Well, Cecil’s basement would be sort of an unusual workplace, no?
You have no idea…
So, Bricker, any chance of you ever responding to my post 38?
Yep. Missed it. Sorry.
That’s a very forgiving view of the OP. His point is that the action itself (suing SIU) is morally questionable on its merits. It is with that point that I vigorously disagree.
Your dishonesty arose when you characterized the OP’s tirade as “an issue that deserves serious debate” and my tirade as an “irrelevant and facile dismissal.” You applied markedly different standards to my side of the question, and that is classic intellectual dishonesty.
My comparsion was not meaningless. In fact, the OP’s attack on the government’s action fails to acknowledge the illegal nature of the programs under attack, inveighs aginst the motives of anyone failing to support this odious brand of racial discrimination, and completely ignores the gross inequities that the law properly forbids.
We can debate that proposition, if you wish. But here we have a program that is, by its operators’ own admission, absolutely closed to any white male. That’s a far cry from “pride week”.
So I’m not a liar, I’m a non-objective fool?
Well, OK, I’d still like to think you’re wrong, but that’s an accusation I resent less, as it’s almost certainly true at least from time to time (for me as for all of us).
What, exactly, was the point of “If a similar award were closed to balck or Hispanic males, there would be no question of its illegality and no dearth of outrage from the left.”? I mean, that’s obviously true, and does not reflect particularly badly on the left, as far as I can tell. It seems to me that it’s only point is to try to cheaply win the argument via saying “well, YOUR position is obviously hypocritical, I win, let’s move on”. One might as well enter a reasoned discussion about the precise limitations of free speech by saying “If a similar person were arrested for yelling fire in a crowded theatre, there would be no question of its illegality and no dearth of outrage from the left/right/freemasons”.
Two comments:
(a) If someone came in and said “Virginia has suddenly started enforcing their decades-old law against consensual adult sodomy… what an awful thing they are doing to court the religious right”, the poster presumably believes two things:
(i) consensual adult sodomy should be legal
(ii) even if it isn’t, this law hasn’t been enforced for some time, and suddenly was
Thus, saying “ahh, but it’s ILLEGAL” is not a particularly meaningful response to that sort of claim.
(b) Whether it’s illegal or not is also not particularly obvious to the generic reasonably informed American citizen. Taking myself as an example, I am (as a doper, if nothing else) FAR better informed about rights and laws and so forth than the average American, and if you’d said to me “what defines whether a recruitment program with racially based preferences and/or quotas is legal or not?” I would have had no idea. So while a lawyer like you might be outraged that anyone would defend something that is SO OBVIOUSLY ILLEGAL, well, it’s not obvious.
I’ve reread the OP again, and I still don’t see that. Saying “Bush is doing this to appeal to the most evil people on the right” doesn’t imply that only the most people on the right would oppose this program in the first place.
Yes, the OP isn’t saying “I favor affirmative action, here are my reasons”. He’s not trying to debate the pros or cons of the subject. But it’s also FAR from a driveby “here’s something that happened… republicans are assholes” type post. Read the first paragraph, and part where he quotes Obama. Now, his claim is hardly couched in the most diplomatic of language, but there actually is a POINT he is trying to make. It is not an Reeder- or Brutus-esque flamefest.
Agreed. But
(a) my point is that you can’t just automatically win the argument by saying “ahh, but substitute ‘white’ for ‘black’ and you liberals would flip flop. Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites I say!”, not that this program is necessarily good.
(b) There’s a difference between a program which, right in its very rules, has “no white men allowed”, and a program which is set up to favor various disadvantaged groups in such a way that it’s vanishingly unlikely it would ever end up selecting a white male.
Anyhow, a general comment about the issue: I think racial preferences should only be allowed with very good reason, and then only in strictly constrained contexts. Is trying to increase a racial community’s presence within a field in order to provide role models for future children and students, thus hopefully setting up a self-perpetuating cycle in which the current gross numerical inequities (whatever their causes) are overcome, a very good reason? It might be.
Is one small scholarship at one university a strictly constrained context? It might be.
Hi,
I’m sorry I haven’t been participating. I can’t really add much at this time except to say Monstro’s post got me thinking harder about “excluded middles”, and I should acknowledge tomndeb made some good points. I still think the J.D.'s actions here are at least in some part politically-motivated, that racism has played some significant role in the problems I discussed, and that there ought to be room in the law for some corrective measures that get the blanket label, “Affirmative Action”. Beyond that, I can’t contribute much right now.
I was away at a conference in Texas, and when I got back…well, I got some bad news. Maybe I’ll discuss it later. Anyhow, I didn’t intend my post to be a “driveby” or “pubs r teh suxors” kind of affair.
Again, apologies. Wish I could say more.
Loop.
And, while we’re at it, post 185?