Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Prepare for Disparate Impact
REVIEW: ‘When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives’
In her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, bestselling author Heather Mac Donald skewers the ideology of "disparate impact"—a "once obscure legal theory that is now transforming our world."
According to Mac Donald, disparate impact—in which any negative or disproportionate outcome impacting black Americans is declared to be a "tool of white supremacy"—has been deliberately developed and leveraged as a cultural tool, targeting "the very fundamentals of a fair society."
Today, she argues, meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and even respect for our civilizational inheritance stand in the way of achieving so-called racial justice.
Mac Donald describes 2020 as a potentially "pivotal moment in American history," accelerating the notion that racism defines America. This idea, she believes, is tearing the country apart, with any protest rejected by the same "just believe" mandate used by the #MeToo movement.
Not only that, any roadblock to the achievement of "exact racial proportionality"—with the key to disparate impact being the presumption of racial proportionality with no regard for factors such as behavior and ability—is itself evidence of this same systemic racism.
In When Race Trumps Merit, Mac Donald explores three fundamental areas of American life to support her hypothesis that the country is engaging in a fit of "cultural self-cancellation" that is impoverishing the imagination, stunting the capacity for wonder and joy, and stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit.
The first two chapters are dedicated to science and medicine, which were hit "like an earthquake" by the "post-George Floyd racial reckoning" unleashed in 2020.
Mac Donald provides the reader with a deep dive into the racialized nature of today’s scientific community, arguing that American elites have simply moved on from failing to close the academic skills gap by deciding to "break up the objective yardsticks that measure it," including dismantling the system of knowledge underpinning modern medicine. "The result," says Mac Donald, "will be a declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress."
Mac Donald then moves on from the world of science and explores the abstract world of culture. Across 10 chapters she explores the pursuit of racial proportionality across classical music, opera, and art.
The problem with this section—compared with the former and latter sections—is that the bulk of the book is dedicated to subjective expressions of art sandwiched on either side by the comparatively objective areas of science and crime. While the critiques of certain artists under the "rise of mediocrity" might highlight the breadth of the blind pursuit of racial proportionality and the erasure of Western culture, it must be said that by placing such significance upon subjective areas of human expression—rather than objective fields of pure meritocracy—Mac Donald is in danger of diluting the strength of her overarching argument.
The third and final section is an emotionally stunning investigation of the effect of disparate impact analysis on the American criminal-justice system, "where every disparity in arrest or incarceration rates is now attributed to racism."
Presenting the decline of New York City into a haven for criminal behavior as an example, Mac Donald argues that two decades of successful efforts to combat crime have been voluntarily cast aside, with the spread of violence and predation erupting as a predictable...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1428
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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2124
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
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Monday, June 26, 2023
Seven months after 2022 elections, U.S. counties still uncovering Election Day problems
Following reviews over the past seven months on how their election departments administered the 2022 midterms, several counties across the U.S have found numerous issues that highlight processes and procedures that need to be addressed for future elections.
Such jurisdictions have conducted audits, reviews, or investigations to determine root causes. Several counties released the reviews in June, seven months after the elections occurred.
1. Berkeley County, South Carolina: An audit of the county Board of Voter Registration and Elections’ administration of the 2022 elections released this month by the state Election Commission gave 30 recommendations.
The audit found that 25 of 440 poll workers and two polling location technicians were paid despite not receiving training for their positions. Checklists for opening and closing polls weren’t adequately completed for all polling locations, and neither were ballot reconciliation worksheets to ensure that all ballots were accounted for, according to the audit.
2. Cobb County, Georgia: A county elections division employee made an error that led to more than 1,000 absentee ballots not being mailed in time for the November election. The error wasn’t discovered until weeks later, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit for several absentee voters. A judge then extended the deadline for the county to accept absentee ballots.
The county’s Internal Audit Department presented its nearly 80-page report last week to the Board of Elections, recommending that the board automate reports at various stages of the ballot process, log the number of ballots as they’re returned, secure the absentee ballots within the department, and log ballot counts every day at each stage of the process with supervisor verification and employee initials.
3. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania: The county district attorney investigated the causes of the ballot paper shortage that occurred at several polling places in Luzerne during the 2022 general election. The DA found that 16 of the 143 polling places in the county ran out of paper for the ballot-on-demand printers. The acting elections director at the time, who started her job nearly four months before the election, didn’t order more paper ahead of the election, despite saying she would. The DA’s report also found that high staff turnover and the loss of institutional knowledge began around 2019, which he said were the underlying causes for the Election Day issues.
4. Maricopa County, Arizona: A former Arizona Supreme Court chief justice wrote a report commissioned by the county on the issues that occurred at vote centers. Roughly 70 vote centers in the county experienced ballot printer issues on Election Day 2022, which resulted in ballot tabulation machine errors. The report, which was released in April, found that between the August primaries and the November general contest, the county expanded the length of ballots from 19 to 20 inches to include all of the required information for the races. The increased ballot size – in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper – was too great a strain on the printers, the report concludes.
One of the printer companies disputed some of the claims in the report, saying that the county should have reviewed the printer manual or contacted it before using 100-pound paper for the printers.
5. Washoe County, Nevada:
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