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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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New Harvard class of 2028 Demographic data just dropped

Predictably, the Supreme Court decision hasn't changed anything. Whites are not even represented in the demographic statistics, they are an implied residual.

Harvard's data indicates that at least 68% of the class of 2028 is non-White. That leaves 32% of the class as categorized as "White", but the best data we have suggests that Jewish population of Harvard is about 10%, so Gentile Whites, who make up over 60% of the country and founded this country and these institutions, have probably about 20% representation in the Harvard class of 2028, certainly being by far the least represented group by population.

Harvard at least seems to think that the Supreme Court decision changed things. Looking at the admissions data for some other schools, it seems that the results are all over the place, most likely because each tried to achieve their desired racial mix via novel methods and haven't worked out all the kinks yet.

In any case, I thought the whole point of getting rid of affirmative action was so that we would stop caring about things like "[race] makes up [percentage] of the population and so deserves [percentage] of the seats." If you just wanted the racial spoils system inverted in favor of white people, then a lawsuit on behalf of Asians whose goal was admissions purely by test score was probably never going to achieve your goals.

Really we'd all be better off if there were a clearer distinction between admissions at technical schools like MIT and Caltech, which would do fine on a purely meritocratic exam system, and places like Harvard and Yale, which if they had any balls would say "We are private institutions and will admit whomever we damn well please, because our job is to groom the future rulers of this country, not churn out a bunch of programmers and engineers who will never hold the reigns of power." I thought perhaps the disruption of the pandemic would allow for reforms of that magnitude, but sadly the higher education system seems content to stumble along with kludges and half-measures until its bubble inevitably bursts.

The supreme court ruling made their job harder, but there's plenty of ways to get around AA directly. They just have a harder time sorting and categorizing student essays and using plausible deniability. They have to go by application address and correlated by essay instead of a box the applicant clicks.

I hear the new meta is moving your kid to a bottom-tier high school for senior year, since a lot of colleges have committed to taking the top x% of grads from such schools.

Not sure if going to Angela Davis high school is more torturous than being forced to play the vuzuzela for ten years because your preschool's college advisor said it makes you a shoo-in for Harvard orchestra recruiting.

I am still waiting for this to get common enough that we get a TV shows about the reverse Fresh Prince, where a promising young rich kid is sent to live with his ghetto (or hillbilly) auntie for a chance to get into a better college.

I imagine the plot would be sort of a twist on the oft-forgotten Jamie Kennedy vehicle Malibu’s Most Wanted.

Taiwanese immigrant tiger mom sends her striver son to live in Compton in order to up his street cred. Unfortunately, her perceptions of America being thirty years out of date and skewed by pop culture, she doesn’t realize that Compton was gentrified by Latino immigrants more than a decade ago and isn’t even a particularly unsafe area anymore. However, her son desperately needs to maintain appearances so his mother doesn’t realize her money (she’s paying his rent, which is no longer dirt-cheap in Compton) is being wasted. So, he hires some of his black actor friends to pretend to be hardcore gangsters every time his mom comes to check on him.

However, when a real gang confrontation does break out (instigated by a very real and very scary Latino gang) he and his fake gangster buddies have to put their money where their mouths are, with the protagonist displaying surprising aplomb and bravado. This is witnessed by a Harvard admissions officer, who offers full-ride scholarships to him and to his “gang”. (None of whom, mirroring real life, are actual poor urban blacks, but who will happily count toward Harvard’s black quota)

Great premise. Not too different from current asian meta of 'personality hacking' instead of achievement grinding. Asians are unpopular so use a Nigerian immigrant pretending to be ghetto in order to get the best success at hollywood scripts.

this is very good.

This sounds hilarious, but also raises a genuine question. Why aren't the tiger moms already doing this? It seems like a lot of striving asian families are still doing things the old-fashioned way, sending their kids off for piano and violin classes. They seem smart enough to realize that the system is rigged against them (hence the lawsuit), but not smart enough to work the system and send their kids to the ghetto.

My guess would be that they fear the damage done by a ghetto school would outweigh the benefits.

well, you could find some other way to work the system. Start a "service club" where you do volunteer work in the ghetto, rather than practicing violin. Something like that. The volunteer work could be anything, it doesn't even have to be real.

Asian Americans (Indian and sinics) end up crowding the meta. Relatively safe New Jersey shitholes got rapidly gentrified and flooded with Asians to pull test scores up too fast. Its like a tragedy of the commons, too many smart hardworking kids in a shithole make them stand out less.

I'm reminded of that joke on reddit of the guy who lets off a few shots every now and then to keep property prices low. The actual meta for Asians should be to loudly complain that their kids sre getting bullied and becoming stupider at some low achieving district in order to dissuade overachievers from crowding out their kid. If the current meta favors 'best in class', then cripple the class at the outset.

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I'd watch that show.