Weekly Grounding #8
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“The Moral Bankruptcy of Ivy League America”
Edward Luce at The Financial Times offers important commentary on elite university hysteria surrounding the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action. He notes that “the Ivy League could as easily be construed as an affirmative action plan for wealthy white people, which is very far from the progressive brand it has cultivated.” Luce reports that 43 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the “‘ALDC’ — athletics, legacy, dean’s list [major donors] and children of faculty and staff” category. He continues: “Perhaps the biggest cost to US society is the elite’s obsession with race. Having benefited from a system they want their children to inherit, it is little wonder they were outraged by last week’s ruling. The US media is dominated by Ivy League graduates. It is a life experience that moulds people to see colour over class.”
On the question of color versus class, as well as race versus lineage, this excerpt from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in the affirmative action ruling is quite significant. Yvette Carnell of the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) Advocacy Foundation pointed out that Gorsuch’s opinion indicates an important legal distinction between race and lineage, a distinction that could be utilized to target reparative policies toward ADOS (for whom they were originally intended) on the basis on lineage rather than toward much broader, amorphously defined groups on the basis of color:
“The Capitalists Are Circling Over Ukraine”
I previously addressed the push for Ukraine’s “postwar digital future” in Weekly Grounding #3. This column by Thomas Fazi at UnHerd provides further details surrounding Ukraine’s likely future under “Western economic tutelage.” He reports that “From certain perspectives, the war is clearly good for business: indeed, the greater the destruction, the greater the opportunities for reconstruction. At Davos this year, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said he hoped the initiative would turn the country into a ‘beacon of capitalism.’ David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, also spoke cheerily of Ukraine’s post-war future. ‘There is no question,’ he said, ‘that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment.’” Fazi also highlights the anti-union reforms to Ukraine’s labor law, reforms which were encouraged by “the UK, via its development aid arm, UK Aid, and its embassy in Kyiv” by “funding consultants to assist the Ukrainian government in selling the labour market reforms to the people.”
“The Art of Vassalisation: How Russia’s War on Ukraine Has Transformed Transatlantic Relations”
This remarkable report from the European Council on Foreign Relations, a premier pan-European think tank, describes the “vassalisation” of Europe to America in the wake of the Ukraine War. The authors trace America’s increasing power over European foreign policy back 15 years, a development that was shaken up by Trump’s presidency but subsequently kicked into overdrive by the Biden Administration. They write that “members of the transatlantic alliance are reverting to their cold war habits in which the Americans lead while the Europeans either push from behind or simply follow. There is little room or appetite for independent European efforts on either side of the Atlantic, even on issues such as US-EU trade that were once considered outside of the security realm.” The report concludes: “Vassalisation is not a smart policy for the coming era of intense geopolitical competition – either for the US or for Europe.”
“Gaza’s Unsung Heroes: The Working Class”
Mahmoud Nasser’s photojournalism in The Electronic Intifada captures scenes from the daily lives of construction workers in the town of Beit Hanoun in Gaza. Observing from afar, it can be all too easy to forget the labor, class, and human dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is often reduced to religion, ethnicity, or geopolitics in the media. Nasser’s photographs help resist this reductionism. This was my favorite photo from the published collection:
This is an important critique of the concept of utility by
at . He makes a cogent argument against the utilitarian assumption that “there is this number you can assign to any experience, presumably a negative one to negative experience and positive for positive experience. It posits that there is a continuum between these, and that when you add up enough negative utility, you get something that could fairly be called ‘suffering.’” This essay pairs nicely with ’s “Why I Am Not an Effective Altruist” from last year on .
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.