Legalizing PC

The Ginsburg dissent in Ricci v. DeStefano, most of which I read, is one of the worst Supreme Court opinions I've ever read for sheer illogicality. It's embarassing, and the problem isn't that she's stupid: there simply isn't a coherent set of arguments available to defend her preferred form of social engineering. Of course, most organizations evade this Title VII issue with more political acumen than New Haven evidenced. For example, Chicago's fire department makes its promotions by administering a test designed to achieve an 85% pass rate. They then award promotions by lottery from this pool of "qualified" firefighters. They get racial diversity, but they do not get the best leaders since they don't weed out the witless and the lazy.

I wrote a reply to a NY Times editorial on this issue (guess which side they took). They never posted it. Here it is:
 

Apparently the city leaders in New Haven and their supporters at the NY Times think that the most important criterion in selecting leaders for the fire department is "well-balanced racial diversity." Not competence, not leadership, not commitment--instead they prioritize racial politics above all these things and thereby sacrifice lives and resources in the line of duty.  In the end they're letting political corruption and political correctness corrode the city government’s efficiency at one of its most crucial junctures—where people’s lives are actually at stake.

Are the supposed benefits affirmative action contributes to social cohesion in this country worth the economic, social, and psychological costs of this transparent lie? The implicit premise underlying these 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 is whether to lower the standards for the uncompetitive races or effectively exclude them from those positions which confer the most power upon their holders. Unfortunately, as noted in the editorial, most cities have opted for what the NYT deems “better tests”—which really means tests that are simple enough for virtually everyone to pass, allowing HR to base hiring and promotions on “other factors” than actual demonstrated competence and thereby to achieve a preconceived notion of racial balance.

The Western world, in its moral and material successes, is founded on the concept of the value of the individual as such. This much elaborated concept, with accretions of depth and meaning extending over millenia, has invested mankind with a dignity never conceived, much less attempted, by any other cultural tradition. From the Greco-Judaic source-springs, and all heirs and contributors to them, we have in our possession--in our minds and, maybe, in our souls--the grandest of all inventions: the idea of the human individual as an end in himself--no longer deemed dirt and manure for a tyrant's whimsical gardens, whether he plants by socialist or royalist or any other plan, cultivated to secure Leviathan's moral and practical predominance over the individual. And they want to sacrifice all this to some socialist fantasy? Reinvent the sort of state machine that necessarily reduces man to what is contemptible? And perfect this pulverizing machine? What? And the effort, even the mere thought, does not resolve them into puddles of self-contempt? Human bio-diversity indeed!