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"Justice Alito delivers the inside story on how DeStefano did Ricci down"

28 Comments -

1 – 28 of 28
Anonymous Anonymous said...

is it any wonder that the 'civil rights' movement coincided with the final stages of civil service reform?

6/29/09, 10:12 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve, very minor but some of the references to Alito are mispelled as Alioto.

6/29/09, 10:16 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Thanks.

Alioto was the mayor of San Francisco when I was a kid, so, on the whooping crane-whooping cough principle that only the first few letters in a word are remembered, that's how I spell the Supreme Court Justice's name.

6/29/09, 10:28 AM

Blogger Hugo said...

How often do US Supreme Court justices write this sort of thing? It reads like a fact-finding report from an outside consultant.

6/29/09, 11:01 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So four Supreme Courts justices said that racial discrmination is fine, as long as it's discrimination against whites.

6/29/09, 11:33 AM

Anonymous simon said...

Good to see that Italian-American Supreme Court Justices are defending the interests of their ethnic confreres.

Obviously the result here is good - more competent firefighters save lives - but I wish we could depend on dispassionate justice to enforce Equal Protection.

Failing that, I agree that racial quotas for African Americans (only!) would at least lessen the harm of Affirmative Action.

6/29/09, 12:31 PM

Blogger RobertHume said...

Great job, Steve. Of course Alito has too many vowels in his name also; so he has a personal interest in the case. But he is also a logical thinker.

6/29/09, 1:08 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Consider yourself lucky not to be represented by the likes of Rep. Linda Sanchez of CA's 39th District. Her reaction to the Ricci decision is as follows:

"Buried in all the 'reverse racism' attacks Republicans are trying to cultivate is the fact that the promotion tests were flawed. The regatta question is nothing new in decades of critique of cultural bias. In fact, until recently, the SAT continued to use items about polo mallets, lacrosse, and regattas. How likely is a poor kid from the inner city to spend his or her weekend attending a regatta? I'll never forget taking one standardized test and being asked a question where the correct answer was; church: silence. Growing up on the west coast and attending masses where mariachi music filled the room, my church was anything but silent. Culturally-loaded tests don't reveal career potential but rather socio-economic class and background. No one should be surprised then when a city decides to throw out a test because only one type of person was able to pass.

In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg mentions that better tests in other cities have produced less racially skewed results. The firefighters who were able to pass the test had no vested right to a promotion and no other persons have received promotions in preference to them. The City of New Haven and the Judges who upheld the city's action were right to notice that one test produced a flawed result. It was part of an ongoing inequality in the New Haven fire department where out of 21 fire captains, only one was African-American. We should be applauding them for recognizing a cultural bias before it produced any real damage. Unfortunately, today the Supreme Court took a step back in the progress society has made by giving the regatta question a bewildering comeback."

Idiocy like this is enough to make me think of rebellion....

6/29/09, 1:55 PM

Blogger Stopped Clock said...

Linda Sanchez wrote:

The regatta question is nothing new in decades of critique of cultural bias. In fact, until recently, the SAT continued to use items about polo mallets, lacrosse, and regattas. How likely is a poor kid from the inner city to spend his or her weekend attending a regatta?

Yes, Im sure all the white firefighters spent most of their childhoods on yachts, drinking tea out of cups held in saucers, and played polo in their spare time. Don't all white people do those things?

6/29/09, 2:06 PM

Anonymous Chris said...

Larry Auster said this about David Bazelon late last year:

In this inadvertently devastating portrait, we see the chief judge of America's second most powerful court busily reshaping Anglo-American Constitutional law according to his Jewish outsider's sense of compassion, while conspiratorially winking at his young law clerk. Equally revealing is Dershowitz's tribute to Bazelon and his other mentor, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg: "[T]heir Jewishness--their rachmones--resonated in me more powerfully than the Jewishness of ritual." [Ibid., p. 60]. It is clear that these secular Jews, leading architects of the modern omnicompetent state, regard the liberal agenda as an emotionally fulfilling substitute for the religious tradition they have cast aside..

6/29/09, 2:17 PM

Blogger David said...

Steve has left the building for the day. He is dining on his regatta, imbibing celebratorially, and wishing us all a good night as he lifts his glass to all the little people. Boo-yah!

6/29/09, 2:23 PM

Anonymous Ed Campion said...

oarsman-regatta???

That was ditched THIRTY years ago!

Isn't this heading into snopes territory?

6/29/09, 2:35 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Linda Sanchez

Congress's first unwed mother.

6/29/09, 2:36 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

by ms. sanchez's logic, math is racist since nams suck at it and asians are good at it.

-bushrod

6/29/09, 2:38 PM

Anonymous Svigor said...

Throw me in the briar patch. Make all cognitive tests ghetto fabulous.

They haven't made cognitive tests that favor NAMs because it's impossible.

6/29/09, 3:28 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Steve has left the building for the day. He is dining on his regatta, imbibing celebratorially, and wishing us all a good night as he lifts his glass to all the little people. Boo-yah!"

Actually, after the regatta he'll be attending a polo match and playing a friendly game of lacrosse. All in sharp contrast to the silent Sunday morning he spent in church.

6/29/09, 3:29 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

By the way, it's funny that David in his sarcastic comment clearly demonstrates that he doesn't understand the meaning of the word "regatta". He must not be white.

6/29/09, 3:31 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In fact, until recently, the SAT continued to use items about polo mallets, lacrosse, and regattas. How likely is a poor kid from the inner city to spend his or her weekend attending a regatta?"

I've never played polo or lacrosse and I've never participated in a regatta, but I know what those words mean anyway. It's called curiosity. Some people have more of it than others.

I've never been to ancient Rome, but I know what the words consul, tribune and centurion mean anyway.

Unlike Ms. Sanchez I don't have a Spanish surname, but I bet I'd beat her on a quiz about Spanish or Latin American history.

6/29/09, 4:33 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ah, but maybe David's comment contained an even deeper level of irony!

Maybe he was parodying La Sanchez and her befuddled world view? Misuse of 'regatta' was deliberate.

Of course he may have just got it wrong anyhow...

6/29/09, 4:40 PM

Anonymous Josh said...

The problem is that the most predictive tests have the greatest disparate impact:

"The most distinctive thing about the test is what it omitted--virtually any measurement of cognitive (mental) skills. Although the project's careful job analysis had shown that "reasoning, judgment, and inferential thinking" were the most critical skills for good police work, the final "implementation" version of the exam (the one used to rank applicants) retained only personality ("non-cognitive") scales such as "Achievement Motivation," "Openness to Experience," and "Emotional Stability." The reading component of the "experimental" test battery (the version actually administered to applicants the year before) was regraded pass-fail; to pass that test, applicants only had to read as well as the worst one percent of readers in the research sample of incumbent police officers. Nor did failing the reading component disqualify an applicant, because the final exam score was determined by combining the scores from all nine tests. Not mincing words, Frank Schmidt (1996a, b) predicted that the test would be "a disaster" for any police force that used it.

The major legal dilemma in selection is that the best overall predictors of job performance, namely, cognitive tests, have the most disparate impact on racial-ethnic minorities. Their considerable disparate impact is not due to any imperfections in the tests. Rather, it is due to the tests' measuring essential skills and abilities that happen not to be distributed equally among groups (Schmidt, 1988). Those differences currently are large enough to cause a major problem. U.S. Department of Education literacy surveys show, for example, that black college graduates, on the average, exhibit the cognitive skill levels of white high school graduates without any college (Kirsch, Jungeblut, & Kolstad, 1993, p. 127)."

http://www.ipacweb.org/files/nassau/gottfredson3.html

6/29/09, 7:02 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I once explained the "regatta problem" to a Japanese woman, raised and educated in Japan. She nearly died laughing, saying "Even we know know what that word means." The absurdity of the complaint was apparent even to her--a non-native speaker of English.

6/29/09, 8:23 PM

Anonymous Chris Anderson said...

RE: Sanchez,

Eh. The great Jim Brown, a race man to his core, played lacrosse at Syracuse. In the 1950's.

6/29/09, 8:39 PM

Anonymous headache said...

Alito is impressive! He pulls no punches. All the juicy stuff you always wished the courts would deal with.

6/30/09, 2:13 AM

Anonymous TH said...

I remember reading (perhaps from Steve) that the regatta question was not biased against blacks, because the racial gap in it between whites and blacks was the same as the gap in other similarly difficult (for whites) questions.

6/30/09, 2:43 AM

Anonymous headache said...

Linda Sanchez
Congress's first unwed mother.



Gotta be that family values thing Bush was talking about.

6/30/09, 3:23 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've never been to ancient Rome, but I know what the words consul, tribune and centurion mean anyway.

Oh, yeah? Well now those are hate facts, whitey.

6/30/09, 5:24 AM

Blogger David said...

My use of regatta was intentional, as was my neologism "celebratorially" and "little people." Exuberant wordplay baffles some, and the others are annoyed by exuberance per se. Sigh.

6/30/09, 8:06 AM

Blogger Evil Sandmich said...

"Pontius Pilateisms"

*Chuckle*

6/30/09, 10:54 AM

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