90% of conservative media is advertised as telling you what is really going on - the things the liberal ‘mainstream’ media wants to hide from you. Every conspiracy theorist thinks they know what is really going on - the secret knowledge normies are unaware of. The ‘red pill’ is referring to exactly this concept: the things a supposedly biased society wants to hide from you. Did you think you had a monopoly on knowing the hidden truth? Many of these people are also outraged - they desire to act on their knowledge, to stop the people benefitting from these lies. They think they are the ones doing good.
How can anyone tell what is right, really, except by using their best judgement? That’s where we all are.
I ask this honestly- Do you mean “right” as in correct? Or “right” as in moral and ethical?
The first is easy. Every child, once they are old enough, should be taught critical thinking. And now more than ever when exactly as you said you can find numerous web sites, groups and media outlets agreeing with you, every body should be taught to demand and check on cites.
If you mean moral and ethical, a lot of groups agree on the golden rule. We should start from there.
No, I’m pretty sure they are not. And i have other evidence against them. Their instructions to interviews used to be completely racially neutral. Yes,
That’s quite true. I think the interviewers attempted to judge students fairly, and without regards to race. It’s because they were found to be overriding a process that i understand and believed to be fair that i think they were trying to depress the number of Asian admissions.
They now have a lot of coded messages about how interviewers can try to promote minorities. They toned it down this year. Last year was pretty egregious.
That being said, i think Harvard is right not to make academic scores (grades and test scores) the gold standard, and i think they are right when
Other schools have other priorities. MIT gives much more weight to academics, to look a little down the river from Harvard.
I think it also serves Harvard, and Harvard’s students, well for Harvard to give some weight to diversity for the sake of diversity. And i don’t mean just “favoring Black students”. Other categories they have favored have been geographic minorities (as compared to the rest of the students), students from lower socioeconomic classes, students who play an under-represented musical instrument, students with unusual interests, and many other groups.
Of course, they also favor children of alumni and athletes, perhaps disproportionately. I think they expect those categories to improve their fundraising abilities.
Anyway, i think what Harvard claimed to be doing, which included favoring some racial minorities, was fine. I think what they were actually doing, which included capping the number of Asians, was not fine. And despite the lawsuit, i bet they are still doing that.
Both. In this case I think it’s pretty damn clear that Harvard was racially discriminating, and have given every indication they will continue to do so. @puzzlegal apparently disagrees, I assume sincerely. People can come to different conclusions based on the same evidence, or avoid looking at evidence that would contradict their beliefs. Who bothers to check sources for info that fits their priors?
And it’s not clear what they should do, either. If you accepted that getting a demographically representative class required de facto quotas, would you want that? Knowing that in practice it means favouring upper middle class Hispanic and black kids over poorer (but not poor enough to be interesting) white and Asian ones. I think it’s perfectly possible to disagree in good faith on this. Unfortunately, most progressives don’t.
It’s a good rule. But if you follow it when others don’t, you are going to get taken advantage of. Tit for tat is also a good rule, and necessary to preserve any kind of functioning society. This is something modern progressives strikingly ignore.
IMO, conservatives who believe that affirmative action is unnecessary, and is patently reverse-discrimination, seem to also believe (or, at least, want to believe) that there really aren’t structural inequities present in society anymore which need to be remedied, and that majority groups don’t still operate from a position of privilege.
They believe that there are inherent intelligence differences that correlate with skin color. The conservative position is that, essentially by definition, a Black person is less qualified to attend any university, let alone an elite one.
That’s how it’s done. Targets and coded messages. Internal interviewers would have been aware of the targets, and known to grade accordingly.
There was a thread on this subject before the judgement; have you changed your mind on anything you said then as a result of this personal experience?
It serves Harvard. I doubt it serves America to have a mostly-unaccountable private institution selecting their elite based on opaque criteria, and binding them into a clique before sending them out to take important positions in the country. Broadening recruitment for influential jobs would lower the stakes a great deal.
Whites are rapidly ceasing to be a majority in America. It seems reasonable to discriminate against the majority to help a fairly small minority that has clearly suffered significant mistreatment and disadvantage at their collective hands. It’s far less tenable to discriminate against one minority in favour of another. Just numerically, it hits each individual harder. It’s even less tenable to discriminate against one group of recent immigrants to help another - what structural disadvantage are Latinos supposed to suffer that Asians don’t, that would make this fair? Yet where Asians take a large share of places, this is what is required to achieve ‘equity’.
…America locks up more people per capita than almost anywhere else in the world. Most of them haven’t been convicted, but just can’t afford bail.
“One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime” compared with “one of every 17 white boys.”
Yeah, that’s a problem that parents need to warn their children about.
America locks up 541 people per 100,000 compared to 300 in Russia, 258 in South Africa, 150 in the UK, 119 in China, 90 in Canada, 33 in Japan.
Do you really think “better policing” is the solution here? Because, have you seen how many police America has?
Just look at how many of them there are. The NYPD spent 2.2 billion dollars in overtime in 2022, double the budgeted amount. They’ve got an intelligence bureau with police stationed in London, Paris, Jerusalem, Amman, Madrid, Toronto.
And this is a problem because:
Firstly: Matt Yglesias is a fucking idiot.
And secondly: this is precisely the type of over-policing that happens now, and its exactly why so many people are locked up in jail that haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth.
The woke are right here. And people like Matt Yglesias are wrong.
No. I don’t think the admitted black students were any less qualified than anyone else. I don’t believe you can neatly rank students and say, “this one is better than X and worse than Y.” I think if Harvard did a first pass to select the qualified students, and selected completely randomly from that group they would do fine. Except some years they would have no cellists, and other years they would have no students from the middle east.
I do think they artificially capped the number of Asian students admitted. And I’m sure I’ll never prove it, but i bet they are still doing that.
I think you vastly over estimate the power Harvard has to influence who becomes the elite. I think Harvard is trying to guess who that will be and admit more of those students. Because that’s good for Harvard.
I have no problem with governments not protecting Nazis, racists and terrorists.
Nobody actually wants absolutely free speech. We all just have different lines. Usually around speech related to intended violence/harm.
Or are you OK with me yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre? Or following you around at night yelling sexual threats? No? Then we just differ on what’s a credible threat.
Because Whiteness has already shown its hand in what it intends when it shouts ‘Nigger!’ or ‘Kaffir!’. Credible threat, if you’re PoC.
Please; as said, a third of black males end up with a felony record already thanks to how rabidly racist our system is. You can’t deter crime with the police when the people who are supposed to be deterred know perfectly well that they have an excellent chance of ending up in prison no matter what they do. It even undercuts social pressure, since in the black community going to prison isn’t something to be ashamed of because it’s pretty close to the norm, and they have no reason to trust the legal system in the first place.
And that’s ignoring that the American police are a corrupt collection of racists and thugs who couldn’t run a just system if their life depended on it. They aren’t there to enforce justice, they are there to enforce injustice; you’d have to permanently fire essentially all of them and rebuild the police from basically scratch to get anything other than a force of bigoted thugs.
Why, in your view, is it okay to have unofficial quotas for white, black and Hispanic students, but not for Asian students? You say the rejected students are not more qualified than those admitted, because you can’t neatly rank students. This applies to Asians as much as any other group. A class with 60% Asians is also problematic for Harvard’s diversity goals: it’s less diverse because a majority of students will have similar backgrounds, it’s not representative of America, and the same argument about elites looking like the people applies. Harvard’s admissions policy is not about compensating for disadvantages either, since they count wealthy white Hispanics like Matt Yglesias towards their diversity goals, and still give a boost to upper-middle class black kids, including children of immigrants whose families never suffered through slavery or segregation.
I don’t agree with it, but I think Harvard’s position on this is far more consistent than yours.
Both are true. Harvard tries to pick promising students, it provides them with the all-important chance to network with other budding elites (it’s not what you know…) and employers trust their judgement and favour their graduates when hiring.
Singing songs about shooting Boers in a country that still has significant racial tensions is racist and inflammatory. I remember when this story came up on social media: the hypocrisy in seeing the same people who want to protect minorities from microaggressions and triggers defend literally singing about killing an ethnic group was extremely disillusioning. It’s not about language or protecting people, it’s no principle more noble than Us and Them.
The whole premise of the word ‘woke’ is that other people are not awake to or aware of these facts. Did you always know them? Did you learn these truths in school?
No more than singing songs about shooting Nazis is. Like I already told you, Boer in that song does not translate as ‘white farmer’ to the people singing it.
I’d say I noticeably began waking up at about age 15. It would have been earlier if I’d grown up with different parents. But I always have had a very strong awareness of what was false and wrong, even when I was too inexperienced to identify what made it so. It has ever dismayed me that other people could be staring right at lies and injustice and see nothing amiss. It was only much later that I came to realize that this was because, unconsciously, they were protecting themselves from the pain of seeing and feeling what was so for others, and hence, in some way was also true for themselves. For no man is an island.
I sure the fuck didn’t learn this in school. Quite the opposite; numbness was the only option. Unless you count college. I was in college in the 1970’s, nuff said.
I didn’t say that. I don’t think Harvard does have quotas for white, Black, or Hispanic students.
Also, “children of successful Black immigrants” have become common enough that it doesn’t give you much of a boost. At least, i interviewed a really super candidate who was a child of successful Black immigrants who wasn’t admitted, and talking about it to a friend who also interviews, that’s what he claimed. If that same student had been a white kid who was a really good pole vaulter, I’m pretty sure they would have been admitted.
Also
Harvard has never claimed it wants a class that “looks like America”. I’m pretty much endorsing their official line, pre-latest-judgement. Not their actual practice, but what they claimed they were trying to do.
How does what you believe Harvard is doing differ from ‘they put a thumb on the scale in admissions decisions, in order to recruit more black and Hispanic, and fewer Asian students than would be admitted if admissions were not using race as a factor’?
We know for a fact they do this and want to continue doing it, because they fought against the court case to make them stop. What do you think their motives are here?
You said this yourself:
They want to promote minorities. Under-represented ones.
