21 November 2021

Pre-Holiday Platter

Turkey Awards coming up later this week…

  • It looks like the US isn't the only nation with a hypocritical immigration-policy problem. Actually, just about all nations these days (by which I mean "since the dawn of time") have/have had hypocritical immigration policies. The biggest "pull factor" for the US is supposed to be that statue in NY harbor, and the values implicit in it… but a prospective immigrant cannot see that statue any longer from any routine port of entry. And that says more than it perhaps should.

    Maybe someone should just whisper "Windrush" to the UK immigration policy-makers and bureaucrats before their next "study" commences? Of course, it could be worse: Explicit exclusion clauses could still be the order of the day. Wait a minute…

  • But at least immigrants aren't (usually) consigned to, umm, "permanent housing" in a landfill. If this turns out to be true, though, the New York (Jersey?) Giants will have overcounted attendance for years without their season-ticket holder with end-zone seats. OK, "seats" isn't exactly the right description.
  • This brings a new — and entirely unsurprising, especially for those of us who knew/know some, like certain political appointees it was my displeasure to encounter back in my misspent youth — flavor to "legacy admits" at Harvard (and elsewhere). It also casts some disturbing light on other practices, like a certain law school in Chicago (no, almost certainly not the one you're thinking of) with multigenerational members in Illinois and Chicago government; and on admission practices for "legacy admits" at non-elite institutions of all kinds…

    As usual with these sorts of things, it's the unexamined second-order effects that are most disturbing. Especially when combined with the preceding sausage on this platter. But we're just not going to talk about English public-school boys, ok? Don't kid yourselves, though — every nation has its own preselection schools; a certain segment of British society just revels in it while criticizing it.

  • Over Here, though, we tend not to talk about these ugly little things, especially when related to purported guardians of culture. A little trip to a bookstore recently — now that they're (sort of) reopening — convinced me that nothing has changed in the last decade. I strolled by a number of endcaps, in a chain store located in a highly diverse part of town; there were 27 faces staring out from 20 books on the Romance endcap, and the only black one was a labrador retriever. (One particularly annoying corollary: A character that is explicitly black was depicted with only a fully-clothed torso and gloved hands.) I blame both the publishers — in particular the art directors, who are even less diverse than either editorial or the actual power structures at the major publishers — and the "buyers" for this.