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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32442 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on.

I should point out that this has already happened in certain parts of the law. I mentioned this in my review of David Bernstein's Classified book:

The most cogent illustration for how race categories metastasize into a distraction is by examining government-mandated "minority preferences." In the early 1980s, Congress tasked some federal agencies (primarily the Small Business Administration and Department of Transportation) to set aside a portion of their grants to businesses that are "owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." These programs are usually referred to by the moniker Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, or DBE. Almost immediately, "socially disadvantaged" was interpreted to refer only to racial discrimination, and the relevant regulations declared that any enterprise owned by a racial minority would be presumptively deemed "disadvantaged." Bernstein does not directly provide an explanation for this peculiar shift, but in all likelihood proving whether someone has been "socially and economically disadvantaged" for each individual applicant would likely have been too administratively burdensome to be practical. Yet this also meant the opportunity to have a nuanced investigation into the question of disadvantage was entirely quashed by just checking the right box.

A federal law meant to address "disadvantage" was functionally transformed into a sort of racial reparations program. If whites/men by definition cannot be "disadvantaged", then no harm done apparently. DBE funding is definitely a place where the "racism equals power plus" crowd achieved a practical victory within the legal system. The legal acrobatics around racial discrimination in college admissions are another.

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