Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, September 22, 2015.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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'Happy Birthday' ruled out of copyright
By (BBC)
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The company collecting royalties to "Happy Birthday To You" does not hold a valid copyright to the song, a US federal judge has ruled.
. . . Judge George King ruled that the original copyright was only granted for specific arrangements of the music, not the song itself.
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Mildred and Patty Hill called their version Good Morning To All, which later evolved into the version popular at birthday parties around the world.
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The rights to the song were eventually purchased by Warner/Chappell for $25m (£16m) when they bought a successor company to Summy in the 1980s.
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Sexual Violence on Campus Is Even Worse Than We Thought
By Madison Pauly
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The Association of American Universities released findings Monday from one of the largest-ever surveys on college sexual violence—comprising more than 150,000 students across 27 colleges—and they paint a bleak picture of sexual assault on college campuses.
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Here are a few takeaways:
More than 1 in 5 undergraduate women are victims of sexual assault. . .
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The vast majority of students don't report sexual assault or misconduct. . .
Transgender and gender-nonconforming students experience sexual assault and misconduct at higher rates than their peers. . .
At least 12 of the colleges that released results on Monday are currently facing federal scrutiny from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights for their handling of sexual-assault cases under federal Title IX standards. Several universities on the list have been found in violation of Title IX, including the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Yale University, and Michigan State University.
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We Could Have Discovered Climate Change As Early As the 1940s if We Had Just Looked
By Maddie Stone
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The signs of global warming are hitting us over the head today — if you’ll remember, the fire and drought-ridden summer of 2015 was the also hottest in recorded history — but how long has our planet actually been feeling the heat? In parts of the tropics, anthropogenic climate change has been tinkering with the thermometer since the 1940s.
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“Remarkably our research shows that you could already see clear signs of global warming in the tropics by the 1960s but in parts of Australia, South East Asia and Africa it was visible as early as the 1940s,” said lead study author Andrew King in a statement. (That’s decades before the the fore-thinking researchers at Exxon discovered global warming!)
Climate change is hitting high latitude ecosystems the hardest — the Arctic, for instance, is warming twice as fast as the world at large. For that reason — and the fact that most big research universities are located in countries with seasons— what’s happening in the tropics has been largely ignored. But as the new study shows, tropical ecosystems may offer an even better long-term thermometer. Lacking a distinct summer and winter, the tropics have a much narrower distribution of temperatures year-round, which makes it easier, statistically speaking, to spot small deviations and outliers years.
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And while the tropics are experiencing smaller levels of warming than, say, boreal forests, climate change stands to wreak even more ecological havoc around the equator. Remember, tropical flora and fauna are adapted to a pretty narrow range of (already high) temperatures.
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International |
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Over 700,000 women and girls in prison, says study
By (BBC)
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The number has risen 50% since 2000, outstripping the growth among men, the study from the London-based Institute for Criminal Policy Research said.
Just three countries - the US, China and Russia - make up around half the total female prison population.
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"(Women and girls) are an extremely vulnerable and disadvantaged group, and tend to be victims of crime and abuse themselves," said Dr Jessica Jacobson, co-director of the institute, which is part of Birkbeck College.
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African countries have the lowest proportion of women in jail, while El Salvador, Brazil, Cambodia and Indonesia have all seen sharp increases.
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Egypt 'demolishes thousands of homes' for Sinai buffer zone
By (BBC)
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Troops began razing homes along the Gaza border in 2013 to create a "buffer zone" and eliminate smuggling tunnels, after a surge in attacks by militants.
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So far, the military has destroyed nearly all buildings and farmland within about 1km (0.6 miles) of the Gaza border using uncontrolled explosives and earth-moving equipment, according to analysis of satellite imagery, videos and interviews with residents by HRW detailed in a report released on Tuesday.
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The government says the operation will allow the military to close smuggling tunnels it alleges are used by jihadists to receive weapons, fighters and logistical help from Palestinian militants in Gaza.
But HRW said little or no evidence had been offered to support this justification, citing statements from Egyptian and Israeli officials that suggested weapons were more likely to have been obtained from Libya or captured from the Egyptian military.
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"Destroying homes, neighbourhoods, and livelihoods is a textbook example of how to lose a counterinsurgency campaign," said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East and North Africa director.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Coca-Cola cheated U.S. taxpayers out of $3.3 billion, according to IRS
By Kate Yoder
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It’s a tax issue that comes up frequently for multinational companies, said Robert Willens, president of a tax accounting consultancy in New York. He said companies tend to charge their foreign subsidiaries low licensing fees as a way to shift reportable income away from the U.S., where corporate tax rates are higher.
Don’t get your hopes up for a landmark settlement, though. These type of cases rarely go to court and are usually settled for a small portion of the assessment.
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Coca-Cola cut its 2014 effective tax rate by 11.5 percentage points because so much of the company’s earnings were outside the U.S., and it gets tax incentives from Brazil, Costa Rica, Singapore and Swaziland.
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Why do American car buyers shy away from diesel?
By Jessica Lussenhop
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The reasons to go for diesel in Europe began to mount in the mid-to-late '90s. In an attempt to cut European nations' greenhouse gas emissions, the choice was made to tax petrol heavily, subsidise diesel and invest in improving diesel technology. Countries like Belgium and Spain have lower taxes on diesel cars. The incentives made the choice easy for consumers and some research concludes that without these governmental interventions, diesel would be no where near as popular as it is today in Europe.
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There are also historical factors at play in the US. General Motors famously rushed diesel vehicles - most famously in its Oldsmobile series - to market in the late 1970s and '80s with disastrous results.
. . . Then there are other less concrete factors at play, like the perception that diesel is just "dirty" all around.
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"Somebody who buys a 5 series BMW - that's not a pick-up truck - they think, 'I have to deal with that grubby fuel?'"
Those perceptions were beginning to change especially as automakers like Volkswagen were pushing their sportier, smaller size vehicles on American consumers. These newer cars - which thanks to better filtering technology and lower-sulphur diesel - helped shake the old reputation. In addition to Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes and Chevrolet are bringing new models to market.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
. . .
They began life as an opportunistic novelty act, born when Brown and bassist Tony Wilson took up an offer to join a group of Brixton based musicians who were employed recording reggae covers of current hits. One track, a bizarre version of Give Peace a Chance with a stentorian vocal and additional lyrics courtesy of Brown – “Rubbish! Rubbish!” he kept shouting, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear – found its way to John Lennon and was released on Apple. Signed to Mickie Most’s RAK, they floundered, devoid of a direction – scoring the occasional pop soul hit, like 1970’s Love Is Life, trying their hand at everything from glam to bubblegum to hard rock in the vein of Free’s All Right Now. It wasn’t until Most steered them in the direction of social commentary and brought in string arranger John Cameron that they settled on what appeared to be a winning style: the bleak funk of Brother Louie, the astonishing 1974 hit Emma, an impossibly morose tale of poverty, failure and suicide. The latter featured a remarkable vocal from Brown: he’s the model of resigned stoicism until the song’s closing minute, where he unleashes a series of harrowing screams.
It’s hard not to wish Hot Chocolate had made more records like that, had made more use of Errol Brown’s voice in that way. That said, you could see why they ultimately didn’t. Emma made No 3, but the band’s success was far from assured. Setting what was to prove a pattern, their subsequent debut album, Cicero Park, failed to make the charts at all, despite being a genuinely great record, offering a far tougher, sparser take on the nascent disco sound than the one they would subsequently become famous for. Of their follow-up singles, only the densely orchestrated A Child’s Prayer was a big hit. On the B-side of one of the flops was a track called You Sexy Thing: it was lightweight compared to Emma or Brother Louie or most of Cicero Park, but it was packed with hooks. Rerecorded, it became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic and set a kind of pop-disco template for the rest of Hot Chocolate’s career: So You Win Again, Every 1’s A Winner, deathless wedding disco favourites all.
. . . he remained a popular live artist until his retirement: testament to the lasting impression You Sexy Thing and So You Win Again made. When his death was announced, among the more unlikely tributes came from former Suede guitarist turned-songwriter-and-producer Bernard Butler. He took to Twitter to mention one of Hot Chocolate’s weird production quirks, putting congas through a wah pedal intended for a guitar. It was another hint that they were a rather stranger, more intriguing band than their most famous records suggested.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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The rise of diesel in Europe: the impact on health and pollution
By John Vidal
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Volkswagen’s rigging of emissions tests for diesel cars comes after nearly 20 years of the technology being incentivised in Europe in the knowledge that its adoption would reduce global warming emissions but lead to thousands of extra deaths from increased levels of toxic gases.
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“The motor manufacturers made a démarche to the department of the environment, showing that a major switch to diesels would lead to a substantial drop in CO2 emissions,” Fisk said. He added that the air quality division in the then-Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Detr) saw there was a problem he said – that local air pollution would increase as a result – so a national system of air quality standards was created.
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A senior civil servant, now retired, who worked in the department for transport but asked not to be named, said that cost-benefit studies of a switch to diesel were done by government but climate change was “the new kid on the block” and long-term projections of comparative technologies were not perfect.
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But Michael Meacher, environment minister 1997-2003, said he could not recall ever being consulted on the UK’s switch to diesel. “If it had been a question of a trade-off between carbon emissions and health, much as I would have wanted to reduce climate emissions, the medical effects would have trumped it. I would have been keen to see a major reduction in [carbon] emissions, but I would not have wanted that to be at the price of lives.”
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Syria war spurs opening of 'doomsday' Arctic seed vault
By (Al Jazera)
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Syria's civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a "doomsday" vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies.
The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.
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It has more than 860,000 samples, from almost all nations. Even if the power were to fail, the vault would stay frozen and sealed for at least 200 years.
The Aleppo seed bank has kept partly functioning, including a cold storage, despite the conflict. But it was no longer able to maintain its role as a hub to grow seeds and distribute them to other nations, mainly in the Middle East.
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It would be the first withdrawal from the vault, she said. Many seeds from the Aleppo collection have traits resistant to drought, which could help breed crops to withstand climate change in dry areas from Australia to Africa.
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Science and Health |
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Feeling anxious? Check your orbitofrontal cortex, cultivate your optimism
By (ScienceDaily)
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The orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region located just behind the eyes, is known to play a role in anxiety. The OFC integrates intellectual and emotional information and is essential to behavioral regulation. Previous studies have found links between the size of a person's OFC and his or her susceptibility to anxiety. For example, in a well-known study of young adults whose brains were imaged before and after the colossal 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, researchers discovered that the OFC actually shrank in some study subjects within four months of the disaster. Those with more OFC shrinkage were likely to also be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers found.
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"You can say, 'OK, there is a relationship between the orbitofrontal cortex and anxiety. What do I do to reduce anxiety?'" Sanda Dolcos said. "And our model is saying, this is working partially through optimism. So optimism is one of the factors that can be targeted."
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Florin Dolcos said future studies should test whether optimism can be increased and anxiety reduced by training people in tasks that engage the orbitofrontal cortex, or by finding ways to boost optimism directly.
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Genetic analysis: Rare mutations cause half of all autism cases
By Stephen Feller
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Researchers found that rare mutations of a set of genes could be responsible for roughly half of all autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, cases. The "spontaneous" genetic mutations, researchers said, most likely happen to genes that are essential for normal brain development.
The new theory differs from a commonly held one that ASD is caused by a combination of genetic mutations that are harmless individually but when combined cause the disorder. Instead, researchers say mutations present in a germ cell or fertilized egg can result in ASD.
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Genes considered vulnerable harbor what the researchers refer to as likely gene-disruption, or LGD. LGD spontaneous mutations occur between generations, and researchers said they were often carried by the mother and passed down./td>
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Everyone has a 'microbial cloud'
By James Gallagher
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Walk through someone else's cloud, and it will "rain" bacteria on your skin and be breathed into your lungs.
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The researchers argue the mix may have a "forensic application" to detect whether someone had passed through a room.
However, it is not clear how much someone's microbial cloud changes over time.
Adam Altrichter, a research assistant on the project, told the BBC News website: "There is a germaphobe aspect to this, but we need to understand that we're not sterile and this is something completely natural and healthy."
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Technology |
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Smart devices to get security tune-up
By Mark Ward
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More than 30 firms, including BT, Intel, and Vodafone, are creating an industry body to vet internet-connected devices for vulnerabilities and flaws.
It will encourage firms making smart gadgets to think about security as the hardware is being developed.
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The internet of things is the name given to the growing trend of adding sensors and communications to household objects so they can help monitor a home and be managed remotely.
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"It's a bit like the aviation industry - when it began, it had to reassure people it was safe to fly," he said.
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The Hit Charade
By Will Knight
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One thing that stands out about Apple Music, a streaming service you can use on computers and mobile devices for $10 a month, is the presence of human DJs like Lowe on a channel called Beats 1. Lowe’s show introduced me to unfamiliar artists, and it highlighted intriguing musical connections—between, say, a stadium anthem by AC/DC and a recent piece of remixed electronica by a Scottish artist called Hudson Mohawke. The emotion running through all the songs was upbeat, even defiant.
Just as computers cannot yet create powerful and imaginative art or prose, they cannot truly appreciate music. And arranging a poignant or compelling music playlist takes a type of insight they don’t have—the ability to find similarities in musical elements and to get the emotional resonance and cultural context of songs. For all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, machines are still hopelessly unimaginative and predictable. This is why Apple has hired hundreds of people to serve as DJs and playlist makers, in addition to the algorithmic recommendations it still offers.
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There is an inherent limitation to such automated recommendation algorithms, too: they cannot suggest a new song, because there’s no data to show how much other listeners like it. In contrast to an algorithm, humans can usually tell, within a few moments of listening, just how much they like a new track. Here, though, recent advances in artificial intelligence are starting to help. Last year, Spotify began testing a way of analyzing a song itself rather than just the metadata associated with it. This involved training what’s known as a deep-learning network, roughly modeled on layers of neurons in the brain, to recognize frequency features of an audio signal (corresponding to the sound you hear and the way that sound changes over time) in millions of songs. These algorithms can classify a new song surprisingly well, as shown in example playlists posted by a member of Johnson’s team at Spotify.
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Tellingly, efforts to pass the Lovelace test have largely foundered. Still, the challenge lives on. In fact, Michael Casey, a professor of music and computer science at Dartmouth College, plans to hold several Turing tests early next year, perhaps followed by some Lovelace tests. One will involve computer DJs, with dancers asked to judge whether the songs they just heard were cued up by a human or by a machine. Casey hopes that within this limited context, a machine will demonstrate something akin to musical creativity.
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Cultural |
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As Pope Pushes to Help the Poor, Catholic Universities Leave Them Behind
By Annie Waldman
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Six of the top 20 nonprofit colleges that are most expensive for low-income students are Catholic institutions, according to a ProPublica analysis of recently released federal data. At almost half of all Catholic colleges, low-income students graduate with more than $20,000 in federal loans. (See our Debt by Degrees interactive, which shows how American colleges compare in how much federal student loan debt students accumulate.)
At Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., where Pope Francis is scheduled to speak on Wednesday, the school’s poorest students pay over $31,000 a year in tuition, even after discounts from scholarships — more than any other research university in the nation. Students also graduate with a significant amount of debt: $26,000. And just 12 percent of its students are low-income.
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Notre Dame, which has an $8 billion endowment, recently announced a $20 million fund to cover college expenses for low-income students. The school also has begun to enroll undocumented students and give them funds to match Pell grants, for which they are ineligible.
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Just down the road from Catholic University sits Trinity Washington, which has some well-known graduates, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi. The women’s university has a tiny $11 million endowment. But nearly 65 percent of its students receive Pell grants. The poorest students graduate with on average $16,000 of debt from federal loans.
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“There’s a whole group of schools that want to be in the Ivy Leagues and want to be considered prestigious, and then there’s the rest of us who believe education is not about competition,” said McGuire. “Every institution needs to examine its own conscience about whether it could do more for students on the margins.”.
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There is no real case against equal opportunity
By Clayton Aldern
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Dylan Matthews has a bone to pick with equal opportunity. In his case against the concept, published on Vox yesterday, he begins with a series of quotes from sources spanning the political aisle. Readers are besieged with defenses of the concept from Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, from Hillary and Jeb. But Matthews has seen the light, and our elites are mistaken. Equality of opportunity is a “deeply, deeply illiberal ideal” that would turn the United States into a “dystopian, totalitarian nightmare.” It is “simply a bad goal.”
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In the 1977 Supreme Court case The Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke, the latter (a 33-year-old white man) sued the UC Davis medical school for denying his acceptance, despite his test scores being higher than several applicants admitted under the school’s affirmative action scheme. “That is true: no doubt he would have been accepted if he were black,” wrote political philosopher Ronald Dworkin at the time. “But it is also true, and in exactly the same sense, that he would have been accepted if he had been more intelligent, or made a better impression in his interview, or, in the case of other schools, if he had been younger when he decided to become a doctor.” In challenging the status quo, the case for affirmative action stands on its own merit, regardless of any incidental inequalities it produces in striving to ensure greater societal equality.
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Here at Grist, we write about environmental justice and reproductive rights because of the opportunities they afford, not the outcomes they promise. Environmental justice is not about magically ensuring everyone gets well-paying jobs — it’s about rectifying the country’s disproportionate rates of asthma, particulate matter and ozone exposure, and water pollution, so the affected marginalized communities can breathe easier and have one less thing to worry about. We don’t advocate for longer, better paid parental leave policies because we’re upset about potentially foregone income; we advocate for them because they can help combat gender discrimination and reinstall individual agency that is currently being denied.
What Matthews really appears to have a problem with is the concept of a meritocracy. And meritocracies certainly can be flawed. Societies that claim to be built on merit fail morally when elites control access to merit-granting institutions or when public policies hold poor definitions of merit itself. But equality of opportunity itself does not require an “obsession with effort.” What it does require is a willingness of those in positions of power to relinquish some of that power. Anything else is hypocrisy.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |