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fischerry

Who's in Trump's Cabinet? - CNN.com - 0 views

  • President-elect Trump will have about 4,000 government positions to fill, including some of the most important posts in the US government. Cabinet positions require Senate confirmation, but other key posts are completely up to the discretion of the President.
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    "Cabinet positions require Senate confirmation, but other key posts are completely up to the discretion of the President." This shows who's in trump's cabinet so far. It's interesting how trump seems to be filling his cabinet as if he's looking for people to run a business with.
Javier E

Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
  • . Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”
  • The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review
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  • 17 percent of G.D.P.
  • there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
  • This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees
  • The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control
  • Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up
  • As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion
  • kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.
  • High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.
  • t Stanford is apparently now tamed. I invite you to read Ginevra Davis’s essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” in Palladium, which won a vaunted Sidney Award in 2022 and details how university administrators cracked down on student initiatives to make everything boring, supervised and safe.
  • Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.
  • the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives
  • The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.”
  • this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data
  • Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.
clairemann

Justices will decide whether to reinstate death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber - SC... - 0 views

  • the Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would review the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 bombings.
  • The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit threw out his death sentences last year, ruling that the district court should have asked potential jurors what media coverage they had seen about Tsarnaev’s case
  • Federal law gives district courts the discretion to order someone who is in that district to give testimony or produce documents “for use in a foreign or international tribunal.” In Servotronics, the justices will decide whether that discretion extends to discovery for use in a private foreign arbitration.
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  • The justices once again did not act on a high-profile petition from the state of Mississippi asking the court to review the constitutionality of a state law that bans virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts struck down the law.
  • Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the president to declare national monuments on “land owned or controlled by the federal government.” The designation resulted in a ban on most commercial fishing, prompting a group of commercial-fishing associations to go to court, where they argued that the designation as a monument went beyond Obama’s power under the Antiquities Act because submerged land in the ocean is not land “controlled” by the federal government.
  • . Sotomayor stressed that Longoria’s case “implicates an important and longstanding split among the Courts of Appeals over the proper interpretation of” the commentary, with most circuits concluding that “a suppression hearing is not a valid basis for denying the reduction.”
  • The Sixth Amendment guarantees “the right to a speedy and public trial.” In Smith v. Titus, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down the case of a Minnesota man who was convicted of murder for the shooting deaths of two people who had broken into his home.
  • Smith argued that the decision to close the courtroom violated his rights under the Sixth Amendment. The Minnesota Supreme Court rejected that argument, and federal courts turned down Smith’s requests for post-conviction relief. Smith came to the Supreme Court in November, contending that the state supreme court’s ruling was contrary to clearly established Supreme Court decisions – the standard for relief under federal post-conviction laws.
Javier E

Opinion | Overturning Roe Is a Radical, Not Conservative, Choice - The New York Times - 0 views

  • What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.
  • As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period.
  • It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.”
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  • the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.
  • Beware of unintended consequences. Those include the return of the old, often unsafe, illegal abortion (or abortions in Mexico), the entrenchment of pro-choice majorities in blue states and the likely consolidation of pro-choice majorities in many purple states, driven by voters newly anxious over their reproductive rights.
  • In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.
  • And what will the effect be on the court itself? Here, again, you may be tempted to think that overturning Roe is an act of judicial modesty that puts abortion disputes in the hands of legislatures. Maybe — after 30 years of division and mayhem.
  • Yet the decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition.
  • A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.
  • The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. Justices: Be prudent.
Javier E

The Good, Racist People - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion.
  • New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.
  • much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story.
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  • I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
Javier E

Is Growth Over? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What do we know about the prospects for long-run prosperity?
  • The answer is: less than we think.
  • long-term projections produced by official agencies, like the Congressional Budget Office, generally make two big assumptions.
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  • Robert Gordon of Northwestern University created a stir by arguing that economic growth is likely to slow sharply — indeed, that the age of growth that began in the 18th century may well be drawing to an end.
  • On the other side, however, these projections generally assume that income inequality, which soared over the past three decades, will increase only modestly looking forward.
  • One is that economic growth over the next few decades will resemble growth over the past few decades. In particular, productivity — the key driver of growth — is projected to rise at a rate not too different from its average growth since the 1970s.
  • long-term economic growth hasn’t been a steady process; it has been driven by several discrete “industrial revolutions,” each based on a particular set of technologies. The first industrial revolution, based largely on the steam engine, drove growth in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The second, made possible, in large part, by the application of science to technologies such as electrification, internal combustion and chemical engineering, began circa 1870 and drove growth into the 1960s.
  • The third, centered around information technology, defines our current era. And, as Mr. Gordon correctly notes, the payoffs so far to the third industrial revolution, while real, have been far smaller than those to the second. Electrification, for example, was a much bigger deal than the Internet.
  • the case against Mr. Gordon’s techno-pessimism rests largely on the assertion that the big payoff to information technology, which is just getting started, will come from the rise of smart machines.
  • machines may soon be ready to perform many tasks that currently require large amounts of human labor. This will mean rapid productivity growth and, therefore, high overall economic growth.
  • who will benefit from that growth? Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to make the case that most Americans will be left behind, because smart machines will end up devaluing the contribution of workers, including highly skilled workers whose skills suddenly become redundant
  • there’s good reason to believe that the conventional wisdom embodied in long-run budget projections — projections that shape almost every aspect of current policy discussion — is all wrong.
Javier E

How to avert America's Brexit - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.
  • The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.
  • every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.
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  • For decades, the United States has led the way as the world’s markets for manufacturing, labor and capital have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This has benefited poorer nations around the world — most prominently China — as well as large multinational corporations with the reach and balance sheets to compete globally. It has also contributed to a surge in the incomes of well-educated professionals with globally competitive skills.
  • our leaders in business and government have offered up a consensus view that chief among the gains from open trade is a small financial benefit — reflected mostly in lower prices for a host of imported goods — spread in a thin layer over an enormous number of people, which in the aggregate offsets the narrowly focused devastation wreaked on discrete industries, workers and communities.
  • today’s practical lesson is much simpler: The deal on offer to the U.S. working and middle classes from globalization is in tatters. We have ignored at our peril the dislocations and the uneven distribution of the benefits.
  • We need a new agenda promising fairness and growth in equal measure.
  • The business community’s agenda for accelerating economic growth is straightforward. It includes making our corporate tax system simpler and more globally competitive; subjecting regulations to rigorous cost-benefit criteria; reforming our immigration laws to admit more highly educated and skilled workers, particularly in the technology and engineering fields; and adopting more free-trade agreements, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, to stimulate global flows of goods and services. Corporate leaders (and many economists) are convinced that this is the clear path to accelerated growth and job formation.
  • in order to create the social circumstances necessary to make this commercial agenda at all politically feasible, the business community must find a way to support — and especially be willing to pay for — an array of policies designed to foster economic fairness that are traditionally opposed by the business lobby.
  • This list is long but would include increasing the minimum wage, expanding the earned-income tax credit and reforming unemployment programs; investing in early-childhood education, vocational training, prison-to-work assistance, apprenticeships and college affordability; financing a large-scale infrastructure building program; implementing robust transition assistance for workers dislocated by foreign competition and technological change; and ensuring health-care and retirement income for aging citizens in need.
  • The cost of all of this would be, of course, high. But the price of inaction is certainly far more dear. One of the best ways to finance it all might be a national sales levy along the lines of a progressive value-added tax
  • To restore credibility to the business community’s agenda, we must work to set in motion the policies necessary to stimulate growing incomes and rising equality. In actuality, growth and fairness agendas are compatible and mutually reinforcing because a stronger middle class — and healthier consumer — would be as good for business as it is for society.
Javier E

Military Children Outdo Public School Students on NAEP Tests - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Black fourth graders at the military base schools averaged 222 in reading, compared with 233 for whites, an 11-point gap. In fact, the black fourth graders at the military base schools scored better in reading than public school students as a whole, whose average score was 221.
  • the schools on base are not subject to former President George W. Bush’s signature education program, No Child Left Behind, or to President Obama’s Race to the Top. They would find that standardized tests do not dominate and are not used to rate teachers, principals or schools.
  • At schools here, standardized tests are used as originally intended, to identify a child’s academic weaknesses and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum
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  • Under Mr. Obama’s education agenda, state governments can now dictate to principals how to run their schools. In Tennessee — which is ranked 41st in NAEP scores and has made no significant progress in closing the black-white achievement gap on those tests in 20 years — the state now requires four formal observations a year for all teachers, regardless of whether the principal thinks they are excellent or weak. The state has declared that half of a teacher’s rating must be based on student test scores.
  • Ms. Kapiko, on the other hand, has discretion in how to evaluate her teachers. For the most effective, she does one observation a year. That gives her and her assistant principal time for walk-through visits in every classroom every day.
  • The average class in New York City in kindergarten through the third grade has 24 students. At military base schools, the average is 18, which is almost as good as it is in the private schools
Javier E

How to Teach Students to Think Like Historians | History News Network - 1 views

  • First, the accumulation of research has established a developmental framework for historical knowledge.  Development moves broadly from a naïve, unquestioning acceptance of the authority of historical texts and a judgment of the past by contemporary values and beliefs to a sophisticated recognition that the past is irretrievable and different (even strange), all accounts are human constructions, subject to challenge, and all sources are problematic. 
  • Second, sophisticated historical thinking can be broken into discrete cognitive “moves”  (2), which Reisman has condensed into sourcing, close reading, contextualization, and corroboration.
  • These skills seem effective for teaching at the secondary level, especially for the struggling readers in the study, but of course historians use more; for example, making connections, empathy, marshaling evidence, recognizing limits to one’s knowledge, and recognition of different perspectives.
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  • Unlike a traditional history class, in which students are asked to master a single narrative, usually established by a textbook, Reisman’s lessons asked students to “interrogate, and then reconcile, the historical accounts in multiple texts in order to arrive at their own conclusions.” 
  • the introduction of historical thinking skills does not require the dismantling of chronological approaches to history.  Instead, they are integrated into the chronology-based curriculum already in place.
  • The fifty-minute periods were organized in a consistent, predictable structure (an important element of learning, Reisman maintains), with the teacher typically devoting ten minutes to introducing or reinforcing background information through lecturing, use of video, or textbook questions followed by thirty minutes of document work, individually or in groups.  The background presentation was designed to prepare students for the documents to come, and often to set up “straw men” that the documents could challenge.  The document work was organized around an essential question (for example, “Why did the Homestead strike of 1892 turn violent?”), and included documents offering conflicting interpretations.  Questions in the handouts were designed to direct student attention toward interrogation of the validity of the documents.  The final ten minutes were taken up with whole-class discussion, during which, Reisman hoped, students would engage in historical argument, making claims supported by specific evidence from the background material and documents. 
  • Reisman also evaluated student arguments on a scale beginning at the lowest level of analysis—judgment of historical actors by modern standards with no evidence—to judgments with minimal evidence and no regard for context, to judgments containing an awareness of context and perspective though limited in awareness of complexity, to, finally, awareness of one’s own historical subjectivity that encouraged resistance to hasty judgments.  This highest level demonstrated metacognition; these students had developed an awareness of their own thinking.
  • Reisman also noted another critical but unmeasured factor:  the role of the teacher.  It was crucial for teachers to model the thinking they asked of their students, often by putting a document up on a screen and “thinking aloud” as she read the document and reasoned her way through it, demonstrating, in the process, specific use of the various skills.  In this way, she could make metacognition concrete.  Teachers’ mastery of their subject varied, however, as did their skill in guiding a discussion.  Most of the teachers who participated in the study did not question documents sufficiently or “stabilize content knowledge” by correcting misconceptions.  Reisman pointed out the crucial role of guiding discussions, for example, to interrupt for clarification or to push student thinking toward greater rigor.  Instructional methods that permit students to explore a topic without teacher intervention run the risk of leaving errors and misconceptions—“opportunities in the search for understanding”—unexplored.
Javier E

The Collapse of Big Law: A Cautionary Tale for Big Med - Richard Gunderman and Mark Mut... - 0 views

  • he law is not well. US law school applications are down by nearly half from eight years ago, and 85% of graduates now carry at least $100,000 in debt. More than 180 of the 200 US law schools are able to find jobs for more than 80% of their graduates. Median starting salaries for those who do find work are down by 17%, and more than a third of graduates cannot find full-time employment. Tellingly, lawyers have higher rates of depression and alcoholism than the general population. 
  • more fundamental problems emerge. One is the increasing popularity of law school rankings. In order to compete for students and tuition dollars, law schools do what they can to improve their standing, which means in part encouraging as many students as possible to apply and to take jobs with high-paying firms when they graduate
  • An even more serious problem is the way law firms keep score. One prevalent measure is PPP, or profit per partner, introduced by The American Lawyer in 1985. When such statistics began to be published, firms that thought they were doing well suddenly discovered that they were being outperformed by peers.  Soon bidding wars ensued for top earners, who are sometimes referred to as “rainmakers.”
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  • as soon as law firms begin measuring their performance by the revenue each attorney generates, money begins to supplant all other means of assessing performance.
  • To professionals who choose careers in fields such as law, medicine, and teaching, it is demoralizing to be treated as a unit of production. Even some of the lawyers earning millions of dollars report that they find little or no fulfillment in the work they do.
  • by stoking the flames of competition between law firms and attorneys, the current system has engrained what economists call a “zero-sum” mentality. There is only a relatively fixed quantity of legal work to be done, and for one firm or attorney to command more of it, others must make due with less.
  • As a professional, a lawyer represents her clients in the courtroom, in her office and at the negotiating table. She operates with an appreciation for her role in the adversarial judicial process, the need to educate clients about the limits and purpose of the law, and the importance of helping clients create frameworks to work together to form organizations, build businesses, and plan for the future. Doing these things well provides a sense of meaning and value in work.
  • As a mere service provider, by contrast, her role is to provide a discrete technical service—usually assumed to be the same as any other lawyer would provide—for a fee. Her success is measured not in the professional insight and practical wisdom she offers but in the technical efficiency with which she provides services and her ability to attract other clients willing to pay her to do the same. The sense of professional fulfillment associated with the role of service provider is small at best. 
Javier E

Don't Count on Calorie Counts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • we Americans are waddling toward the moment when calorie counts like the ones at Lenny’s are posted in every chain restaurant across the nation.
  • As part of the Affordable Care Act, any restaurant in America with at least 20 locations must follow
  • the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease
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  • the roughly 90 million Americans who are formally considered obese — that’s about 30 percent of the population — aren’t just in imperfect health. They’re downright ill, and we need to heal them.
  • Brian Elbel, a population-health expert at New York University’s school of medicine, examined fast-food receipts from four chains in New York both before the city law went into effect and after, to see if customers were altering their orders to reduce the calories they consumed per visit to the restaurants. He found no meaningful difference, and his subsequent research in Philadelphia, which in 2010 implemented a mandate like New York’s, echoes and bolsters that conclusion. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that nothing big is happening for a large group of people,”
  • New York City commissioned a broader survey than Elbel’s, looking at thousands of receipts from 11 chains. At three of them — Au Bon Pain, KFC and McDonald’s — there was proof of calorie reductions after the law. But at seven there wasn’t, and at Subway, which was promoting footlong sandwiches for $5 during the post-law survey period, calorie consumption per visit actually increased.
  • “Calorie reductions were highest in high-income, high-education neighborhoods (where we believe obesity rates to be lower),
  • . “The people who tend to be most responsive to information may be those we least aim to target.”
  • Starbucks customers ordering sugary, creamy coffee beverages kept on doing so, seemingly because they had already figured that the drinks were fattening and had made a flabby peace with that. But customers indeed adjusted their food orders upon realizing that a pastry could easily exceed 400 calories. They hadn’t bargained on, or planned for, that. “What really matters is what your prior beliefs are,”
  • education and information could be effective in influencing a discrete, relatively easy behavior, like persuading someone to get vaccinated. “But when it’s habitual and even addictive behavior, you’re in a whole new ballgame,
  • the principal reasons for the remarkable decrease in smoking in New York City and elsewhere over the last few decades weren’t ominous commercials and warning labels. They were taxes and the bans on indoor smoking. People kicked the habit when it became onerous, in cost and convenience, not to
  • that — not any itch to play nanny — is why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg support such measures as new taxes on sodas, which may never happen, and a ban on sugary drinks over 16 ounces
  • We’re not as plump as we are because we’ve never had our eyes opened to the wages of a Whopper. We’re this way because it’s all too easy, in a pang of hunger and collapse of resolve, to turn a blind eye to the toll
Javier E

William Stuntz - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The book argues that the rule of law has been replaced by the misrule of politics, with a one-way ratchet of ever-expanding criminal laws giving boundless discretion to police and prosecutors, leading to a system that wrongly punishes too many black men.
  • “The Christian story is a story, not a theory or an argument,” he said, and others are made in the image of God, just as he was.
Javier E

Secret Fears of the Super-Rich - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the overwhelming concern of the super-rich—mentioned by nearly every parent who participated in the survey—is their children. Many express relief that their kids’ education was assured, but are concerned that money might rob them of ambition. Having money “runs the danger of giving them a perverted view of the world,” one respondent writes. Another worries, “Money could mess them up—give them a sense of entitlement, prevent them from developing a strong sense of empathy and compassion
  • Enormous wealth takes care of so many day-to-day concerns, that the remaining ones grow that much more frustrating. The rich “want their children to make wise choices,” says Schervish, “because that’s what they can’t control.”
  • Many wealthy parents structure their children’s inheritances such that the money arrives only in discrete packets, timed to ensure that during their formative years they have no choice but to find a vocation. But Kenny hasn’t seen the strategy work, he says, because the children always know that the money is out there, and usually their friends do too.
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  • As they get older, many children of privilege take either too many risks, because they know the consequences of failure are minimal, or too few, because they feel assured in their financial well-being. Kenny says they, like their parents, can grow bored with one line of work and make consequence-free shifts to other jobs—until finally they reach middle age and discover that they have put together the résumé of a dabbler and haven’t made the impact that they had hoped.
  • Eventually, Schervish and Kenny say, most wealthy people discover the satisfactions of philanthropy.
  • wealth isn’t always worthy of envy, and is certainly not worth sacrificing one’s life to attain. “If we can get people just a little bit more informed, so they know that getting the $20 million or $200 million won’t necessarily bring them all that they’d hoped for, then maybe they’d concentrate instead on things that would make the world a better place and could help to make them truly happy,”
  • they describe an untroubled, unwealthy family that had found a happy medium that many among the super-rich might envy: Having only riches enough to be able to gratify reasonable desires, and yet make their gratifications always a novelty and a pleasure, the family occupied that just mean in life which is so rarely attained, and still more rarely enjoyed without discontent.
  • If anything, the rich stare into the abyss a bit more starkly than the rest of us. We can always indulge in the thought that a little more money would make our lives happier—and in many cases it’s true. But the truly wealthy know that appetites for material indulgence are rarely sated.
Javier E

The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin | Hoover Institution - 0 views

  • All told, some fourteen million people are estimated to have died as a result of these atrocities; to put this number into context, it is two million more than the total number of German and Soviet soldiers killed in battle and over thirteen million more than American losses in all of its foreign wars combined.
  • The Holocaust was a unique historical event, the causes of which were distinctive. But it’s precisely because it occurred alongside other wide-scale horrors that Snyder is right to “test the proposition that deliberate and direct mass murder by these two regimes in the bloodlands is a distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment.”
  • Both ideologically and practically, Stalinism gave rise to Hitler. This was thanks to Soviet communism’s absolutist and totalitarian nature, which gave Hitler all the evidence he needed that nothing less than the full militarization of society was required to confront the eastern menace. Similarly, Stalin’s paranoid worldview directly contributed to policies which only emboldened Hitler. Stalin instructed German communists to treat their Social Democratic countrymen as “social fascists,” leading to fractures on the German left that ultimately gave way for Hitler’s ascent. This hothouse geopolitical environment created, as Hobsbawm would later put it, an “Age of Extremes.”
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  • To this day, the populations of the former Soviet Bloc, and some elements of their intelligentsia, have yet to come to terms with their historical complicity in the Holocaust, painting their ancestors as victims, which indeed many of them no doubt were, while ignoring the fact that many were erstwhile collaborators.
  • But it was in Belarus where the conflagration between Nazis and Soviets, and between collaborationists and partisans, was greatest. By the end of the war, Snyder writes, a full half of the country’s population had either been killed or deported.
  • Despite the images of walking skeletons that greeted American liberators at Buchenwald, the full enormity of the Holocaust was not fully appreciated, even in the Western world, until relatively recently, for the simple reason that “the Americans and the British liberated no part of Europe that had a very significant Jewish population before the war, and saw none of the German death facilities.” Those facilities, and the fields in which the Germans exterminated the vast majority of their Jewish victims, lay in the bloodlands, which were conquered by the Soviets.
  • The Nazi plan to eliminate the Jewish race — a plan which it executed often with the gleeful participation of local collaborators who needed no prompting in rounding up and murdering their Jewish neighbors — is today being downplayed so that Soviet crimes loom larger.
  • “the vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.” Their murders were personal affairs in that they involved soldiers firing bullets into their bodies; death did not take place within a closed chamber and the murderers saw the faces of their victims. Most of the killing took place in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.
  • Snyder reports that the Nazis deliberately killed upwards of eleven million; for the Soviets during the Stalin period the figure was between six and nine million. On the Soviet side, these numbers are far less than what had originally been believed, due to the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives in the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • What has allowed the Soviet Union to escape the same sort of historical reproach as Nazi Germany is that its killing was carried out in the furtherance of various causes — absolute economic equality, the preservation of a dictatorship, the collectivization of agriculture — that are not commonly considered to exist on the same moral plane as a theory of racial superiority. “In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself,” Snyder explains.
  • Academics, journalists and political leaders in this region, particularly in the Baltic states, have put forward a “double genocide” approach to understanding this period of European history, which, unlike the more nuanced take of Snyder (who, while placing the Stalinist and Nazi regimes alongside each other as subjects of historical inquiry, does not equate them in terms of moral depravity), is explicitly political.
  • The perverse irony of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s desire to conquer the bloodlands was that by expanding their empires they diversified them. Suddenly, they had a whole lot of foreigners living under their domain, who would need to be pacified. And so the solution to this problem would have to be the liquidation of massive numbers of people.
  • This historical airbrushing amounts to “Holocaust obfuscation,” in the words of the academic Dovid Katz, which, he writes, “tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.” Last year, for instance, the Lithuanian government passed a law making it illegal to deny that the actions of the Soviet Union in Lithuania constitute “genocide,” as it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
  • But his acknowledgement that the period of 1933 to 1945 was marked by several genocides, rather than a single one, does not lead him to promote the “double genocide” theory. Snyder has written elsewhere that “The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated.” It is morally specious to compare the Jewish Holocaust to the Soviet “genocide” of Balts or Poles or Ukrainians, awful as the experiences of these peoples were, because of the inherently different nature of the methods the Soviet and Nazi regimes used against their subject populations. The Soviet Union had many local collaborators throughout its occupied and satellite territories. And while the Nazis also had collaborators during their occupation of the Baltic States, there was never any room for a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi project.
  • Though Stalin’s murder campaigns were, in many cases, predicated on ethnic antagonism, the difference is that the Soviets did not exterminate for extermination’s own sake. Once Stalin’s discrete policies had been achieved (the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, for instance), the mass murder stopped, and the Soviet Union eventually wound down its widescale deportations and mass killings in the mid- 1950s. Had Hitler’s  regime, with its animalistic understanding of human nature, lasted beyond 1945, its mass murder and terror would not have decreased. For these tactics were not just means but ends; they were the very lifeblood, the weltanschauung, of nazism itself.
  • The crucial factor one must consider in evaluating these two strains of totalitarianism is their competing long-term visions, and the policies that were required to execute them. Classifying Stalin’s various murder campaigns (alongside Nazi policies towards Roma, gays, educated Poles and Soviet citizens in Belarus and Ukraine) as “genocides,” which Snyder does, while also singling out the Holocaust as the worst of them all, is not mutually exclusive.
  • Bloodlands is an incredibly original work. It seeks to redirect our understanding of the Holocaust as primarily an eastern phenomenon, and one which took place among a spate of mass killing policies. When popular interest in the Holocaust and an “international collective memory” of it began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, it focused almost exclusively on the experience of German and West European Jews, the wealthiest and most assimilated on the continent, who died in far smaller numbers than did the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States, who were nearly eradicated. “Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history,”
Javier E

Fooling Other Countries - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • one thing we are not going to do is be strictly rule-bound in our approach to foreign affairs.
  • The United States is a huge country with a very large and conflicting array of interests and, being both a democracy and a country with a divided central government, limited ability to set policy at the government’s discretion. To most countries, we will inevitably be a relatively fickle friend.
Javier E

'History has never been so unpopular' | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

  • First, it can hardly be a cause of celebration that students in independent schools are almost twice as likely to study GCSE history as those in maintained schools. In 2010, more than a hundred state secondary schools entered no students for GCSE history.Second, as the inspectors' report acknowledges, England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory for students beyond the age of 14. Worse, many state schools now offer a two-year key stage 3 course, which allows some pupils to stop studying history at the age of 13.
  • • 25% of all schools no longer teach history as a discrete subject in year 7• 30% of comprehensives spend less than one hour a week on history in the years up to age 13• More GCSE candidates took design and technology than history last year• More A-level candidates took psychology.It is a paradox indeed. History has never been more popular outside schools than it is in Britain today. Yet history has never been so unpopular in British schools.
  • Even more disturbing is the evidence of widespread historical ignorance among school-leavers.
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  • How did we get here? The problem is surely not poor teaching. Rather, it is the stuff that teachers are expected to do, which is the product of an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists, not forgetting over-mighty examination boards.
  • Such initiatives from above provided the proponents of a so-called new history with a golden opportunity to reshape historical education. Historical "skills" such as source analysis, they argued, should be elevated above mere factual knowledge. And "discovery" by children should count for more than dusty old pedagogy.The result was a national curriculum designed to instil in schoolchildren all kinds of "key concepts" like "chronological understanding", "cultural, ethnic and religious diversity", "change and continuity", "cause and consequence", "significance" and "interpretation".And these were to be taught with reference to an impressively wide range of subject matter.
  • The trouble is not so much with the theory as with the practice that has evolved in too many schools. As Ofsted admits in a damning passage on primary pupils, "some … found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. They knew about particular events, characters and periods, but did not have an overview. Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together."
  • In fact, as the inspectors concede elsewhere, in 28 of the 58 secondary schools they visited, "students' chronological understanding was not sufficiently well developed: they had … a poor sense of the historical narrative". This is hardly a minor deficiency. It's a bit like saying that maths is a successful subject in British schools, apart from the fact that pupils in half of schools can't count.
  • Commenting on a not untypical primary curriculum, the authors of History for All say that "its principal weaknesses are the disconnected topics and the potential for the pupils to be left with a fragmented overview". You can say that again. Consider this list of topics spread in this order over four years:
  • The word smorgasbord doesn't really do justice to this random assortment. Lost, as Simon Schama has justly lamented, is the "long arc of time", to be replaced by odds and sods.
Javier E

Going Home Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Most TED talks are about the future, but Sting’s was about going into the past. The difference between the two modes of thinking stood in stark contrast. In the first place, it was clear how much richer historical consciousness is than future vision.
  • Then it was obvious how regenerating going home again can be
  • Historical consciousness has a fullness of paradox that future imagination cannot match. When we think of the past, we think about the things that seemed bad at the time but turned out to be good in the long run. We think about the little things that seemed inconsequential in the moment but made all the difference.
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  • Going back is a creative process. The events of childhood are like the Hebrew alphabet; the vowels are missing, and the older self has to make sense of them
  • The person going back home has to invent a coherent tradition out of discrete moments and tease out future implications.
Javier E

Bibi's Opponent: 'I Trust the Obama Administration to Get a Good Deal' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Netanyahu and Herzog differ stylistically and dispositionally, and yes, their views on a range of economic, security, and social issues are miles apart, but it is their diverging approaches to management of the American file that is most dramatic.
  • what does Herzog think about Obama—and specifically, about his handling of the Iran nuclear talks? Here is what he told me in December, when I interviewed him at the Brookings Institution's Saban Forum: "I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal."
  • Whether he actually does, I do not know. But I do know that he is clever enough to talk about the U.S.-Israel relationship with discretion and nuance
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  • both men believe that Obama's pursuit of a deal is not Chamberlain-like, but instead a regional necessity—so long as Iran is kept at least a year away from nuclear breakout.
  • All options for me are still on the table,” including the military option. But when asked if a nuclear Iran posed an "existential threat," he demurred: "It is a big threat. That’s enough.
  • Goldberg: Come to this large question of the Labor Party. Why is the Labor Party in such a diminished state? Where did it go wrong?
  • For a long time, we were members in coalitions of other leaders. We kind of were erased of our identity. It took us time to recover, and we also lost touch with new groups in society while taking the role and demanding to be part of it. For example, the Russian immigration of a million people
  • Add to it other groups. The Arab population—they gave 96 or 98 percent support to Ehud Barak.
  • Couple it with the fact that there's a young generation who took over, who's coming in, who's voting, and they don't remember the legacy of Labor. And add to that the fact that even within that young generation, or the general public at large, we were viewed as giving up too quickly to the Palestinians or the Arabs.
  • The fact that there is no connection, no discussion, no discourse or no trust between the leaders, is adverse to the ability to reach an agreement. Yesterday morning I had breakfast with Gerry Adams, the leader of the [Irish Republican Army's political wing] Sinn Fein. May I remind you he was an outcast? He came to Israel and Palestine. I know him. And we had breakfast. And I said to him, “Gerry, could you tell me, what was the moment of truth, that all of a sudden you guys moved?” And he said, “When we all came to realize that we won't achieve it in any other way—both sides.”
  • Goldberg: Israel is quite obviously a Jewish state. What's so bad about passing a law that says, Israel is a Jewish state? Herzog: I will explain the following and I said it in the floor in the parliament when I debated with Netanyahu last week. I said that when it comes to the deal with the Palestinians, in the final-status moments, I think it's correct to say that both states are nation-states, that Palestine will be the nation-state of the Palestinian people and Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people, as it is derived from the November [19]47 UN Partition Plan of Resolution. But this has nothing to do with what's within Israel. Within Israel, all citizens must feel they are equal, not only to say it, but they must feel it. And coming forward with this discourse, on Jewish state, treads on racist undertones, makes a feeling that somebody will be preferred on the other. The way a majority treats a minority is essential to the well-being of our society. The Arab community in Israel is 20 percent. It's comprised of all denominations of Christianity and Islam. Fascinating community—like all other communities in Israel, non-homogeneous at all. Many of them want to be part of an inclusiveness in the Israeli public life all throughout, and there are many who want to be secessionists. Our duty is to be inclusive, if you want to protect the well-being of the state. And to make anybody feel, in any form or manner, that he is not that, is not only a huge mistake; it's against the basic inherent declaration of independence of the state of Israel, which is our Magna Carta.
  • It depends on building trust. It depends on confidence-building measures. It depends on being innovative, bold, and it depends on radiating to the people that there is hope. The situation that we see right now is so devastating because there's a feeling of lack of hope. There's a despair feeling and most worrisome of all is the unleashing of feelings of religious hatred that is so dangerous to all of us, turning it into religious war.
  • Goldberg: You are prime minister—what is your settlement policy? Herzog: My settlement policy first and foremost is based on the famous [Clinton] parameters. I believe in the blocs. I definitely believe in Gush Etzion [a major settlement bloc just outside Jerusalem] being part of Israel. It's essential for its security.
  • I believe in freezing settlement construction outside the blocs as part of confidence-building measures. But it should be part of a plan that Israel presents. And this plan should of course take into account, most importantly, the basic inherent security needs of the state of Israel.
  • I do believe however, unequivocally and from the bottom of my heart, that since it's a must, it's a must under all circumstances, to separate from the Palestinians, that if it fails, we will have to take steps that define our borders in a clearer way.
  • There are ways, even if you don't negotiate, you can coordinate. Even if you can freeze settlement construction as I mentioned. You can do steps that say, I gave priority to that area and not the other. But I think it's a mistake that we already assume that it's over. It's part of the tragedy that unfolds in front of our eyes. It is not true, I'm telling you absolutely. It is possible, absolutely possible still, to make peace with the Palestinians.
  • Goldberg: Well, I've heard people on the right in Israel talk about replacing Europe, for instance, with a China-India policy. You don't think that Israel can pivot east? Herzog: There's nothing to compare, with all due respect to these important countries, economically they are very important countries. But we look at the record, look at the record in the United Nations. Look at the record in the UN Security Council. We have only really one trustworthy ally, which we really share affection and trust with on so many levels, and there's nothing to replace that.
  • Goldberg: The Palestinian Authority is a fairly weak and corrupt body. Obviously Palestine itself is divided between two competing and sometimes warring parties. Why do you—you seem to have more faith in the Palestinian Authority than the average Israeli. Herzog: Because they lead a moderate Palestinian political body. Let's be frank about it. We always love to judge everybody else's political systems. I'm not judgmental. If I have to take a decision between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, I believe in working with the Palestinian Authority, and I believe it's feasible.
  • And they are working. Look at the summer. Let's put it in perspective. Following the abduction of the three boys, which was a huge tragedy for Israelis and for everybody, the Palestinian Authority functioned properly. They coordinated with us [in our] efforts to find their whereabouts. They handled the situation in calming it down, despite the fact that there were many Israeli operations on the ground. Then came Protective Edge in the summer in Gaza, so before kind of always, everybody loves to term them as weak. So far, Abu Mazen survived four or five Israeli prime ministers to the best of my recollection
  • I speak a lot to Abu Mazen, and I said to Abu Mazen, “People say that even if I negotiate with you, you'll never make peace with us.” And he laughed, and he said, “I'm sure we can reach an agreement.”
  • —what makes you think that now, which most people see as a very inauspicious time for a revised peace process—what makes you think that now is the time to try to move towards this two-state solution?
  • Herzog: It's not that now is the time. It has been a long drawn-out process. Don't forget Oslo. You're ignoring a lot of things. You're ignoring the Khartoum process of ‘68 and compare it to today. It's a totally different ball game, totally different arena. Today there is an intense interfacing and discourse between us and the Palestinians, not necessarily through the leaders.
  • my fear is, that within the Palestinian and Israeli camp, the peoples are losing faith in the possibility of separating and coming to the two-state solution. It was there, believe me, it was there. In 1994, during the Rabin era, there was a huge majority for it in both peoples. Unfortunately, terror on both sides led to the fact that we got into a stumbling block with no possibility of moving forward, and then we repeated it time and again.
  • Goldberg: Where does that come from?  Where does that impulse to suddenly slaughter a group of rabbis with a meat cleaver come from? Herzog: There's no justification of it, none whatsoever. It's against any moral, legal, or human values, period. And it's shocking. Nonetheless, when you look at the whole picture, we have to analyze it, and in order to neutralize these elements, we have to bring hope. And we cannot give up on that.
Javier E

Uber's Business Model Could Change Your Work - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Just as Uber is doing for taxis, new technologies have the potential to chop up a broad array of traditional jobs into discrete tasks that can be assigned to people just when they’re needed, with wages set by a dynamic measurement of supply and demand, and every worker’s performance constantly tracked, reviewed and subject to the sometimes harsh light of customer satisfaction.
  • Uber and its ride-sharing competitors, including Lyft and Sidecar, are the boldest examples of this breed, which many in the tech industry see as a new kind of start-up — one whose primary mission is to efficiently allocate human beings and their possessions, rather than information.
  • Various companies are now trying to emulate Uber’s business model in other fields, from daily chores like grocery shopping and laundry to more upmarket products like legal services and even medicine.
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  • “I do think we are defining a new category of work that isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either,”
  • Proponents of on-demand work point out that many of the tech giants that sprang up over the last decade minted billions in profits without hiring very many people; Facebook, for instance, serves more than a billion users, but employs only a few thousand highly skilled workers, most of them in California.
  • But the rise of such work could also make your income less predictable and your long-term employment less secure. And it may relegate the idea of establishing a lifelong career to a distant memory.
  • “This on-demand economy means a work life that is unpredictable, doesn’t pay very well and is terribly insecure.” After interviewing many workers in the on-demand world, Dr. Reich said he has concluded that “most would much rather have good, well-paying, regular jobs.”
  • “We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit,”
  • at the end of 2014, Uber had 160,000 drivers regularly working for it in the United States. About 40,000 new drivers signed up in December alone, and the number of sign-ups was doubling every six months.
  • The report found that on average, Uber’s drivers worked fewer hours and earned more per hour than traditional taxi drivers, even when you account for their expenses. That conclusion, though, has raised fierce debate among economists, because it’s not clear how much Uber drivers really are paying in expenses. Drivers on the service use their own cars and pay for their gas; taxi drivers generally do not.
  • A survey of Uber drivers contained in the report found that most were already employed full or part time when they found Uber, and that earning an additional income on the side was a primary benefit of driving for Uber.
  • The larger worry about on-demand jobs is not about benefits, but about a lack of agency — a future in which computers, rather than humans, determine what you do, when and for how much. The rise of Uber-like jobs is the logical culmination of an economic and tech system that holds efficiency as its paramount virtue.
  • “These services are successful because they are tapping into people’s available time more efficiently,” Dr. Sundararajan said. “You could say that people are monetizing their own downtime.”Think about that for a second; isn’t “monetizing downtime” a hellish vision of the future of work?
  • “I’m glad if people like working for Uber, but those subjective feelings have got to be understood in the context of there being very few alternatives,” Dr. Reich said. “Can you imagine if this turns into a Mechanical Turk economy, where everyone is doing piecework at all odd hours, and no one knows when the next job will come, and how much it will pay? What kind of private lives can we possibly have, what kind of relationships, what kind of families?”
Javier E

The Halloween Costume Controversy at Yale's Silliman College - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads.
  • Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.
  • But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.
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  • Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.
  • In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”
  • As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”
  • This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.
  • It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.
  • Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.
  • That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.
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