespect for stare decisis that’s unbecoming of a Supreme Court justice. When something like that shows up in a dissent, it indicates that the decision created a great deal of ill will.

As I explained in my previous two posts analyzing the Ricci decision, the statutes passed by Congress are racially neutral and state that it’s unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 42 USC §2000e–2(a)(1). It doesn’t say that it’s only unlawful to discriminate against minority races. The Supreme Court has continuously paid at least lip service to the concept of race neutrality, and theoretically there are only a few limited circumstances in which it’s legal to discriminate against whites in order to favor minority races. One such circumstance is in education where the need for “diversity” is such a compelling interest that it allows colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions See Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

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