Mortification

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal...Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.--socialist economist Robert Heilbroner


Had dinner with the Stewarts and then went to "The Great Gatsby," a play that has been around in both N.Y. and London. It is a good story and provocative in our current American mea culpa phase. It was well done but had an interesting twist: Gatsby was played by a black man. This creates a number of plot problems but may have been worth it as it updated the conflict--but maybe unnecessarily. Interestingly, i bet about a third of the audience left at the break.
The Astros vs. the Yankees should be epic.
It was painful watching Cole vs. Glasnow in the playoffs. I have no argument with fine-tuning a small market team but some value must be returned. And the third guy they gave to the Rays, Baz, I think, is their number 6 prospect. That is just unforgivable.


                              Mortification
Diversity programs are increasingly not about getting past race; they are about insisting on its eternal centrality to everything in America. So we are not trying to solve whatever racial problems we have, we are trying to institutionalize them. We are beginning to look like a culture bringing back those public Middle Ages frenzies of mortification of the flesh. But this cultural guilt is quite selective.

In the last decade, the emphasis is on racial oppression as a permanent structural force built into America’s DNA. The NYT has developed an entire thesis on this idea in what looks like simple pamphleteering, not reporting or news in the slightest. So discrimination is not a the result of some tribalism or "other recognition," it is a distortion of our normally accepting nature. This good nature has been poisoned by America.

Affirmative action is not an adjustment to a distorted inequality, it is a form of open-ended resistance to a malignant “white supremacy” that has been aided and abetted by America's history--but also its very nature. So, we are not to overcome whatever errors have occurred, we must accept them as sort of a national illness. It has become the nation's Original Sin, a matter of faith and ceaseless contrition. And we insist upon publicly whipping ourselves.

In colleges, perhaps 'reverse" discrimination could still be justified by the legacy of an overwhelmingly white student body for a very long time, an attempt to level the playing field retroactively so that non-white minorities can do better. Still discrimination but....maybe charitably tolerable. But there is a problem, even in this re-balancing distortion. There is clear imbalance in racial selection in colleges and graduate schools to the detriment of Asian-Americans.

So why go after Asian-Americans — a non-white minority? Why punish one minority group in order to protect others? Many Asian-American students are children of immigrants, without inherited wealth or privilege, and, as an ethnic group, were subject to brutal discrimination in this country for centuries. Japanese-Americans were actually locked up in internment camps in living memory. And they’re the ones being discriminated against for the purpose of racial justice? This is possible only if bad thinking is actively encouraged in the community.