john mitchell @daeyoung@qoto.org

@nytimes has been sounding the alarm on the NY gubernatorial race as if Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate, has a chance of winning LOL. Nice try

Lmao can’t believe Herschel Walker is winning. Georgian Republicans really have no dignity, do they?

I can already hear American democracy wilting

#TIL the curb-cut effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect

Recently came to know of this scholarship (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/computer-science/study/scholarships/aspire-award-undergraduate-scholarship) selected and awarded by a prestigious British university, and one of the eligibility criteria is "must be black or mixed-black." Along with the recent U.S. Supreme Court case on affirmative action (Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College), this rekindles my skepticism of race-conscious affirmative action.

1. Logically speaking, UCL's criteria are connected by "and" (i.e., A and B and C and ...), so the fastest way to whittle down candidates is to pick the most stringent one and apply it first. Nonblacks don't qualify anyway so that criterion alone can strike lots of people out. It's arguably the sole reason for rejecting an applicant. Also, how do you quantify blackness? We surely cannot go back to the "one-drop rule."

2. If this were a U.S. public university (as UCL is public), the strict scrutiny analysis is that you need a compelling state interest and it must be narrowly tailored for the public and the government. My question is how can a (black-only) scholarship program that discriminates against diverse candidates in favor of one racial group be narrowly tailored to advance the interest of diversity? This runs directly afoul of Grutter v. Bollinger.

3. The UK does not have a compelling reason to erect a reparative criterion for black migrants, especially with British taxpayer money. I sound like a raging conservative but I don't think I'm being irrational or extreme here. The UK parliament can do all sorts of things to help underprivileged people through legislation, but doling out public resources such as scholarship programs and public university admission cannot be one of them.

#AffirmativeAction #UCL

Dems wrapping up election-day eve on a "democracy is on the ballot" note is probably gonna cost them a lot of seats in Congress. Republicans are undeniably proposing and implementing changes that will erode democratic institutions, but average voters care more about the economy right now. They should've zeroed in on how they stanched economic meltdown, citing the grim circumstances in Europe, and how Republicans are floating massive cuts to social security and health care. I can't help but think dems have, more often than not, so much disconnect with the average voter

#election #uspolitics

Legacy media are writing articles on Mastodon!

#mastodon #nytimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/technology/mastodon-twitter-elon-musk.html

Sometimes the textbox here in a web browser is laggy and I haven't got a single clue why this is happening. I suspected the federated timeline might be the cause of it and disabled advanced web view, but the browser seems to have it still being updated real-time in the background?