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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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A few tweets are catching my eye on college education today.

Seems like a lot of low IQ people are getting college degrees. IQ<90. Let’s be serious those people can’t do intellectual work. I actually think the modern world would be very confusing for people with an IQ well above there let alone doing intellectual work.

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1679712417419341827?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

There is a big discrepancy in repaying student loans between males and females. Being that the gap begins immediately I assume it has nothing to do with child birth. Perhaps hoping to marry a guy who will buy them out? Females do have more pressure to entering the dating market earlier versus developing personal finance.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1679787590680031232?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

Hannania had some affirmative action takes lately. Here’s one on mainstream conservative embracing hbd.

https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1679861286392434688?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

Maybe it’s low effort to post a bunch of tweets but I’m noticing a trend here of the Supreme Court ruling getting people talking about issues in higher education and attacking it. These all seem to be attacking in slightly different directions but it seems a debate has been started on the right.

IMO Hannania keeps saying Musks buyout of twitter has helped the right a lot with activision. Protests work now. Lack of censorship helps them get there more intellectual debates out there which they couldn’t before.

The example I see getting kicked around a lot is how insanely bad Jackson's dissent in the Asian discrimination cases was. Her commentary about black babies and black doctors was just a complete hash, as if neither she nor her clerks have even a rudimentary grasp of statistics. Innumeracy is not a good look, especially when you pile it on top of her infamous failure to define "woman."

In fact Sotomayor's legal reasoning is noticeably weak, and Jackson makes her look bright by comparison. That this encompasses two-thirds of the Court's left wing can make this sound like a partisan dig, but in fact Kagan has no trouble holding her own (though I have seen speculation from both the right and the left that she has taken to "phoning it in" when she sides with someone they don't like). Judson Berger's "Weekend Jolt" from National Review last week had this to say:

Importantly, Roberts retains an ability to influence the conservative wing of the Court sheerly through his position as chief justice. (As such, he may assign controversial opinions to himself if he joins the majority.) But one other thing that deserves emphasis . . . is how intellectually outgunned the Court’s liberal wing is relative to the conservative side. It’s not merely a matter of numbers so much as a stark matter of judicial ability and temperament. Elena Kagan is a genuinely brilliant liberal justice with the ability to persuade those in the conservative majority as to the soundness of her views, but she has of late seemingly been phoning it in. Meanwhile Sonia Sotomayor is (to put it generously) notoriously lacking in the “intellectual outreach” department, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, though she may develop on the bench, is at this early date depressingly outmatched rhetorically and argumentatively even by Sotomayor.

So then it can seem like a race/HBD thing except of course that Thomas is black and seems to do fine. That may be substantially a matter of accumulated experience, at least in comparison with Jackson. But also, when it comes right down to it, he's no Scalia.

I do have an alternative explanation, but I'm not sure whether it's more charitable, or less. There is a tradition on the political left that leans in to the who/whom divide. As long as you're fighting the right bad guys (or in other words, attacking the right targets), truth is not only irrelevant, it might actually be something you should actively reject. Representative Cortez famously placed being "morally right" above being "factually correct", and was defended by the media on that. As a life-appointed justice, Jackson could very well be calling a deer a horse for all to see; what are we going to do, impeach her for it? By enshrining false claims about American racism into the canon of SCOTUS jurisprudence, she launders those claims into respectably citable assertions for generations of scholarly grifters.

So like, pick your poison? Jackson might just be so immersed in critical legal theory that she just looks like an idiot to people who think that intelligence is measured by one's grasp of empirical facts--when actually she's more Machiavellian, an "idiot" only to her enemies and a great manipulator of the levers of power for her friends. On this interpretation she is also a horrible justice who should never have been allowed anywhere near SCOTUS, but so long as she minds her Ps and Qs, she will never be removed and so the criticism is now moot. All anyone can do in response is vote Republican and pray.

On the other hand... she might just in fact be an idiot. Occam's Razor suggests that we should probably peer past the pomp and circumstance of pretending that the political appointment process is in any way meritocratic, and just call a spade a spade. And if this is that case, why, she should never have been allowed anywhere near SCOTUS, but so long as she minds her Ps and Qs, she will never be removed and so the criticism is now moot... ah. Looks like elections have consequences, and appointing justices explicitly for the color of their skin and the shape of their genitals does, too. And once that's done, there's surprisingly little anyone can do to fix it.

So then it can seem like a race/HBD thing except of course that Thomas is black and seems to do fine. That may be substantially a matter of accumulated experience, at least in comparison with Jackson. But also, when it comes right down to it, he's no Scalia.

It seems like on a body that is representative on the level of 9/300,000,000, you can find genuinely talented blacks out of the slightly over ten percent of that population with the right skin color. So Thomas doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that recent dem appointments aren't even intended to be genuinely smart legal minds- RBG, as much as I disagreed with her, was clearly capable of good legal reasoning. So was Breyer, and is Kagan. Sotomayor and KJB are not, but the DNC doesn't and didn't care- they rule the way the DNC wants them to, who's going to point out that their reasoning for doing so is sophomoric nonsense.

I strongly suspect that this has to do with differences in attitude between the two parties- democrat's judges are intended, first and foremost, to rule in accordance with the party that nominated them, and dumb partisan hacks are the easiest route there. On the other hand for republicans the constitution is an actual document that has actual words in it, and it's important to nominate someone who has a consistent reading of those actual literal words with actual meanings. These people sometimes ruling against you is a cost of doing business because those are actual literal words that actually have meanings and you are of course not the expert on those words or their meanings.