Supreme Court Decisions

There were three big decisions over the last two days.

First, as expected, the Supreme Court shot down Affirmative Action at least with respect to using race as a criterion for college admission. The decision only affects race and not things such as socio-economic class or geography.

I think this was a good decision. Using race as a criterion strikes me as dangerous. If colleges can use race as a criterion for admission then why can't companies use it as a criterion for hiring? If colleges really want "diversity" then I would think that socio-economic class would be a better criterion anyway.

The second had to do with a web designer that didn't want to do websites for LGBTQ+ clients because it (1) violated her freedom of religion and (2) violated her freedom of speech because it would force her to "say" things that she didn't believe.

The whole case was a bit of a stretch in my opinion but the court ruled that she could decline based upon freedom of speech. I don't know about this one. It seems to me that it opens the door for all sorts of abuse.

The third case was the long awaited decision on Biden's student loan forgiveness program. I thought the court might let this stand but apparently not. They ruled that the Department of Education exceeded its authority and shut the program down. 

Biden immediately announced an alternate legal avenue for doing the same thing. I suppose they had Plan B waiting in the wings just in case. I'm sure this will also be challenged so we shall see. 

Juneteenth

Juneteenth as a holiday upsets my sense of order. People keep calling it the day slavery ended and that's just not true.

Slavery hadn't ended in the entire US by June 19th, 1865. Only in the states of the Confederacy in areas not under Union control. Slavery didn't end until December 6th, 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified. June 19th, 1865 is simply the date when some random group of slaves found out they had been freed by presidential order two years previously. The only "holiday" that made less sense than "Juneteenth" was "Columbus Day" which celebrated some Italian dude, working for Spain, who accidentally bumped into Hispaniola, while trying to find India and proceeded to treat the indigenous people there terribly. Dates which might make more sense would be December 6th as explained above, September 22nd which was the date on which Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 or April 3rd which was the date that black regiments (some say the first was the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry and others that it was the 29th Connecticut Infantry) entered Richmond and insured that the Confederacy, and by extension slavery, were doomed. Oh, by the way, the freed slaves were not citizens in June of 1865 because the Dred Scott decision was still in force. The 14th Amendment fixed that so June 9th, the date that the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 and the former slaves became citizens, might make more sense as well.

Some may call this petty but I find it annoying that those who whine about the distortion of history have no problem with distorting it themselves when it serves their purpose.

Why I'm no Longer "Woke"

When "woke" simply meant an awareness to realizing that some people weren't treated equally it was a positive thing. But over the last couple of years it has become toxic. Suddenly everything is racist or sexist or some other sort of oppression.

- There's a morbidly obese woman on TicTok with a petition demanding that the FAA force the airlines to give obese people free extra seats because obese people are oppressed. That's insanity.

- There's a black woman with a video claiming that fat phobia is equivalent to racism and therefore being thin and working out are forms of white supremacy. That's even more insane.

- In California they're trying to introduce "equity based" mathematics whatever the hell that is. That sounds insane as well because anything associated with "equity" rather than "equality" tends to be insane.

When justified demands for equality morph into unjustified demands for equity or special privilege then we have a problem.

Apparently I have male privilege, white privilege and something called thin privilege so I should be coming up with ways to atone for all of this privilege. The first step apparently is to ask people what their preferred pronouns are before I can speak to them. Why I would need to know someone's third person pronouns when I'm speaking to them directly I haven't figured out yet.

All of this would be comical if it didn't result in a backlash even among people that would normally be sympathetic. The race card has been played so often and so wrongly that I no longer care if someone thinks I'm a racist. I saw an article this morning calling the SNAP work requirements included in the debt ceiling deal "racist." Regardless of what you think of those work requirements how can something that applies to everyone, and in this applies to more white people, be "racist?"

The Republicans know they have a winning story here because way too many people are fed up with this bullshit.