Affirmative Action aka State Sponsored Racism

Pseudorandom thoughts as we roll into this cold/5th gen civil war that everyone agrees is ongoing...

Not to be outdone by Saul Alinsky,  George Jackoff, oops, Lakoff, whose title is "Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley" has penned a new book that he hopes to be the new manual for the communists among us.  Called "The Little Blue Book", it's a guide to the mind tricks and mind games the left is so good at.  An obvious homage to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book that all the "cultural revolutionaries" carried while they arranged the murder of about 50 million of their countrymen, the "dog whistle" aspect of the title will appeal to the White House insiders.  Already scoring tons of praise from leftists luminaries, such as:

(Who would think a dusty professor from The People's Republic of Berkeley would get George Freakin' Soros to do a jacket blurb for him?)  Zombie, at PJ Media deconstructs this volume well.  As a lesson in how to manipulate others, it comes across as stupid; pure leftist claptrap, pure, well, evil.  The guy is so out of touch with modern life, he thinks conservatives want a strict government, and quotes something Dr. James Dobson wrote in 1970 as proof modern conservatives believe in government implementation of morality.  I suppose a percent or two of conservatives may feel that way, but the vast majority are for economic and personal freedoms.  Zombie closes by saying he's wondered for years who's at the heart of liberal ideology:

But then I read it, and its hollowness left me flummoxed. It’s not just that there’s no there there; it’s that he elevates therelessness to liberalism’s pre-eminent virtue. Sloganeering had replaced introspection.

I finished the book with the rather unnerving conclusion that no one remains at the wheel of the Good Ship Liberalism, that it rides the political currents, adrift.

The message of the book is that if they rename bad ideas, they magically become excellent ideas; all that matters is getting the right label on ideas that never work or have unintended consequences and suddenly everything is wonderful.  Judge them not by what happens when they implement ideas (which have failed every time they're used), judge them by the goodness of their intentions.     

The Little Blue Book is being marketed as an “Indispensable Handbook for Democrats” to help them communicate their values more clearly. But I think that the marketing is itself a ploy. The Little Blue Book was not written to help liberals communicate; instead, it was designed as a feel-good mantra, a comforting rectangular teddy bear reassuring the left-wing audience that they are good people. The book’s real underlying message is this: We liberals are morally superior to our nasty and small-minded opponents; if everyone could just see what was in our hearts, we’d be more popular than those mean old conservatives.

A perfect example of the sort of "labeling" that Jackoff preaches is "affirmative action", which sounds positive but is actually state sponsored racism.  The state makes one group favored and discriminates against others.  Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection posts on plans being developed to make STEM programs in colleges regulated by Title IX, the famous affirmative action law that says "college sports need to have equal numbers of men and women".  This law, as all liberal laws, is intended to equalize the opportunities.  In this case, it equalizes opportunities for sports scholarships for men and women, but does so by eliminating opportunities for men. 

Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes. (Under the three-part Title IX test created by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work, colleges are allowed to temporarily comply by increasing the number of female athletes rather than cutting the number of male athletes, but the only viable permanent way to comply with its rule is to restrict men’s participation relative to women’s participation, reducing overall participation.) Thus, as Charlotte Allen notes, the Obama administration’s guidelines are likely to lead to “science quotas” based on gender.

Just call this a new front in the Democratic law on science.  The story, from OpenMarket.org

Gender disparities in a major are not the product of sexism, but rather the differing preferences of men and women. The fact that engineering departments are filled mostly with men does not mean they discriminate against women anymore than the fact that English departments are filled mostly with women proves that English departments discriminate against men. The arts and humanities have well over 60 percent female students, yet no one seems to view that gender disparity as a sign of sexism against men. Deep down, the Obama administration knows this, since it is planning to impose its gender-proportionality rules only on the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), not other fields that have similarly large gender disparities in the opposite direction.

Prepare for coming caps on male enrollment in science, math and engineering.  Prepare to see a decrease in the number of graduates.  Prepare to see the US slide further into oblivion.  As OpenMarket puts it:

No girl should be denied the opportunity to study a STEM field based on her sex; but that does not mean that colleges should adopt a gender quota for female students in math and science. Since a college cannot force a woman to go into math or science, the only way for a college to satisfy a gender quota will be to cut the number of male math and science students, by turning male students away from their favorite subject.