Probably not in the Beltway.

But in the nation at large, it rapidly became more conversable the second week of Nov 2012.

Using statistics against the non-quota quotas is precisely what the plaintiff in Grutter was trying to do, and that’s why Rehnquist thought it important to get into his dissent, but, alas, no matter, it didn’t work.

You know where it does work? And where not only is it ok, but it is presumptively ok, and with an officially approved magic number of 80% deviation (no matter what profession or what the demographic statistics say)? And where it’s always automatically such a strong factor that the criminal process evidential burden shifts to the defense to prove itself innocent if the EEOC or the DOJ CRD gets a hold of you?

Well, ‘disparate impact’ and ‘employment discrimination’ (ANY perceived slight in hiring, firing, pay, promotion, or even ‘work environment’ factors like friendliness, hostility, etc.). This is the whole reason meaningless Human Resources departments exists – to maintain paper trails of magic-spell documents so companies can immunize themselves against maybe half of the most ludicrous suits.

You make an allegation and the the government becomes your free law firm but you get to collect the settlement! Awesome! What have you got to lose? Nothing!

So, if Berkley or the University of Michigan has a black quota and says it’s being ‘holistic’ and it’s a ‘coincidence’ – then it wins by hiding the ball and distributing unspoken directives (exactly as Souter said would happen). But if your company (or New York City Fire Department – thanks George W Bush!) gets 100 white applications and 100 black application and hires 61 whites and 39 blacks, then watch out!

So, you can’t have affirmative action ‘quotas’, but you can consider race, use it as a ceteris paribis tie-breaking ‘plus factor’ (but not with an explicit points system!) in order to achieve ‘critical mass’ (whatever that magical number is, which, apparently, is different for different ethnic groups, and, like Plutonium, can be too high for Asians) and the educational benefits of the compelling state interest of ‘diversity’ (whatever those benefits are, or to who they follow (everybody? just white kids?) – it’s funny how no one is actually asked to express them in a measurable way and then go about, you know, actually measuring them.)

So, if you’re actually running a racial-quota system (which everybody, everywhere, knows everyone is actually doing), you can get away with it so long as you say you got there ‘coincidentally’, using only court-approved procedures.

Proving intent is easy, actually, so long as it’s a conspiracy, which means you had a conversation about it with a witness or wrote a policy document.

So, duh, the trick is to not have those things, which means ‘telling without telling’. That’s why Ruth Starkman wrote about all the nebulous talk about ‘these kids’ and:

Why did I hear so many times from the assistant director? I think I got lost in the unspoken directives. Some things can’t be spelled out, but they have to be known. Application readers must simply pick it up by osmosis, so that the process of detecting objective factors of disadvantage becomes tricky. It’s an extreme version of the American non-conversation about race.

Yep. Most of living the modern American life is about having, understanding, and navigating (with varying degrees of success) all the nonconversables.

That’s when the monopoly commission starts opening branch agencies

Is that what Control Yuan is doing? I expect the BGO idea to fail, the question is how fast and in what way.

I expect adding ‘fire people whenever they want’ to ‘audit’ in the list of responsibilities would help. Again, the question is how much and for how long.

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admin,

the first step is withdrawal of legitimacy

I think that would work, short term. I’m in favour.

However, thinking about it, what is legitimate is determined by what the masses believe about the political formula. What the masses believe is determined by the elites du jour. How do you undermine the legitimacy of your opponents without having already won?

Before a few moments ago, I liked to say that government is clearly illegitimate if it needs to hide. But transparency is impossible. In any case, fooling the masses is difficult to avoid, even on purpose. Shockingly, the layman is incompetent.

It comes back to opting out of taxes. That, at least, is simple enough and impossible to opacify. If you want something that’s like democracy but isn’t purely symbolic, let subjects withhold taxes. (Of course, also let the state withdraw citizenship.)

Two BGOs are probably needed to work — at a minimum — with the constitutional provision being that they each get to keep 50% of the cost savings from down-sizing other parts of the government (including each other), thus incentivizing a maximum of hyper-aggressive vulture behavior.