Go ahead, play the broken link card, apo.
Broken here to. has an extra go in the url.
It works for me. Also, I don't know why this is an offensive as all the recent anti-human, pro-corporation rulings.
No, the go is supposed to be there. I stripped the www part of the address. Does it work for everybody now?
Works for me. And he's not saying it's racist, he's saying it's discrimination on the basis of race. Which is closer to being arguably correct.
"Works for me" refers to the link, not the decision.
Probably don't need to get into Affirmative Action 101 here, but since the originators of the relevant Amendments were all about discriminating in favor of blacks on the basis of race, it's a pretty indefensible stance for a conservative, much less an "Originalist."
Works for me now. It worked if I removed the go before, it then redirected me to the correct page.
he's not saying it's racist, he's saying it's discrimination on the basis of race
I'm not sure I see the difference (definition #2).
And he's not saying it's racist, he's saying it's discrimination on the basis of race. Which is closer to being arguably correct.
It's arguably correct but it fails to understand or even anticipate the structural causes of racial inequality. The conservative court's faux liberalism is a strict adherence to the means of race discrimination, as if it is inherently wrong to elect for preferential treatment on the basis of race when 1) it comes at zero or marginal cost to individuals within communities and 2) individuals cannot by acting individually affect or address the structural roots of cyclical inequality.
I'm pretty sure there's a cock joke in 11 somewhere, but I'm having trouble locating it.
What I was going to say was pwned by 8. Does Roberts claim to be an originalist?
I think it is important to note that the linked story is incorrect in its analysis of what this opinion means. Roberts wrote for four justices, not five. Justice Kennedy concurred in the judgment, but wrote separately to voice his disagreement with the majority's "color-blind" analysis. Notably, Kennedy said that diversity is a compelling state interest that justifies the use of race. However, the specific program failed to attempt to achieve diversity by other means and thus fails the strict scrutiny test.
Sorry, that was confusing, I'm a little rushed for time today. Here you go.
14: I just scanned the opinions, and god knows what Kennedy was thinking -- waffly nitwit.
The plaintiff's lawyer on NPR this morning came within an inch of uttering the phrase "separate but equal."
Somewhere there is a graduate student writing the cultural history of how the political language of the American Civil Rights Movement became the vocabulary of American Conservative Reactionaries in the years between 1980 and 2000.
Comment spam alert on
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2006_11_12.html#005798
Just FYI, Powers That Be.
That doesn't seem to be advertising anything, and the URL it links to is "england". I think it's just comment insanity.
I think it's just comment insanity.
Is that permitted?
20: everything not forbidden is compulsory. Didn't you know?
THE INSANITY WILL CONTINUE UNTIL COHERENCE IMPROVES
Balkinization is on this, with some serious additional snark from Mark Graber
I don't know if you kids can understand what our new SCOTUS feels like to someone who grew up in the 60s.
This is really depressing, it is.
This line:
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
makes me feel like Justice Roberts is doing an impression of Stephen Colbert. ("I don't see color. People tell me I'm white, and I believe them.")
Roberts may yet become my least favorite justice
11 gets it. The decision would be unimpeachable if, in fact, categories like "Asian-American" didn't mean anything. But since Roberts himself uses that (and other racially inflected language) in his argument, clearly that's not the case.
24: Some of us kids were born during that heady time, and grew up in an atmosphere where people thought it was the beginning of a brave new world. Yeah, we get it.
Graber can snark all he wants, Roberts was born in 1955, Alito in 1950, their "other priorities" during the "good" civil rights movement involved things like junior high school.
I really should be reading all those opinions and I really don't want to. I did read through the synopsis this morning. It surprising how much "WTF?" marginalia you can get onto the page and a half summarizing the plurality opinion.
I'm now reading Section IV of the Roberts opinion, in which he says that remedying segregation isn't an acceptable basis for considering race unless it's to remedy an existing constitutional violation. Capsule summary: all things not compulsory are forbidden!
Does Roberts claim to be an originalist?
Not really, but then there's the originalist Scalia, who joined the opinion, and the originalist Thomas, who wrote a concurrence without sharing with us any of what I'm sure is the massive pile of evidence that the Reconstruction Congress understood the 14th Amendment to oppose race-based remedies.
Make sure to watch the American Propsect tomorrow for a brilliant, flawlessly argued, seminal article on this subject!
So how much of a loophole is left by the Kennedy dissent? What kind of programs can sneak in there, and can it provide leverage for changing this decision in the future?
Also, the resale price maintenance (antitrust) decision handed down today is major too. Low, low prices were the major benefit your ordinary folks got from viciously competitive globalized capitalism. This lays some groundwork for delivering that surplus back to our capitalist overlords. I think its the kind of thing Congress might be able to reverse, though.
Dunno if anyone's listening any more...one thing I've learned about Unfogged, threads may get 300-400 comments, but once they've moved a few inches down the page, they're done, baby.
Hah, fooled you -- I'm still reading. My take on the Kennedy dissent is that it's waffly enough to allow a later court to completely ignore this case: anything permitted before this is still permitted. But that only works if a later court wants to ignore this, which I'm afraid is unlikely.
I do think there's some room left to maneuver for class-based or maybe neighborhood-based plans that could accomplish some of the same objectives on a nominally non-racial basis. They wouldn't be as flexible or as targeted, but better than nothing.
35: Say Marcus, would you explain more about the antitrust thing? I was looking around on the internet and I still find that I'm confused about the impact of this decision.
37: It looks like they can choose based on almost any proxy for "race" they wish to use. What they can't do is say "Mr. X, you're black, you go to this school, Ms Y is white, she goes to that one."
So, the Sorting Hat could look for grades, gang tats, iPods, iZods, or whatever instead.
Resale price maintenance is an agreement where the manufacturer dictates the minimum sale price to the retailer (the retailer is not allowed to discount the price further than that level). Before this decision, that practice was a straightforward violation of antitrust law -- in other words, it was simply illegal, you couldn't do it, if you did and you were sued you'd have to pay damages. There was a period during the middle of the last century when such agreements were allowed more widely, and some believe that they were used to prevent the emergence of retail chains that aggressively discounted products.
Thursday's decision allows manufacturers to give reasons for price maintenance agreements, and if the reason seems to be "OK" and not driven by a desire to reduce competition through forming a cartel, then the courts can choose to allow such agreements. The most generally accepted non-cartel justification for resale price maintenance agreements is to help the retailer recoup the costs of providing services to the customer, like explaining or demonstrating a product. E.g. if you go to the high-service electronics store to learn what kind of computer is best for your needs, then you go the discounted retailer down the street and buy the same product more cheaply. Just based on my own experience, I've always thought this was a sort of dubious justification for RPM, but it apparently carries a lot of weight with the courts.
Anyway, it is a complex issue, but I think in the end the ability to do price maintenance will harm consumers. Here's a good discussion though: