Building Idiocracy

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090406_graduate_school.htm What is particularly shocking is that we allow incapables to become doctors and dentists. Dead patients and squandered resources result. For the rest, it's certainly inefficient to promote less intelligent individuals into the professions when more intelligent people are available and could perform the work more effectively. Part of the waste is borne by the affirmative action beneficiarcies themselves. Note the estimate that half of blacks who enter law school never become lawyers. This is hardly surprising given the two hurdles they face: 3 years of law school, then the bar exam (which does not give racial credits). I would imagine that black medical school graduates face similar challenges. In the end, affirmative action is a crude form of covert welfare for those minorities who suffer from cognitive and cultural deficits. But, these deficits are not the excuse provided by the policy's apologists: they claim discrimination pervades our society (including the design of all standardized and IQ tests) and can only be sufficiently redressed by recourse to legally-mandated racism against those races who manifest higher intelligence and higher rates of economic success. Of course, one obvious irony here is that the Jews in America have faced uninterrupted racism throughout the last century (the form of the racism evolved from being in favor of whites initially, then in favor of blacks and hispanics), and rose to power in spite of it. Are the supposed benefits affirmative action contributes to social cohesion in this country worth the economic, social, and psychological costs of this transparent lie? And, if diversity is of such monumental importance that it overrides considerations of intellect and diligence, why doesn't Harvard admit lazy, half-witted whites to complement the diversity provided by all the lazy, half-witted blacks and Mexicans it admits? The implicit premise underlying these admissions policies is that certain races cannot engage in intellectual competition on an equal footing with whites and Asians--and, if this is the case, the choice faced by decision-makers would be whether to lower the standards for the intellectually sub-standard races or to exclude them from those educational institutions which confer the most power upon their graduates. Unfortunately, the imperative of lower standards seems to extend to the top of our government: witness Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the least competent Justice on the Supreme Court since his confirmation, and Judge Sotomayor, who will finally offer Thomas some competition for this sad distinction.  So we witness the continuous corrupt degradation of the fine old ideal of individual merit, the ideal to which we owe most of the Western world's achievements and global leadership, the ideal that raised the moral value of the individual to a Judeo-Christian plane profoundly superior to the nihilistic oriental fantasy of the preemptive value of the group.