I believe you’ve mischaracterized what I posted. I didn’t claim “your side is just as bad”, and I have no idea how either one of us could make factual arguments for or against that proposition. “Just as bad” or “worse” are entirely subjective in this context. I think HRC would have been a “worse” president than DJT. You almost certainly feel the opposite. I can’t see how we could reach a factual consensus on which one of these opinions is correct. You think yours is, and I think mine is.
As for, I think, the root of your question though, one of Obama’s more egregious cabinet picks was a Secretary of the Treasury that had failed to pay taxes due.
The question implies a felony level, you came back with a parking ticket. Further, you infer that it was “one of the most egregious”. You withheld all the others out of consideration for our delicate sensibilities?
This was exactly my (very prescient) point in post #141. To a lot of us that pay taxes, it’s pretty damn egregious to appoint a guy who couldn’t properly pay his own taxes to a position overseeing the IRS, where he and those working underneath him are presumably going to work to make sure that the rest of us do what Geithner couldn’t, and pay our taxes on time and in full.
If you’re a non-tax-paying environut*, then having a CIA director that doesn’t buy into all the climate change bullshit seems like a big deal, and you might think the non-tax-paying Secretary of the Treasury is “parking ticket” level of bad.
Which one is “worse”? That determination is entirely subjective because it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
just offered as an example of differing perspectives, not claiming that septimus or elucidator are non-tax-paying environuts
Discussions here tend to have a distinct left skew and while often reasonable and learned points are made, I don’t accept the GD forum’s consensus on such issues as deciding anything. You haven’t said anything completely untrue, but for example the discussion of legacy admissions is basically a tangent. There are many things going on in elite (not limited to Ivy League) university admissions, and I’m not claiming it’s a simple system of racial quota’s biased against Asians for the hell of it. Nor am I saying criteria other than objective ones should never be considered. Keep in mind my point is not particularly to debate the merits of implicit quota’s on Asians at hard to get into colleges, just to point out that they kinda obviously exist (the hardest to get into UC schools show what happens when you don’t do that). So what’s so ‘white supremacist’ for somebody to muse idly about an imbalance in Asian representation in prestigious positions later along in life? IOW your argument that ‘correction’ in college admission for higher Asian achievement on tests/grades still fits into a holistic, though imperfect, system etc could be reasonable, but doesn’t actually refute my point.
You’re basically saying, and I believe GD ‘concluded’ that de facto quota’s against Asians in college admissions are good quota’s. That’s consistent with the liberal view that de facto admissions quota’s in favor of blacks are also good quota’s taking everything, in academic life as a whole, in society as a whole, into account. But ‘good quota’ doesn’t mean ‘not a quota’. And where it can become inconsistent is in jumping on any statement about social non-optimality of other disproportionate representation of groups other than whites as ‘white supremacy’.
There has been large scale immigration into the US since 1965. The % of foreign born population is near a historic high. The last time it was as high, by the mid 1920’s, there was a big pull back, and comparatively little immigration again till post 1965. Did this correspond to the US being a lot worse off macro-wise? Hard to make that argument. Good and bad stuff happened, with little if any clear causality to lower immigration.
I personally tend to be relatively ‘liberal’ on immigration of skilled people* because in the current trend toward eventual eventual fiscal ruin the US just has to grow faster in total GDP, immigration helps do that. But that wasn’t actually true in previous cycles when the US was much less burdened by unfunded govt liabilities. The US got a lot bigger due to mass immigration in mid 19th to early 20th century. But did it actually have to? Someone above talked about ‘hand waving’ in saying there are costs for particular voters to more immigration. I think it’s the other way around actually in many cases, and the pro-immigration position is often defended by hand waving of ‘cultural benefits’ (or even ‘that’s just who we are but some people have always opposed immigration’, talk about hand waving :smack: ).
More attention needs to be paid to why particular voters should vote in favor of continued large scale immigration, and that is what we have, a continually growing foreign born % is not small scale immigration. The fact that some exaggerate the extent doesn’t mean it’s small. Why should they find it in their interest? Not answered just by claiming it’s in the overall interest. Definitely not by claiming it’s in the immigrants’ interest (which is also sometimes effectively part of the argument). And rather than ‘dog whistles’, IMO charges of ‘racism’ are more often just a smokescreen to avoid convincing people why a continued high rate of immigration is in their interest. A popular thesis of the left from ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas’ is that GOP strength is explained by working people voting against their own economic interest. But on immigration the left just quickly states the ‘given’ that immigration is in ‘the’ economic interest, then straight on to accusations of racism. Besides which you can call it ‘racism’ if you like that people want their homeland not to rapidly change culturally unless there’s a big economic benefit to them, but that doesn’t mean it’s an effective argument.
*the failure to more effectively limit illegal immigration, of typically low skilled people, has been a big mistake from any POV IMO. That immigration has at best very marginal overall economic benefit any way you count, and it’s poisoned the broader issue, other issues by proxy also.
I’m not saying anything even remotely like the interpretation that you’ve inexplicably chosen to put on it, along with selective quotes of what I said that omit the most salient portions, and I certainly don’t consider any kind of GD “consensus” to be support or evidence of anything, nor do I even think there was one in that thread – I just mentioned out of interest that we’d had an extensive discussion of the Asian university admissions issue in case you wanted to look at it.
My opinion is neither profound nor insidious and extends no further than the plain meaning of the words I wrote, that the various subjective criteria that Ivy Leagues tend to consider correlate with success do not, in my view, constitute the kind of compelling social problem that would justify public intervention, given that we have good safeguards against racial discrimination.
A “growing foreign born %” compared to what? The percentage of foreign-born Americans was significantly higher in 1890 than it was in 2010. It started dropping for many decades after the 1920s after a series of shameful anti-immigration laws were passed, and it wasn’t because someone noticed that the percentage of the foreign-born was high, it was because it was deemed the wrong kind of immigration – suddenly it was Italian Catholics, German Jews, and people from eastern and southern Europe who were perceived to be speaking strange languages and practicing strange customs and just being all-around gosh-darned un-American! Today’s prejudices are no different, and indeed many of those who have been victims of racial abuse have turned out to be native-born Americans, just the wrong kind.
These terrible laws culminated in the overtly racist Immigration Act of 1924 which sought to severely curtail their numbers, and the “worst” of them – Asians and Arabs – were banned outright. By 1942 the US had turned away thousands of Jewish refugees in a time of war and sent many of them back to their deaths in the Holocaust. “National security” was an oft-cited reason, and no one would be more persuaded that history repeats itself than today’s Syrian refugees. No, there is no “smokescreen” here, just a calling out of age-old racism and xenophobia when it’s as clear as day.
Cite that any of Obama’s got a parking ticket?