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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.

One could argue that this has extended to other domains, with exhibit 1 being Kamala Harris. Like she must be pretending to be dumb right? I need to find a video of her in court at some point, there is no way the California attorney general was this incompetent.

Yeah, without knowing these people personally it really is impossible for me to say with confidence. I've interacted with some pretty high profile people over the last few decades, and in my experience the "upper echelons" of American life include a surprising number of obviously-not-that-bright people, even though very-obviously-bright people are over-represented in their ranks. Really plainly stupid people are rare among millionaires and billionaires and successful politicans and lawyers and academics and so on... but listening to partners from multi-million dollar law firms fumble soft-ball questions from sympathetic appellate justices is always a sobering experience. To say nothing of reading arguments from SCOTUS justices who apparently can't even do high school math! It really goes to show that if you do something for long enough, and happen to be in the right place at the right time, eventually people will assume you must have some merit--and then they will give you more "merit."

Basically this SMBC comic but extended beyond graduation speakers, to all paid speakers, to all lawyers and politicians and academics and the whole damn PMC, I guess. It seems fruitless to complain about it because it appears to just be human nature, and so presumably adaptive in some way.

But there does seem to be a genuine asymmetry where right-wing jurists are still trying to, at minimum, pay some lip service to reason and principle and the actual empirical facts that underlie our successful intergenerational institutions... while left-wing jurists embrace "winning is the only thing that matters" via the postmodernist deconstruction of those institutions. Whether they're doing so deliberately, or inadvertently as a result of uncritically absorbing their political milieu, in the end scarcely matters. This has always been my objection to the political left, even though I am often more aligned with the vision of the left than the right. If I can only make sense of your jurisprudence by assuming that you are either stupid or dishonest, then it makes very little practical difference which of those things you are.