Please drop the passive-aggresive tone. It ruins an otherwise lively discussion. People can disagree without being “confused.”
In any case, you might want to be more careful with sweeping statement, because you used the words “we know” when obviously some people here disagree with you. I don’t really care, since for the purposes of this discussion, even having to talk about these things is beyond silly. And I suggest that you rethink your following quote:
This sentence completely ignores that legal definitions of exactly these points have financial and cultural effects mostly channelled through AA efforts. So, I suppose you could assume that politicians don’t actually debate these points before passing laws, and recent history would probably even back you up on this, but there’s no denying that a clear legal definition is needed of what being “black” or “white” or “minority” means before those defined groups can be protected or supported.
That you are perfectly clear in your own mind what these things mean is commendable but irrelevant to my point. I even suspect that our definitions would be fairly convergent, but again, that’s not the point. The point is that people feel the need to debate these terms in the context of trying to achieve some artificially defined balance, and that alone keeps the X-ism monsters alive even if they were defeated in every other arena of existence.
I agree with your general thrust, Nemo, but having laws on the books that adjust opportunities and redistribute resources pretty much makes sure that people are always looking to see if they are on the lucky side or not.
Your opinion on the accuracy of the statements has been noted, but I stand by them with one correction: I would change racism to X-ism, because as you say, race is not always the deciding factor. But the whole point is that certain groups are defined, those groups get benefits, and whatever noble goals that the original concept had remain forever tainted with a residue of X-ism, whatever X happens to be.
Once again: absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about. I’m sure you have a completely relevant point in there, but not in response to my posts.
There is no reason, (aside from a desire to scorn AA), to believe that any group has been or will be harmed by it. If there was such harm, one could point to it and quantify it. When such quantification has been sought in the past, the answer has always come back in the form of anecdotes where a person claims that they “know” that they or someone else was harmed. Anecdotes are not data and after watching such responses for some 40 years, I have come to the inductive conclusion that they are not accurate.
Added to that is the fact that everyone I have encountered who claimed to have"become" racist or sexist or whatever through encounters with AA have all turned out to have been racist, sexist, or whatever before they ever encountered it and I find no reason to believe that it actually generates as much harm as is claimed.
One does not need to be racist or sexist or whatever to oppose AA. Opposition to any particular form of social engineering may arise from any number of sources. I do not like quota systems because they do not provide any genuine assistance while giving racists, sexists, and whomever ammunition to complain. But there is a difference between opposing AA or some form of it for practical or philosophical reasons and erroneously claiming that it actually harms any group.
I guess then that affirmative action had been a great benefit for white men. It’s finally removed the stigma they must have felt back in the pre-AA days, when women and blacks and other minorities were excluded from many areas and white men felt ashamed over their unearned successes.
Then just say that, and don’t attribute things to confusion. It’s much easier to respond to an accusation of non-sequitur by filling in the blanks than it is to respond to a general accusation of confusion.
Poorly constructed sentence on my part. You are not silly. I am not silly. The discussion is silly. Or, it would be silly if there wern’t so much riding on the conclusions.
I generally agree with your statement, but I wish to point out that the use and application is exactly where the practical results are seen, regardless of any scientific definitions. I would try to avoid the whole sticky mess by simply not needing the definitions.
I agree that anecdotes are not scientific, and I would not want to base any policy decision on a collection of stories. However, I would be quite interested to hear about any attempts to actually quantify negative/positive effects from AA. Do you have any?
These are anecdotes In any case, noone turns racist, and that was not my point. However, a law that uses some arbitrary grouping in order to redistribute resources is going to fan the flames of the latent X-isms we all carry with us.
Agreed! I would only argue with the assumption that no groups are being harmed. We both already covered this point above, so I suppose whoever has time to scour the internet for proper studies can educate the rest of us.
Absolutely! I’m pretty sure that I clearly stated my support for the original goals of AA and of the necessity of the rather radical solution. (Although, categorizing white men’s successes as “unearned” is going too far. I would tend more towards “sometimes at the expense of and through the exploitation of”, but I’m just being nitpicky.)
The whole point is that most of the “anti” arguments are nothing but anecdotes and speculation. I put my anecdotes against those anecdotes.
I am not sure that it is true that no one turns racist. I have known people who started out with no specific attitudes toward people of other perceived races who later became racist due to various events. None of them, however, were triggered by AA.
I stand in awe of such devastating wit. :rolleyes: As I posted the link at 4:38 pm and you posted at 4:39 pm, you could not possibly have had time to read it.
I also agree that the article is bullshit. Any analysis that relies on the circular argument that IQ predicts income and then claims that the failure to correctly predict income demonstrates that AA harms whites rather than noting that the failure of the prediction disproves the original claim is nothing more than bullshit.
Nonsense, Tom. You said an incredibly stupid thing. You said that it is possible to discriminate in favor of one person without discriminating against someone else. Anyone with any common sense knows better than this, but it is critical for white progressives to hide from themselves their own willingness to throw poor and working class whites to the wolves for the sake of ideology. The adverse effects of affirmative action fall much more heavily on lower class whites than middle and upper class whites if for no other reason than that lower class whites lack the political power to protect themselves from such disempowerment–something which is obvious to anyone whose higher brain functions have not been paralyzed by political correctness. La Griffe du Lion provided the statistics and number crunching to show that this is so, and your response is to close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and shout, “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”
You and your buds can deny it all you want, Tom, but affirmative action is perversely unjust to poor and working class whites.
I’m going to repeat my earlier question, in the context of this comment. What’s wrong with affirmative action programs that don’t take race into account? For example, a university may give preferential treatment to applicants from low-income households, single-parent households, children of non-college-graduate parents, etc. What’s so bad about this approach? In what way is it “perversely unjust to poor and working class whites”?
Nonsense, yourself. I never said that it is possible to discriminate for one person without discriminating against another person.
What I said was that Affirmative Action does not harm anyone. It is your belief that AA discriminates against white people, (back to attacking the blacks even though they are not the primary beneficiaries of AA, I notice). It does not. Quotas would, but quotas have been illegal for over 30 years and I have already noted that I have never supported quotas.
As to du Lion’s bullshit: his numbers are imaginary, based on false beliefs where he invents incomes based on purported IQ levels, and then presents pseudo-science with poor logic. He just made up a bunch of nonsense. First he claims that IQ is a perfect predictor of income. (It is not.) Then he claims that if there is any deviation from that “perfect” number, it has to have been the result of AA. The simple and more accurate response to his claim would be that his initial claim that IQ perfectly predicts income is wrong. (And that is if I charitably accept that IQ measures anything more than the ability to take IQ tests, which I do not, or if there were no other possible factors that influence the numbers–a point he fails to address.) Citing Murray is a good way to indicate that one is either clueless or deliberately dishonest when discussing intelligence, so du Lion has already demonstrated bad faith in this discussion.
We have already seen how stupid his claims are. Go back up the thread and look at the unemployment figures. If every single black man was given a job, today, there would still be millions of white men unemployed. There just are not enough black men in the country to drag down all those impoverished white men.
(And why is he throwing Hispanics into the mix where he does? Hispanics tend to be a union of the two purported races that are supposed to be “smarter” than Africans–white Europeans and Indians who are the extended colonists of those brilliant Asians. They ought to be much higher on the intelligence and pay scales even than whites, yet he places them below those middling white folks. Now, the IQ tests could be wrong or the IQs might not be great predictors of pay, but either way his claim is nothing more than puffery intended to use bad math and woo to denigrate blacks.)
I don’t need to stick my fingers in my ears; I need only recognize nonsense when it is trotted out.
Heck, even Ron Unz (that is no friend of liberals) has no kind words for “La Griffe”
Point here is that **LonesomePolecat **is going for a source that is not even respected at all by very conservative luminaries, but it is worse than that, La Griffe remains an anonymous source that is unpublished in academia or scientific journals, but he is seen as the “beesnees” in many racist websites, this is really going for the bottom of the barrel of sources and citations.
In any case, noone turns racist, and that was not my point. However, a law that uses some arbitrary grouping in order to redistribute resources is going to fan the flames of the latent X-isms we all carry with us.