Do you know what a logical fallacy is? Do you know what the fallacy of composition is? Do you understand why you committed the fallacy of composition? Do you understand why an argument based on a logical fallacy yields a fallacious conclusion in most cases?
As for something being a “semantic” quibble, I’d hope you’d not use such poor tactics in the future. Semantics means, literally, meaning. Calling an error in meaning a “quibble”, especially when it’s the meat of an argument, is the tactic of someone who is beaten on the facts and doesn’t want to address it.
Legacies “favor” nobody other than relatives of legacies. A poor person who goes to Yale and has children has exactly the same legacy status as a rich person. A Kenyan who goes to Yale has exactly the same legacy status as a white anglosaxon Protestant from New England.
There are more people from higher SES levels and more white people who benefit from legacy status, but the policy itself favors nobody. It is 100% egalitarian amongst its members, actually. Anybody who is a legacy, has the same legacy status.
Obviously, legacies are not based on racism. And although, judging from discussions and threads like this, there are certainly quite a few racists on the ‘left’ side of the aisle, our modern civilization and code of morality says that racism is wrong, period, full stop. Keeping AA going, especially with explicitly racist supporters, like many in this thread, will only yield a continuation of a racist status quo. Children will never learn that racism is wrong as long as they’re being taught that racism is fine, as long as it’s directed at the “correct” group(s).
Legacies, on the other hand, are not based on racism. They’re based on a simple, objective, operational and 100% neutral position: if you’ve attended a university, your relatives benefit.
Both are spurious objections. Are you really against things that are unearned? Having parents who read to you as a child is unearned, should that be removed? Well educated people going back to get second or third graduate degrees doesn’t remedy anything, should they be prohibited from adding excellence to excellence?
Moreover, for all the claims that AA “remedies” anything, its own logical underpinnings eviscerate those same claims. For instance, we are told by some that AA has to exist because of a history of racism and oppression (statements like that, from Jesse Jackson, will no doubt provide an excuse for face to babble about how anybody who then disagrees probably hates blacks, but hopefully we can ignore such poor rhetoric, yes?). Well and good… but no matter what efforts are taken in the present, and the future, the past will never be changed. So no amount of AA will ever “remedy” the fact that we have a history of racism in this country. Nor will AA actually “remedy” racism, currently. As already pointed out, AA is racism. You cannot end racism by employing racism. Further, as I challenged and nobody has yet really answered, AA does not has not, and almost certainly can not solve problems like “Driving While Black”. Only changing minds will do that, and one does not convince people that racism is wrong by championing racism.
Further, for many, AA is no remedy at all. If someone from Zaire steps off the plane tomorrow at Newark, they’re entitled to benefit from AA, and yet, they have no history in America at all that needs to be remedied. And then there’s the fact that “blacks” are not fungible, you cannot commit the fallacies of composition and division and act as if you made a point rather than a mistake.
If the founder of BET’s children applied to college, should those children of a billionaire be treated as having more need for ‘remedy’ than a white child who studied hard but whose parents couldn’t afford to put food on the table most days, and so he had to deal with a seething belly while trying to study? You can’t just dismiss major logical fallacies like composition and division as “quibbling”. It’s the same whacked out logic that we saw above from unconventional where a white person, who is poor and actually has no power, is ascribed power due to a racist ideology where white people are interchangeable in the ‘power structure’, and even when an individual white person doesn’t actually have any societal power, they still do. Ignoring that not all “black” people need SES relief, nor a ‘remedy’ for a history of oppression, and that some “white” people do need SES relief, and could benefit even more than some wealthy (or even middle class) “blacks”?
That way lies the path of the ideologue: the primacy of belief over reason.
Have you not been reading the thread? More than one poster, face most notably, irrationally, and bombastically, has objected to the fact that people have, ya know, noticed and responded to the claims of many of the supporters of AA who cast it as a “black program” designed and implemented to relieve historical and current ills done to “black” people. The charge has been cast that when Jesse Jackson or Evil Captor or whoever else, in this thread or out of it, supports AA by saying it was created primarily for black people and should continue in that vein, that debating, that actually responding to someone’s specific claims, makes one a racist.
The point, I suppose, is the Orwellian nature of some folks’ behavior, and the scope of the AA debate itself. AA is, obviously and undeniably, a racist policy. One which, of course, many people are left to argue is “good” racism, thus teaching children that there’s nothing wrong with racism as long as it’s the “right” kind of racism. Those same folks then, of course, bemoan the fact that racism isn’t being stamped out. So by gum, we need more AA!
Some of the most ardent supporters of the racist policies of AA say they’re doing it to counter racism against blacks, and then when people respond to those very claims, other supporters jump up and say that, damn if it isn’t true, people are discussing AA in the context of its effects and intentions towards blacks. So, by gum, we need more AA!
Etc, etc, etc.
