Man, racists will just never give up on their dog whistles. What’s the equivalent of a euphemism treadmill, one that changes the racist dog whistle as they leak out? Whistle treadmill?
Jews->international bankers->commies->globalist
It’s nothing new - I read about the euphemism on this board at least a decade ago.
You keep repeating this as if SAT scores were some measure of qualification to get into Harvard, where a higher score means you are more qualified. That’s the disconnect.
Once upon a time, very high SAT scores actually were meaningful to Harvard, but that ended decades ago when the SAT’s were re-normed, to be more useful to the majority of schools. (It got much easier to get very high scores.) At this point, a 700 and an 800 are the same to Harvard.
It’s as if you were hiring people to be computer programmer, and there was a typing test that everyone took, and you got all upset that some of the people who type the fastest weren’t hired in favor of people who only type moderately fast, but bring other skills to the table.
I clicked on the link. It loaded. I accidentally closed that tab. I am in a bit of a crisis
I clicked the link again. The connection times out. I have tried multiple times.
Works fine for me.
I doubt you’d like the article anyways. It does provide a definition of “woke”, but the claim will be that it’s a description of something that doesn’t actually exist.
Wow! What a parade of strawmen, distortions and unsupported claims!
For example
Who exactly feels that way? What proof do you have that they feel that way? No specific group is named. No evidence is given.
Once again other than the fact that he says so, is there any evidence anybody actually holds that belief?
I could go on like this. I will just raise one other point. If defining “woke” is so easy, why does it take him so many paragraphs and arguments to do so?
Yep. I even gave a cite that mostly debunked them.
Exactly. You can find multiple definitions of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ online, people disagree on what exactly they mean, and if you asked someone to come up with a definition off the top of their head, it would likely be bad and incomplete.
We also get stupid, offensive definitions, like
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
And these get endorsement rather than provoking argument, because almost no one here (who takes part in politics discussion) feels it’s describing them and their beliefs - but in discussions of ‘woke’, they do feel that.
Good lord. This message board needs a moratorium on terrible analogies. The SAT isn’t a typing test; its whole reason for existence is to assess collage readiness and allow selective colleges to find the students with the best skills and aptitude. It’s very much as if you gave applicants for a programming job a test to assess their programming skills and aptitude, and then offered jobs to minority candidates despite them having lower scores, because you were being pressured to increase diversity.
If it was true that these students brought other skills to the table and were admitted solely on their merits, then Harvard and all the other universities in America would not need to take race into account in applications: they could develop entry criteria that properly weighted these skills, and recruit in a race blind manner. But they can’t, and they know they can’t; that’s why they fought a court case to be allowed to continue taking race into account. That’s also why progressives recently tried to reverse the referendum in California that banned use of racial preferences in college admissions: years of opaque ‘holistic’ admissions have still fallen short of matching the demographics of UC admits to the population of high school graduates.
This isn’t at all an issue restricted to Harvard. Besides other undergraduate courses, I mentioned law and medicine, which have their own tests (also developed for the purpose) that show a similar pattern. Colleges want students with the best grades and test scores, except where they need to compromise to ensure diversity.
If you were 100% convinced I was correct on this point, you’d still support affirmative action for other reasons, right? It’s just more comfortable to believe your rationale.
So debunked that the great majority of selective colleges in the US use the SAT in admissions, and most of those that suspended its use during the pandemic are now reinstating it - including Harvard. 
We do disagree what exactly ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ mean. However, there are signicant portions of the definition we do agree on.
‘Woke’ is on the other hand, so excedngly vague and nebulous it is impossible to know what somebody means when they use it.
He’s missing the actual answer here, which is, “Oh, that means you’re a right-wing asshole.”* All it tells me about the person being referenced is that they may have expressed at least one left-of-center opinion at some point. In practice, they could be any of the archetypes he listed: the old school trade unionist, the center-left neoliberal, and the conservative could all be credible possibilities, given how debased the actual usage of the word “woke” is.
*Note that I’m not saying Freddie deBoer is right-wing. I have no idea who he is, or what his actual politics are, although judging by that article, I’d guess they exist pretty far along the “stupid” axis.
He’s an old school socialist. I don’t know if that fits your definition of ‘stupid’ or not.
But I have also observed US right-wingers call everyone from Hilary Clinton to anarchists to tankies ‘liberal’, and no one is declaring that word meaningless.
My next question- What am I invisible?
No, they really don’t. They want students whose grades and test scores are good enough that they expect those students to succeed at their school. As i think I’ve said before, that’s something like 60% if Harvard’s applicants, and many many times more students than they can admit. They might take a start football player, it the sun off a major donor, with iffy scores. They don’t accept
Most state schools have lots of applicants whose grades and test scores aren’t good enough to indicate likely success. Yes, they prefer the kids with the better numbers first. That’s really really not how it works at the ivys.
Plus, when people use “liberal” as a slur like they do with “woke”, they often - but not always - do mean it in the same vague, undefinable way that “woke” is used. You wouldn’t get a coherent definition out of them, either, if you asked, because it suits them to be intentionally vague to whether they mean anything from a centrist Democrat, an ideologically-left, but still democratic, socialist, or a totalitarian communist.
Racism is bullshit. Race is a social construct. Scientifically, the debate over whether people of different “races” differ in intelligence, morality or any other characteristic is as closed as the debate over climate change; any remaining “debate” is driven solely by bad faith actors.
Therefore, when we see large differences in outcomes between racial groups, as we do in the US, literally the ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION is racism.
Today, many racists like to use the “cultural pathology” ruse; Black people aren’t inherently inferior, it’s just that their culture glorifies drug use, single motherhood, whatever. But… if Black people are helpless victims of their own culture, while other racial groups don’t suffer from this cultural pathology, there must be something wrong with Black people. And believing that there’s something wrong with Black people is, by definition, racist.
Culture can explain things like why Blacks generally prefer basketball to golf. It can’t explain why Blacks make “choices” that lead to lives of crime, addiction and poverty. No rational person would make such choices, so blaming “culture” is just a convoluted way of saying that Black people are intrinsically less rational than other people.
Therefore, society should use affirmative action, reparations, and similar techniques to eliminate institutional racism, until such time as all racial groups have approximately equal outcomes on measures like education, life expectancy, and wealth.
What part of the above would you disagree with?
That’s not what the Harvard admissions data shows. For each race, students in the higher academic deciles have a much better chance of admission. It is not the case that there is some floor above which academics don’t matter.
And as I already pointed out, if the differences here were merely a result of selecting on non-academic skills, they wouldn’t need to use racial preferences. The point of racial preferences is to give a boost (or de-boost) to some students depending on their (socially constructed) race. It’s daft to support using them and then pretend this isn’t happening.
Good. They should be doing that. They discriminated in favor of white people for literally centuries.
And that’s without even addressing your implication that the ideal way for colleges to select students would be to look at nothing except test scores and GPAs, which is ridiculous for many reasons completely unrelated to race.
I am a bit confused by the claim that when the Ivy Leagues weigh things other than performance - such as race - in the admissions process, this doesn’t lower the performance level of the applicants who are admitted. That claim seems to be self evidentially true.
Help me out here. You’d agree that if Harvard instituted the sort of policy it had in the late 1800s, where women or black people could only get in under very exceptional circumstances, that this would lower the performance of the student body, because some of the highest performing people who would have gotten in based on merit alone didn’t get in because they weren’t white?
The same would have to be true regardless of the non performance factor you use in admissions - whether that’s race, gender, religion, extracurricular activities, whatever.
Now, note that I’m just saying that you wouldn’t have the cohort of students who performed highest on whatever metric you’re using. I’m not saying you wouldn’t have the highest quality student body. A school like Harvard might decide that their students, and society at large, benefits more from a student body that’s diverse rather than a student body that’s 60% Asian and 35% white. I probably even agree with them! So I don’t have a problem with affirmative action or similar policies.
But just because we favor a policy doesn’t mean we should pretend it has absolutely no cost. Clearly, it does. If we weigh in things other than performance on academic metrics, we won’t have the top performing cohort. And that’s OK!
A simple example: people in poor Black communities have difficulty accessing health care, in part because relatively few doctors want to serve those communities. Obviously, then, we need to train doctors who do want to serve those communities, and those are likely to be people who have roots in those communities. Therefore, it is a benefit to the public health to make it as easy as possible for qualified applicants from poor Black communities to get into medical school.
And a key word here is qualified; for highly competitive institutions like medical school, law school, and high-quality undergraduate schools, the number of applicants who are capable of completing the course of study is vastly greater than the number of available spaces. It serves no particular purpose to favor applicants in the 99th percentile of academic performance over those in the 95th, because at that level there’s no significant correlation with academic or professional success.