Targeting legacy admissions

The US Supreme Court has struck down the use of race as a factor in considering applications for all colleges and universities in the US. This was not entirely unexpected given the court”s ideological leanings, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

But when it comes to elite educational institutions, there is one very large group of people who have been getting preferential treatment in admissions but the legitimacy of which has not been subject to legal review and that is the preference given to so-called “legacy admissions” (applicants whose families have attended that school) and children of wealthy donors, all of whom are able to gain admission with lower academic performances. Preferences are also given to students who have athletic or other extra-curricular success. And the overwhelming majority of such people are white, making this, in effect, affirmative action for white people.

But those preferences are now coming under greater scrutiny.
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Justice Alito and the Wall Street Journal

While much of liberal ire with some of the decisions of the US Supreme.Court has focused on justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions, I have long felt that justice Samuel Alito is the most reactionary member of the court, the one most likely to offer tortured reasoning to justify what seems like pre-ordained conclusions based on his extremely conservative ideology.

Both Thomas and Alito have been the targets of investigative reports by ProPublica about the gifts and lavish vacations that they have been given, including travel on private jets, by wealthy individuals who, directly or indirectly, have had cases before the court. They did not disclose these trips and the private jet travel in their financial disclosure forms.

In the case of Alito, though, he went one step further than Thomas. As is customary with good journalistic outfits, prior to publishing their story, ProPublica informed Alito that they were preparing a story and sent him a list of questions to make sure they were being fair and accurate. What was unusual was that Alito used that to publish a ‘prebuttal’ in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal the day before the ProPublica piece even appeared.
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Jesse Watters to replace Tucker Carlson

Fox News has announced that Jesse Watters will be the permanent host occupying the time slot formerly held by the fired Tucker Carlson, the reasons for whose abrupt departure remain a mystery. Watters has been with Fox News for a long time. He has a juvenile sense of humor and no compunction about saying stupid, bigoted, and incendiary things.

The key question for Fox is whether he can get back the ratings that Carlson used to get and which have slumped since his departure. This will be a test of the model developed by the late Roger Ailes that their shows are based on a template and that the personalities who front them are just types who have specific roles and know they must follow the template because they can and will be replaced by another would-be clone if they fall short.

The template for the Carlson slot is the same as that of most other shows on Fox and that is to promote conspiratorial fear mongering with racist overtones. It is not clear if Watters can suppress and conceal his sophomoric frat-boy personality sufficiently, as Carlson was able to do, so that the dark vision will taken seriously by the typical Fox viewer.

More on Amazon’s devious practices

I posted recently about how Amazon is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for unfair practices that include tricking people into signing up for its Prime services and then making it hard for them to get out of it. The Prime subscription costs $14.99 per month and accounts for $25 billion of its annual revenue. The Prime subscription gives you ‘free shipping’ though that is an illusion since you have essentially pre-paid for shipping whether you use it or not.

Amazon also provides Prime Video, which is a subscription-based streaming service, at a lower cost but although it is possible to sign up for just that, the company makes it hard to do so. After being informed that they were being sued by the FTC, Amazon made some changes. (You can read the FTC press release here and lawsuit here. Paragraphs 23-79 and 149-216 are heavily redacted.))

The extent of their devious practices is really is quite breathtaking. First up is how they manage to get people to sign up.
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The cruelty is hard to comprehend

Texas gets very hot in the summer, with temperatures rising well over triple digits and making manual outdoor labor not just uncomfortable but downright dangerous. As a result, some municipalities such as Dallas and Austin have passed ordinances that require employers to give a 10-minute water break every four hours. That seems to me to be nowhere close to enough but even that is too much for the governor Greg Abbott who has signed into law a measure passed by the Republican legislature that bans local governments from enforcing such ordinances.

The measure, which will take effect later this year, will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin and Dallas that mandate 10-minute breaks for construction workers every four hours. It also prevents any other local governments from passing similar worker protections.

Just days after Greg Abbott, the governor, ratified the law, officials said a 35-year-old utility lineman working to restore power in Marshall, Texas, died after experiencing symptoms of heat illness. The heat index – which takes into account both the temperature and humidity – was 100F (37C) while he was working.

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Amazon under fire from the FTC and Bernie Sanders

One of the best appointments that Joe Biden made is that of Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission. She is a vigorous enforcer of anti-trust laws and unfair trade practices and the FTC has just announced a new lawsuit against the company for unfair practices after winning another lawsuit.

The FTC, the US agency charged with consumer protection, filed a federal lawsuit in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, alleging that the tech behemoth “ knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime” through a secret project internally called “Iliad”.

The lawsuit marks the first time the agency has brought Amazon to court since its chair, Lina Khan, took the helm in 2021. Khan, a former antitrust scholar, has been widely expected to take a harder line on tech firms that have for years enjoyed unabated growth and little regulation.

In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used “manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions”.

It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions – which did not clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime.
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The rival platforms for 2024 take shape

The conventional political wisdom seems to have gelled as far as the 2024 presidential elections are concerned. It says that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) will win the Republican nomination but lose to Joe Biden in the general election. If by some chance SSAT drops out of the race (and the only thing that I think of that might cause that to happen is if he dies or is otherwise incapacitated), then whoever takes the nomination has a better chance of defeating Biden. The problem is that if one looks at past elections, conventional wisdom this far out from the election has proven to be extremely unreliable as a predictor of winners and losers.

But what the election is going to be about in terms of policies is a little easier to predict. SSAT seems to be running on a platform of personal grievance, that he is an utterly wronged man who deserves to be elected as president so that he can wreak vengeance on everyone who has worked against him, which by now is a pretty comprehensive list of federal and state governments, the justice system, and those within and outside the Republican party who have had the temerity to criticize him.

His recent speeches following his arraignment on federal charges painted a very dark picture of the state of the country and warned that if he loses in 2024, the country will be destroyed and taken over by evil forces. He paints himself as a messiah, the only one who can save the country. His competitors for the nomination have had no choice but to echo his alarmism but distinguish themselves from him by claiming that he is going to lose and that they have a better chance of winning and saving the country.
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When victims of bigotry are bigoted towards others

While I am generally optimistic about humanity’s capacity to do the right thing in general and over long time scales, one thing that I have been disillusioned by over shorter time scales is how people who have been subjected to discrimination and persecution when they are are in the minority, discriminate against other minorities when they gain political power. You would think that their own experience of being treated badly would make them feel empathy for other discriminated minority groups. But not so. One sees this switching from being the victim of discrimination to the perpetrators in many different contexts, be it religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

One recent example is that of the city of Hamtramck, Michigan where Muslims, who are often discriminated against in the US, became the dominant group in the city council. Now they have turned against the LGBTQ+ community, banning the pride flag on city properties.
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