How about people are making too much about 2 relatively minor crimes and the press is running with these stories only because of the celebrity factor. There are so many actually important things, and this is just bullshit of no real impact. Getting hot and bothered by it is just silly.
Get pissed about real shit, like I don’t know climate change, anti-vaxx scumbags, Trump and his daily insanities.
Rich people buy their way into and out of things all the time. There’s no justice in that, but it’s so normal that when that “scandal” broke I shrugged, said “rich people problems”, and went about my business.
The Smollett thing is a much bigger deal. Race is still a flashpoint in this country and this has been weaponized by both the people that believe him and the people that don’t. Cities have burned over this issue. No city has burned because a rich schlub bought their kid into college.
No city has burned because a member of a racial or sexual minority group made up a half-baked story about whites beating them up, though. The lies told by white people have led to that outcome though.
In reality, members of minority groups get attacked all the time, those crimes aren’t publicized, no one is arrested, and white people continue to live their lives thinking hate crimes are rare and insignificant. Jussie’s hoax doesn’t help matters but it’s not like hate crime victims have ever enjoyed automatic benefit of the doubt. Most people view their claims with suspicion by default.
Rich people being caught en masse breaking the law in order to retain their families’ position in the social and economic hierarchy and simultaneously barring the door to the less wealthy is a much bigger deal and more “corrosive to society” than a guy committing the crime of faking a crime that might have gotten some flash-in-the-pan attention and caused some localized suffering/injustice.
Breaking the law in order to enforce systemic, class/race-based inequity is fairly awful, and even individual instances of it can have far-reaching consequences.
All the folks who think it’s no biggie are just not imaginative enough, and/or have your heads in the sand.
Outright bribery and fraud in college admissions is not really dog bites man, and to say so I think might be striking a cynical pose without enough thought. What we know, or is at least commonly believed, happens is that rich people make contributions that actually benefit the whole university community, then expect a subtle quid pro quo when scions of that family apply to the university. But we know that because it’s out in the open: it’s not corrupt in the same sense. It’s also a basic feature not bug of any society that allows private institutions of any kind which become prestigious to be associated with and therefore exclusive. The only way to be sure alumni or other contributions to universities never influence individual admission decisions is to ban the contributions, which pretty much means banning learning institutions independent of the government. That’s a much bigger societal decision and would be a mistaken one IMO.
OTOH it’s altogether feasible IMO to largely prevent universities for example admitting people as rowing crew stars because the college crew coach was bribed, by money into his or her own pocket, to recommend students who never rowed a boat in their lives, IOW outright corruption. It’s done by the legal system coming down like a ton of bricks on organized bribery/forgery rings.
The question as initially stated though is apples and oranges. Which is worse, a large scale organized fraud ring making a mockery of the college admissions system, or one person abusing the hate crime laws, and the general social climate on one side of the political spectrum (stunning politically motivated gullibility) to aggrandize themselves? In that comparison it’s obviously the college admissions scandal IMO. A later post seemed to modify the question to who is more guilty, Smollett or one individual, end-of-the-line participant in the fraud ring, such as Huffman. In that case I’d say Smollett, but people will talk past one another more than usually if you mix together different questions like that.
It’s obvious some people are ok with Smollett because of the MAGA angle and the fact they hate Trump so much. They WANT it to be real and after they found out it was fake, are now blowing it off.
Similar being the fact that actress Huffman also gave support to alot of liberal causes like pro choice means many will give her a break.
Here is a website called fakehatecrimes.org.
Oh, I get it. The talking point of the day is that rich people cheating their way to the top is so common as to be non-newsworthy–nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see.
I’m going to file this post away for the next time there’s a thread about the horrors visited upon the land due to Affirmative Action.
Lots of countries don’t have that “feature” and have working private universities. My own alma mater is private. A donation can get the individual or company making it a little plaque on a wall, yay. Several of the donations say “anonymous”; apparently the Anonymous family is pretty intensely interested in chemistry.
I don’t think there’s any country where private donations to universities come with an open promise for favorable hearing for the applications of family members of the donor. But people often assume it’s the case, and probably is the case to some varying degree not limited to any one country. I would guess that assessments from various people speaking up for various countries would mainly reflect their personal attitudes and general customs about national self-criticism in their country more than it would be a scientific assessment of the difference in how much admissions influence donations could actually buy in various countries.
I would stick with my earlier statement and I don’t believe it’s specific to the US. Because there is in fact a conflict of interest when an individual makes a big donation to a university and then a family member subsequently applies. The university might make more or less rigorous efforts to manage and resolve this conflict, the general public might have more or less confidence they’d actually achieved an honest resolution. But the conflict itself is a feature of prestigious, exclusive private educational institutions accepting personal donations without banning family members from applying.
You can easily argue that both are not a big deal. You argue that rich people get away with buying their way in all the time. Well, then, rich people get away with not being prosecuted for crimes all the time, too.
I think dismissing either one like that is silly. It’s better to look at the implications of both of them. The way they were buying in was to make sure that people who were incapable of actually doing the work would get the degrees. And it makes sure that other deserving people would not get in.
The Smollet case is bad because it gives ammunition to the side saying that hate crimes don’t really happen, and are all fake. It’s not that it convinces them of that. It’s that it makes it harder to fight back. There’s also the issue that the guy should have been prosecuted, and got away with it–likely because he bought his way out with money or influence.
Ultimately, I have to side with the college stuff being worse for its wider implications. But at least it is actually being dealt with, while Smollet runs free, making others think they can get away with it, too.
That said, I definitely think there’s some politics involved here. The Smollet case fits a right wing narrative, while the college case fits a left wing one. The difference is that the Smollet case also fits a left wing narrative with him getting off scot free.
Yeah, it’s not for nothing that Milo can come up with a list of some hundred fake crimes.
I mean, even leaving aside the various issues surrounding the Smollett case* and taking it entirely at the most basic-level interpretation that Smollett faked his own hate crime… So what? People fake crimes all the time. The insurance industry considers “fraud” a baked-in part of its balance sheet; as in, they expect at least some percentage of “fake crimes” to slip by. Yeah, it’s more grist for the right-wing bullshit mill, which is tragic, but the tragedy there is not “now we can’t trust real hate crimes”, it’s “there are bullshit merchants using this case to lie about how we can’t trust real hate crimes”; if we’re going to be talking about harm to society, let’s apportion blame accordingly. What Smollett did was a crime and deserves some punishment. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not that big of a deal.
Meanwhile, the college admissions fraud scandal was a concerted effort by dozens of people over many years to fundamentally undermine American meritocra-hahaha I can’t finish that sentence with a straight face I’m sorry. But it’s worse. Considerably worse. Jesus christ is it ever worse. It’s the difference between threatening suicide to get attention and embezzling multiple companies. It’s the difference between sending in a phony police report that’ll never get anyone arrested and widespread systemic fraud. How are these two even comparable? How does this comparison work, exactly?
*Smollett never admitted guilt, the case was dropped, the CPD have a long and storied history of being fucking self-serving, dishonest, and downright evil. If your first instinct is to trust the cops and assume Smollett obviously was guilty… why the fuck are you giving the cops this much credit? They haven’t earned it. They don’t deserve it. The CPD is full of completely heinous people; to quote one of the above stories: “Watts, former CPD Officer Kallatt Mohammed and others on their tactical team would routinely extort residents at the Ida B. Wells housing project in the Bronzeville neighborhood. If they didn’t pay up, the cops would then allegedly plant felony-level drug amounts on them and lie about it under oath.” And you want to tell me you trust these people on Smollett? Pull the other one.