The Left Took An Intellectual Drubbing On Ricci
06/30/2009
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The ignorance and just plain dumbness of the purveyors of conventional wisdom is one of the most obvious lessons of the Ricci case. They got drubbed in the Supreme Court decision in large part because they don't know anything about topics like testing and couldn't think rationally about it even if they did.

Consider this statement today from the Washington Post-owned Newsweek by Slate's regular Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick:

Once upon a time, civil rights laws had two vehicles–one forbidding "disparate treatment" (overt racial discrimination) and one prohibiting disparate impact (discriminatory effects, regardless of intent). These two vehicles have been chugging along side-by-side for years, ostensibly to the same destination, until today, when they suddenly turned on each other and charged.
Stop for a second and savor just how stupid her assertion is.

Who could make a career reporting on legal controversies and simply not get until 6/29/2009 that there is a fundamental contradiction in both theory and practice between abolishing disparate impact discrimination and abolishing disparate treatment discrimination?

Clearly, the Slate team largely thinks about civil rights not in terms of equal protection of the laws, but in terms of "Who? Whom?"

Still, doesn't that get boring after awhile?

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