Here and There, Jan. 17

I am taking a weekend break from the blog. I will be spending the time with my Korean-American wife and our Korean-Jewish son. My personal debt to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is for his efforts that helped lead to the repeal of laws that would have made my family illegal in some states.

And speaking of King, some ask whether he would have been in favor of, or opposed to explicit racial preferences in hiring and education. Today's notions of "affirmative action" (meaning quotas and/or other racial advantages) was not seriously on the public agenda in King's lifetime, so some have tried to extrapolate from his statements to determine what he might say about the current debate over racial preferences. Columbia University's Eric Foner divined that King would have been in favor of racial preferences. Allen Favish critiques Foner, arguing that King would have favored preferences on the basis of poverty, not race. Obviously, we will never know for sure. But the one quote of King's that seems to be most remembered is this one:

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

and it is hard for me to reconcile that statement with any kind of policy that uses race as a basis for, well, anything.

Erin O'Connor has an update on the fallout from the Boalt sexual harassment controversy: Some UC Regents are calling for a comprehensive ban on consensual student-faculty relationships. This is part of Krieger/Reisch/Stevens' radical agenda to impose draconian and intrusive controls on the personal lives of people in the university community. It's also interesting that even if such a sweeping policy had been implemented, it still would not have prevented that now infamous isolated ambiguous incident involving two inebriated adults at 2:30am.

O'Connor adds that she's had several dozen hits from people doing search engine queries for Jennifer Reisch. In my own traffic log I find 144 search engine hits for "reisch" (without regard to case) from 95 different IP addresses.

Ian Buruma, a self-described "squeamish namby-pamby European wimp", observed the sausage factory of an Iraq policy discussion in Washington. He described the discussion as a debate between Trotskyist-influenced neo-conservative ideologues who aspire to bring civil democracy to the Middle East, and the more traditional and pragmatic oil and country-club conservatives who simply want order and stability. Personally, I'm skeptical about the prospects of American-style democracy taking hold in the Arab world in the short-term, but there's no doubt in my mind that replacing the Baathist nightmare in Baghdad will only be an improvement.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 17, 2003 01:50 PM