Done? Cool. Because I had a thing or two to say about the comments.

One common theme among Scalzi’s critics is the idea that white guys used to have it good, but affirmative action has put an end to that, and now the deck is stacked in favor of women and people of color. Here’s a snippet of a representative argument (from commenter bpmitche) to that effect:

In the case of academia, for instance, the admittance guidelines often restrict the number of applicants who will be accepted according to their stated race and their declared major.

For instance, let’s say that the Engineering program at Cal Poly is only going to accept 450 students in a given year; of those 450 openings 200 are set aside for whites, 100 for blacks, 100 for hispanics, and 50 for asians. There are also gender standards – let’s be generous and assume that the goal is pairity between admitted student genders. Now, let’s look at our pool of applicants: although Cal Poly gets applicants from all over the country, there are some demographic truths involved here. First, white males will be the overwhelming majority of applicants to the Engineering program, based simply on the racial demographics of the US (wikipedia). Out of any given 1000 applicants to the Engineering program 637 of them will be white, 163 will be hispanic, 122 will be black and 48 will be asian (with a total of 30 “other or mixed”).

Bpmitche goes on from there to report admission rates for various demographic categories to the nearest tenth of a percent. (“as a white male, your chances … are at best 31.8% … for a black male or female, 81.9%; for a hispanic male 61.7%, female 60.9%; and 100% for both asian males and females.”)

Damning, right? There’s only one problem with this analysis. It’s completely made up.

To start, race-based affirmative action in California’s public universities is illegal, and has been since 1996. Under the California state constitution, the state may not consider “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Period. At Cal Poly, admissions officials aren’t even told applicants’ race or gender.

And even outside of California, the kind of quotas this guy describes are illegal nationwide, and have been since the Supreme Court’s 1978  Bakke decision. Since 2003, moreover, it’s been illegal to give college applicants any quantifiable numerical advantage in admissions on the basis of race. (Colleges are still allowed — though not required — to consider a student’s race on a case-by-case basis, for now.)

Bpmitche also errs in assuming that applicants to an elite engineering program will reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. If that were the case — if people of all races and genders were getting the kind of preparation and training that would render them viable candidates for admission to a school like Cal Poly — then any sort of affirmative action would of course be absurd. But they’re not.

Finally, there’s the issue of Cal Poly’s engineering school’s demographics, perhaps the simplest relevant fact to uncover. Bpmitche estimates that about 45% of the school’s students are white, while the true number is above 60%. He figures the school’s Latino enrollment at 22%, when in fact it’s just 13%. And black students, who bpmitche likewise estimates at 22% of the school’s enrollment, amount to just 0.9% — just 47 students in a school of more than five thousand.

And this, ultimately, is why folks like bpmitche think they’re oppressed.

It’s because they have literally no idea what the facts are.

As SG President, I realized that as great as it is to work on issues of fairness, it only highlighted my own struggles. It didn’t bring the completeness that I sought. By mid-fall, it had gotten to the point where I was living in my own head. With everything I did, from the mundane to the exciting, the only way I was able to enjoy it was if I re-imagined doing it as a girl. My life was passing me by, and I was done wasting it as someone I wasn’t.

I told my family and some of my closest friends over winter break. My brothers and parents greeted me with immediate support and unconditional love. This was the first time that my parents have had to worry about my safety, my job prospects and my acceptance. This story is my experience and my experience alone. There is no one-size-fits-all narrative; everyone’s path winds in different ways.

The experience highlights my own privilege. I grew up in an upper-income household, in an accepting environment and with incredible educational opportunities. I never worried about my family’s reaction.

But those worries are all too common for most. For far too many trans individuals, the reality is far bleaker; coming out oftentimes means getting kicked out of your home. I say this not to diminish my own experience, but to acknowledge the privilege and opportunities which have been afforded to me.

Today is the next day of the life I’ve already had, but at the same time, the first day of the life I always knew I wanted to lead. Starting on Saturday, I will present as my true self. Going forward, I ask that you use female pronouns (she/her) and my chosen name, Sarah.

Congrats, Sarah, and good luck.

Under the terms of the reported deal, UC will be freed up to raise tuition, increase out-of-state enrollment, and divert state funds to construction projects. And crucially, it will no longer have to make the specifics of these arrangements public.

UC’s out-of-state enrollment has been skyrocketing in recent years, as has out-of-state tuition. Just a few years ago, non-Californians represented just 10% of UC Berkeley enrollment, for instance, but now they make up nearly a third of the Berkeley student body — and they’re paying rates higher than Harvard’s.

Let’s underscore that: A third of UC Berkeley students are from out-of-state, and they’re being charged private university fees.

This is the future of the UC system, if CUCFA’s analysis is accurate.

And it should be noted as well that UC’s student body isn’t expected to get bigger, at least not at rates that would be necessary to keep rates of in-state enrollment stable. As CUCFA notes, UC is likely to “dump a larger number of eligible Californians onto the CSU and Community Colleges, which will in turn pass on their overflow to for-profit schools” if this plan goes through.

This represents nothing less than the privatization of the UC system, once the greatest public university in the nation.

At Collège de Rosemont in Montreal, several hundred student demonstrators were pepper-sprayed by police early this morning. Meanwhile, riot police are reported to be on standby at Collège Lionel Groulx in Blainville.

At least thirty injunctions calling for campuses to re-open for classes have been issued so far. To date, nearly all of them have been ignored.

Noon update | Classes have been canceled for the day at Collège Lionel Groulx.

It’s often been reported, for instance, that black Americans oppose same-sex marriage by a 49-39 margin. What’s less often mentioned is that that figure, from April of this year, represents a 27-point tightening from 2008, when 63% of blacks opposed same-sex marriage, and only 26% supported it. At that rate of change, same-sex marriage will reach plurality support late next year and majority support sometime in 2015. To put it another way, black views on same-sex marriage today are exactly where whites’ positions stood just four years ago.

And if you look at charts of public opinion on the issue, it’s clear that views aren’t just changing quickly, the rate of change is accelerating. We’ve reached a tipping point on the question, and we may reach something approaching consensus far sooner than we think.

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

More Americans support same-sex marriage today than supported marriage between blacks and whites in 1994.

That’s right. Same-sex marriage is more popular in the United States in 2012 than interracial marriage was just eighteen years ago. And as with same-sex marriage, polling results on interracial marriage show a long period of slow change followed by a dramatic, rapid shift.

In 1968, only 20% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Support grew at a rate of about one point a year over the next quarter century, and actually slowed in the eighties and early nineties. But then the dam broke, and support shot up 38 points in the next 18 years. Today, support for interracial marriage stands well above 90% for all but the oldest Americans.

Amid concerns that the offer did little to keep tuition rates down and claims by student negotiators that the government altered the plan without their consent, students at campus after campus have rejected the deal, leaving the provincial government and the student unions back at square one and putting the spring semester in peril.

Anti-strike students at one college obtained a court injunction on Wednesday calling on their school to re-open, but when they arrived this morning to enforce the ruling, the campus entrance had been barricaded by a group of some two hundred students and professors. Administrators attempted to negotiate with the protesters, but announced after an hour of discussion that the campus would remain closed.

Yesterday morning the entire Montreal subway system was shut down for an hour and a half after smoke bombs were set off in at least five stations. No person or group took credit for the shutdown, and speculation mounted during the day as to whether it was connected to the student strike.

Activists have been occupying the farm since April 22. As one occupation organizer puts it,

The University of California’s public mission as a Land Grant institution is to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture. Nonetheless, institutional attempts to ensure the university fulfills this promise have not been successful. It is only with the recent land occupation that the University has proposed to hold a series of workshops to explore the possibilities for “metropolitan agricultural initiatives” on the Gill Tract.

But the university has refused to move forward with those initiatives until the occupiers leave the land, and over the last few days they’ve been ratcheting up the pressure. On Wednesday the UC Board of Regents filed suit against the group, looking for a restraining order and injunction against the occupation. They also put up concrete barricades to block vehicular traffic from the site.

Yesterday the university went further, closing and locking both of the farm’s gates. So far, police have not attempted to prevent occupiers from climbing over fences to get in and out of the site. Organizers feared that a police raid was imminent last night, but so far none has materialized.

The occupiers’ website is at takebackthetract.com. Twitter updates can be found at #occupythefarm.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that in 1965, when he was a high school senior, Romney organized a group of his fellow students in a physical assault on a gay classmate, John Lauber. When Lauber, who was closeted at the time, appeared on campus one spring wearing his hair longer than usual, and dyed blond, Romney reportedly put together a posse who grabbed him and held him down, screaming and crying, while Romney cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

Four of Romney’s classmates confirmed the story to the Post, including one who says he participated in the assault.

Of course, 1965 was a long time ago, and few of us would want to be judged on the basis of our worst moments in high school. But this was a physical assault, an act of bullying that participants and witnesses remember as “senseless” and “vicious.” In the era of Tyler Clementi and “it gets better,” it’s an incident that demands a response.

There are three ways to address a story like this. The first, obviously, is to deny it, which Romney doesn’t do. He says he doesn’t remember it, but doesn’t dispute that it happened. That leaves two choices: acknowledge that the incident was serious and express real remorse, or dismiss it as insignificant.

You can’t do both. If the attack was wrong, you can’t brush it aside. Non-conforming kids are still getting brutalized today, and you can’t stand up against that kind of bullying if you don’t take it seriously in your own past. Conversely, any defense that rests on a claim that the story isn’t important because Romney has evolved as a person since high school has to be accompanied by some indication of what that evolution has entailed.

So far, Romney has tried to blow the story off. He’s offered a variety of conditional, vague apologies, but ducked a reporter who asked him whether he’d characterize the incident as one of bullying, and giggled his way through the first interview in which the issue came up. He’s going through the motions of expressing contrition, but making it clear that he’s eager to move on to more serious issues.

And his supporters are following his lead. Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review has dismissed the story as “silly” and “trivial.” A Breitbart columnist has gone so far as to suggest that Romney was merely enforcing the school’s dress code.

I don’t think this approach is going to fly. Teen violence is a recognized problem in this country, and Romney’s equivocation gives comfort to its apologists. On the National Review website, one commenter declared that “we all have such episodes in our past,” while another suggested that the story “makes it sound like he was a normal red-blooded American male teenager and makes him more likable.” As long as Romney continues to minimize his actions, he’s effectively endorsing these defenses and normalizing his behavior.

After spring break that year, Lauber returned to the boarding school’s campus with his longish hair bleached blond. Here’s how one of Romney’s close friends from school remembers what happened next:

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann. … Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors…

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Five of Romney’s schoolmates described the incident to the Washington Post recently, four of them on the record. Each talked to the paper independently, and each recounted essentially the same version of events. One of the four, who says he helped hold Lauber down while Romney attacked him, says he still regrets the attack half a century later, calling it “senseless, stupid, idiotic.”

A Romney campaign representative declined to deny the accounts, telling the Post merely that they “seem exaggerated and off base,” and that the nominee “has no memory of participating in these incidents.” The campaign refused to comment further. (see 10:40 update below)

The Post uncovered other similar — though less horrific — incidents from Romney’s high school years as well. One gay classmate, who like Lauber was then closeted, says Romney would shout “Atta girl!” when he would speak in class. Another classmate remembers an incident in which Romney guided a teacher with limited vision into a closed door, causing the teacher to slam into it.

As for Lauber, he left campus for several days after the incident, and when he returned his hair had been cut short and dyed brown. He was later expelled when a classmate reported him to the administration for smoking a cigarette on school grounds. He came out as gay a few years later, and died of liver cancer in 2004. According to his sister, he bleached his hair blond again after leaving Cranbrook, and kept it that way for the rest of his life.

10:40 am update | In a new statement following the publication of the Washington Post report, Romney again declines to dispute it, and in fact appears to concede the essential accuracy of his classmates’ accounts: “Back in high school I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by that I apologize.”

11:20 update | The above Romney quote comes from a radio interview he gave this morning. Here’s the rest of what he had to say:

Twice he apologized, but in general terms and conditionally. “I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” he said, and “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize,” and “if there’s anything I said that is offensive to someone, I certainly am sorry for that, very deeply sorry for that.”

“If anybody was hurt … or offended.” “Some might have gone too far.” “If there’s anything I said that is offensive to someone.”

Here’s how Romney responded to the specific allegation that he and a group of friends held John Lauber down and chopped off his hair with a pair of scissors:

“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.”

The idea that in 1965, American teenagers weren’t aware of the existence of gay people, or that there wouldn’t any association in such teens’ minds between a boy’s long, bleached-blond hair and homosexuality, is of course preposterous.

11:50 update | Here’s how future president George W Bush responded to a friend who was mocking someone for being gay in 1965:

A few of us were in the common room one night. It was 1965, I believe — my junior year, his sophomore. We were making our usual sarcastic commentaries on those who walked by us. A little nasty perhaps, but always with a touch of humor. On this occasion, however, someone we all believed to be gay walked by, although the word we used in those days was “queer.” Someone, I’m sorry to say, snidely used that word as he walked by. George heard it and, most uncharacteristically, snapped: “Shut up.” Then he said, in words I can remember almost verbatim: “Why don’t you try walking in his shoes for a while and see how it feels before you make a comment like that?”

“In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly. I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew…

“It would scare them.”

—Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012