I think you’re mixing up racist discrimination with racial diversity. Remember, college applicants aren’t offered admission solely on the basis of SAT scores, so it’s not automatically unfair for some students with lower scores to be accepted while some with higher scores are rejected. This happens all the time in the case of, say, student athletes and alumni offspring.
The crucial fact is that the applicants to and supporters of most elite US colleges and universities perceive racial integration and diversity as a desirable thing, so campus communities are expected to provide it. That means that admissions decisions are made partly on the basis of race, as well as many other factors besides standardized competitive test scores.
Like it or not, the people who provide the money to support colleges tend to want them to be something more than a collection of top-scoring test-takers. They want colleges to have a variety of advantages including things like winning sports teams, active fraternity organizations, renowned theater and music programs, support for local students, close ties to their alumni, racial/religious/gender identity diversity and tolerance, and a whole host of other assets that aren’t measured by SAT scores.
If you personally feel that higher SAT scores should automatically entitle a given applicant to be preferred for admission over another applicant with lower SAT scores, well, that’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. But I don’t think anybody with a different opinion is necessarily being unfair or racist or discriminatory just because they don’t happen to agree with you about this.
From what I’ve seen of your GQ posts, they mostly consist of stuff you’ve either completely made up or misremembered. They are almost invariably wrong and require correction by other posters. They make no substantial contribution to GQ other than to muddy the waters.
When considered properly, group membership gives you a lot of valuable data. The problem is that race doesn’t give you much bang for your buck—all it tells you is the continent some or most someone’s ancestors originated on. Try treating peoples as individuals who are part of many groups, large and small, some of which are shared with their families (ethnicity) and then proceeding from there.
Lumping all people into five groups and then trying to say something meaningful about an individual… not impossible, but needlessly tough.
so stipulated. but lest people believe i pose a fundamental threat to the existence of this board, i’ll point out that the poor quality of my posts is often matched by even worse readers. take the example of this exchange with a so-called “charter member”:
me: the americans often captured german goods that were above that of the typical dogface.
him: that may be so but who told you german soldiers ate better than their american counterparts?
me: i didn’t say that (in all honesty i don’t know.) all i’m saying is they captured tonnes of frozen steaks, mint condition lugers, and other goodies.
him: but that’s what you’re implying, that germans ate better.
me: again i didn’t say that. american soldiers didn’t eat steaks everyday but i’m sure neither did the germans.
him: [a repeat of his last post.]
obviously he doesn’t know the difference between basic data and interpretation. but in this case, guests and one moderator corroborated my initial post.
i take it back, i’m finding this thread interesting now.
I surmised as much. You don’t see that you provide exceptionally negative value added to the board. Here’s another tip: when people don’t respond to your posts, please don’t assume agreement. They just don’t want to deal with your material.
Some people just don’t try very hard. Mac_bollan00 is one of those. Unfortunately, it’s appropriate from time to time for the rest of us to chip in and work clean up.
By and large, I agree that you abide by board rules, as I understand them. And yes, the twin missions of the SDMB are to fight ignorance and make wisecracks. But you don’t succeed in either and the absence of punctuation is distracting. Part of the function of the pit is to permit us to speak candidly with one another: this sort of conversation would be highly inappropriate in GQ. In RL we wouldn’t converse this way either, but I’m guessing you’d pick up on our audible and visual cues of dubiousness. (We’d probably just joke around.) I don’t believe that you’re utterly stupid, but I do think you’ve missed something up to now.
Well there’s also the matter of your sig, which doesn’t endear me to you. Given the sad history of the 20th century, I’m not especially tolerant of those who claim to espouse just a little racism. Oh and yes, it’s perfectly consistent have little patience with bigotry.
Well, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming you were merely too stupid to remember that the turn of the century was over a decade ago. If you prefer to claim the infinitely stupider position that the 20th century was some especially difficult time to be openly racist, I have no strong objection to your efforts to make yourself look as dumb as humanly possible.
Heartily agree with the pitting. The post that originally got him here packs a lot of ignorant bigotry into a very short sentence. He then manages the same trick in reply no 9 to this thread. Immigrant does not equal Taliban.
I hadn’t realised quite how much drivel mac_bolan00 had been posting to GQ until I carried out a forum search. The number of topics he feels the need to respond to greatly outnumbers those he knows anything about, and he clearly doesn’t understand this.
