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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.

But also, when it comes right down to it, he's no Scalia.

This is a very poor bar to use when evaluating the writing abilities of justices. Scalia was without a doubt the best writer on the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and one could easily argue he was one of the best ever. His opinions have no trouble standing up to the likes of Cardozo or Holmes, and even the people who loathed Scalia and everything he stood for admit that he was an intellectual giant. He was a writer the likes of which comes far less than the proverbial once in a generation, and the Court is immeasurably lessened by his death.

But also, when it comes right down to it, he's no Scalia.

This is a very poor bar to use when evaluating the writing abilities of justices. Scalia was without a doubt the best writer on the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and one could easily argue he was one of the best ever.

Well, I was more interested in kind of "situating" the justices, it was not my intent to be deliberately unflattering or anything.

But I do wonder whether it's actually a "poor bar." Scalia was an exceptionally capable jurist, but he does have peers in the profession--and even peers outside the profession who would likely make excellent justices. The problem is that the political nature of the appointment now often prevents such people from being appointed. In particular, Robert Bork was a much better choice than Anthony Kennedy, for example, and given Kennedy's penchant, especially in his later years, for flights of poetic fancy instead of hard-boiled legal reasoning, America would very likely be a better place today had Bork joined the court.

That said, though, while I do think it's still a little early to declare that either Gorsuch or Barrett are on Scalia's level, they are at least plausibly in the neighborhood. So it's not impossible to get good jurists on the court. But in the case of Jackson, President Biden didn't even try. He wasn't looking for a great jurist or even an obviously competent one. He made a purely political, explicitly affirmative-action pick, with totally predictable results.

That's a fair analysis. KBJ is certainly the weakest justice in terms of quality of writing and scholarship on the court right now, though purely out of the interest of charity I'd like to think that with time she'll at least get to the level of say, Alito. Not the greatest writer ever by any means, but competent. Of course "competent" by the standards of the Supreme Court is still head-and-shoulders above "competent" by the standards of the rest of the judiciary, so we'll see.