Agreed. That is all.
 

In the USA, such post would mean losing half of your Facebook friends and probably your job as "white supremacist". Considering how much affirmative action happens for Muslim migrants in the West EU, you might be looking for trouble even in Belgium.
 

You just figured out why people who would ordinarily vote Democrat cast their vote for Trump.
 

Look at my earlier posts about "political correctness" and you will see that I figured out those Trump votes already before he was actually elected. The US left has a surprising capacity for double-think, injustice in the name of justice, thought control in the name of freedom.

Having said that, I am convinced that the reports which conclude from his speech patterns that Trump is suffering from some early stages of dementia are true. A "protest vote" against overbearing liberalism can potentially lead to something much worse. And the liberals will be back in 2020, because there is no way the Republican party can survive 4 years of Trump without heavy losses.
 

"there is no way the Republican party can survive 4 years of Trump without heavy losses."

I would argue the Republicans should be more worried about losing seats because of their recent Obamacare repeal failure than anything Trump has or hasn't done.
 

@Tobold: Prediction: Trump will be re-elected with larger margin than anyone in history but Reagan in 84 or even beating that.

The reason isn't really in Trump, though the skyrocketing economy thanks to his deregulation and even more to his anti-affirmative action stance and his anti-immigration helps a lot.

The reason is that the liberals went total nutjobs since the election, they abandoned every issues that actually affect people and busy trying to destroy Trump instead with hoaxes. They don't seem to understand that their job isn't to defeat Trump, but to provide a worthy alternative.

@James: it's a failure of 3 traitors. The only problem Republicans can get is their unwillingness to condemn and cut ties with them, especially McCain who is a particularly evil and destructive person, seemingly wanting wars l'art pour l'art. To add, it will be a huge win for Trump when he can force the dems to cooperate by bankrupting Obamacare providers via canceling Obama executive orders.
 

Anti-affirmative action and anti-immigration aren't economic policies, and anti-immigration is more likely to depress the economy than to improve it. Exploiting illegal aliens instead of paying an American a union wage is good business, even if the morals are doubtful.

On deregulation and tax reform there is absolutely no indication that Trump is able to get anything done. Whether he is or isn't to blame for the failed repeal is debatable. But what is absolutely certain is that the Republican party is deeply divided (and the anti-Trump faction is much larger than 3) and completely unable to agree on anything, even the one measure they all campaigned on.
 

@Tobold: wrong, wrong and wrong.
Affirmative action became the biggest ball and chain on business as they had to hire unqualified people just because of race and sexual orientation. They were also constantly under threat of frivolous lawsuits for microaggressions and whatnot. It's gone, they can hire the best applicants and fire anyone who makes a mess.

Paying an immigrant low wages is "immoral but good business" for a particular company but not the country. The profit lands in the hands of a few who will likely not spend it but reinvest. Legal immigrants who work don't spend, they send it home. Americans can't spend since they are unemployed. So who the hell will buy anything? Immigration is a negative-sum game with one winner and lots of losers.

You know what's "immoral but good business"? Leaving the Paris Accord, that Trump Accomplished, along with removing over a THOUSAND small regulations (mostly environmental protection and administrative). None of them is headline, even I don't blame CNN for not yelling "Trump allows depositing of non-toxic sludge in the 150m distance of streams", but it matters to mining companies a lot. Of course this is also negative sum, but the losers are foreign countries, especially those who'll be flooded by the rising oceans.

The Reps can't agree on big, headlined things. They can and do agree with everyday issues that matter to companies.

Anyway, the prediction stands. Remember when I predicted that he'll win and you laughed?

 

You say that discrimination is bad, and that affirmative action is also bad. Do you have any alternative program in mind for ending discrimination, or is discrimination just a bad thing that we have to put up with cause there's nothing we can do about it?
 

Thank you Tobold - seriously you just can't say that kind of stuff in the US without being labeled a racist.
 

Do you have any alternative program in mind for ending discrimination, or is discrimination just a bad thing that we have to put up with cause there's nothing we can do about it?

Of course you can do things about it! How about a law where the college gets all the CVs of applicants without the information of their name, race, gender, or religion, just a numeric identifier like a social security number. They would have to decide who to take purely on objective data. Discrimination problem solved.
 

So your solution is... nothing? Allow the prior status quo to continue into perpetuity? Because that is what doing nothing endorses.

You can't blame a young person, who has the misfortune to be born today white and male and Christian, [...]

Wow. You're right, it's such a burden to grow up showered in unearned privledges, benefiting from a system stacked in one's favor. It would be completely unfair - bordering on obscene! - to, you know, reduce those advantages in some small way. Advantages that are not historical, but continuous and ongoing, even.

"Identity politics" is about acknowledging facts as they exist. We do not live in a meritocracy, and we never will when a disproportionate number of people are affected by a given disadvantage for no reason, e.g. CVs being dismissed unless you sound like a white guy. In the US, 72% of people are white, 12% are black. Unless we posit that there is some genetic issue going on, we should expect to see college campuses, etc, have similar makeups. If they don't, there is something at play, and it behooves us to examine why. Even if "culture" is the culprit, why has that culture developed and what is it addressing?

Affirmative Action isn't the end goal, but we have to start somewhere. If you have better alternatives, by all means, share them.
 

Wow Azuriel, what Tobold said is in no way related to your reply. Where did you read that in his post.

What I got from it was that Tobold is pro equality, independent of race, religion and whatnot, purely based on merit. He also acknowledged there certainly is a problem.

Personally I agree with him as well, I am against any kind of discrimination, and pro meritocracy. Any discrimination should be stamped out equally hard, and skincolour should have nothing to do with it. Just as uneducated people should get help, independent if it is a white or a black neighborhood. Instead of affirmative action, I would be more interested in government organized blind testing of companies followed by subsidies/fines based on the result (eg: Test application and see how companies react/whom they hire)
 

If only reality didn't play out so differently. So Tobold, in absence of any mechanism for getting people to stop being racists at every level they can get away with it (and there are a lot of people in the US who are quietly, passively racists of opportunity) how do you fix this problem?

I understand and appreciate the idea that tools like affirmative action programs feel like crude hammers against the problem. But the problem does not go away and only gets worse in absence of any action whatsoever.

I'm a white, male middle-aged guy who knows with absolute certainty that I hold the position I do and have gained the advantages I have gained because of my social position in life, made possible by being a white male. Racism isn't exclusive to white groups in the US< either....I live in New Mexico, a state with a very high percentage of native and hispanic groups who are notoriously racist toward blacks. I would not want to be black in NM or my home state of Arizona.

My personal solution is one which is even more detestable to the right in the US: dramatically increased education funding and an emphasis on cultural and anthropological education. This will still likely fail because the point of entry for a child into racists identity comes from the parent, not the school, and can be very hard to overwrite in some of the more distinctly racists and segregated communities in the US.

The only thing I can say for sure is that if you think identity politics are exclusively on the left in the US, you are not paying attention. The identity politics on the right, which is focused heavily on white supremacy with a persistent "not so hidden" message about identifying blacks as violent, hispanics as dangerous, the Zionist conspiracy, etc etc....so how do you classify that if not as "identity politics?"

The left can chill out on this when the right lets go of it's own identity politics. But this culture war is just starting, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
 

@Tobold how would you suggest the workforce improve risks of bias against minorities? You can't scrub a CV of the pertinent data necessary to interview for a job position. I've personally witnessed and experienced this process from a no-risk angle, in which I was the person instructed to fire or hire based on the implied racial leanings of a boss. I have seen this happen very consistently, and even in recent years where I am positionally vice-president of the company I see this bias creep in from our clients who will express dislike toward black employees and put much greater effort in to trying to get them fired, contracts revoked or otherwise make life miserable for them.

The worst part of all of this is: I believe it is inherently human nature to discriminate. The system isn't going to fix itself anytime soon because people may have an inherent drive to segregate and racialize conflicts. The best you can hope for is a system that tries to smooth out inequality and see if time and persistent education work toward improving the baseline for everyone.
 

Last comment....I guess you managed to write a column that got me fired up. So, if Affirmative Action was never about fixing racial bias in the workforce, merely compensating for it....what alternative would solve this issue (that is, fixing racism)? Since the issue is racism, how do you fix that in a cultural medley like the US where implicit racism is so endemic that you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who isn't either overtly or unconsciously racist? How do you do this without making the solution the minority's cross to bear ("Fix your culture, accept our arbitrarily more complex or higher standards for you") or the majority's cross to bear ("check your privilege")?

For all the white guys out there saying they aren't racially motivated, and are genuinely part of some neutral, purely merit-based system that sees no color....you should want this solution, because all the other people who are using racist decision making processes are ruining your colorless view of the world whether you see it or not. Of course, the problem here is that in reality if you see the world as "without color" then you are demonstrating a level of naivete that either implies buy-in to the system (with a lack of awareness to what is going on around you) or you are aware of this bias and are one of those identity politics guys on the right who have gotten exceedingly good at the messaging (drinking the right-wing Kool-aid). "I Don't see colors, I just hire on merit. Yes, this means I don't hire blacks because I think they can't demonstrate the merit I expect of them. What, I'm not biased...I see no colors, I can't help it if I only hire whites because whites are the only ones in the industry due to decades of inherent bias in the system discouraging all those colored people I "can't see" from getting a foot in the industry. Not my fault, I don't see colors!"

And that is why talking about this is tough, because the people who "don't see it" are a huge part of the problem right now. You know when you can say that and know it's true? When you are black and you can say "I don't see it." I know quite a few righties who HAAAATE that fact, because (naturally) they want to be the ones who get to decide when they think racial equality is where they want it to be....and their definition of racial equality doesn't benefit from "actual, real equality." In real equality there's no one on the top, and why the hell would they want to lose that position? So the messaging has got to suck in the rubes who "see no color" right along with the guys who have learned to read right wing lingo.

I could go on and on, but I think I've both made my point and pissed of those who (of course) already made their minds up about this and as is traditional on the internet will proceed to ignore the dissenting opinion while running off to their echo chambers.
 

@Caldazar

The issue is that saying "meritocracy" and washing your hands of the problem resolves nothing. Even if we agree that Affirmative Action is reverse discrimination, we can see here that many believe it to be as bad (or worse) than the standard discrimination everyone else endures. Which is silly, but that notion is what I'm replying to.

The subsidizes suggestion is intriguing, but I doubt that anyone would not see it as AA and/or "government picking winners and losers" etc etc.
 

I can't make sense of this sentence in the OP:
"I don't want the minimum necessary government intervention as well in my bedroom as well as in my wallet"

Did you mean "I wan't the minimum necessary government intervention in my bedroom as well as in my wallet"?

Regarding Affirmative Action, I used to be dead against it, but I think I've mellowed slightly towards the concept, though I agree it's certainly not ideal. Much better to blind selectors, if you can, to the race/sex/whatever of applicants than to introduce another explicit bias. But I'm willing to be convinced that in certain circumstances it might be better than doing nothing.
 

@Azuriel: a black guy with a Muslim sounding name got a job of PRESIDENT. Twice. Cut the crap!
Traditional racism doesn't exist outside of redneck trucker bars in ex-Confederate states.

Identity politics is about blaming laziness, drug use and active contempt of the Western civilization on the Western civilization. It's a racist hate movement.


 

@ Nicholas

I'm a white, male middle-aged guy who knows with absolute certainty that I hold the position I do and have gained the advantages I have gained because of my social position in life, made possible by being a white male.

I take issue with your sentiment that whites, through some mechanism of social/cultural identity, are the only ones who benefit from educaton, hard work and perseverance. I work alongside of blacks, hispanics, female and homosexual co-workers in my chosen field and I am proud to call these people my friends. I respect the accomplishments they have made in life. All of these people are professionals who don't get caught up in identity politics, nor are they "special snowflakes" who get triggered whenever something is mentioned in the news media. They have applied for, interviewed for and received their positions based on their education, work ethic and what they have brought to our organization, just as I have.

The problem that everybody has, is with being told that they must "believe" or "embrace" a certain acceptance level just because someone is screaming "inequality" because they want to be accepted solely because they are of a certain race, religion, creed, culture or sexual affiliation. I want to work with people who want to expend their energy and personal resources on their jobs, not with someone who spends the majority of their day with the gnawing and gnashing of their teeth as they walk around waving a flag of entitlement. Acceptance of someone based on race, religion, creed, cultural or sexual affiliation is the right thing to do, and neither republicans nor democrats have a right to claim exclusivity in being the party who "does it best".
 

So how do you justify towards a young Asian-American student that he needs a SAT score of 140 more than a white student to get a place in Harvard? You can't even blame him for being WASP! It certainly wasn't him, nor was it one of his ancestors who caused previous racial injustice.

Do you really think that two wrongs make a right?
 

@Tobold

Who was that last post aimed at?
 

Mostly Azuriel. But basically any defender of affirmative action. I simply don't believe that by creating new injustices against a new generation we somehow bring into balance some cosmic karma. Somebody being discriminated against for being white or for being Asian is exactly as bad as somebody being discriminated against for being black.

Note that I NEVER advocated doing nothing. I am all for measure that force selection processes to be color-blind, and gender-blind, and religion-blind. Those are the only way to one day arrive at a situation that is completely fair and only based on the merit of the individuals of the current generation, without being burdened with centuries of history of injustice.
 

Well, as long as there are federal monies on the table we will continue to have this issue in education. My thought would be to remove the federal subsidies that drive this issue and replace it with a basic requirement of establishing and meeting quotas based on demographics as represented by population percentages. Same would go for employment. If we have "X" number of students/employees from "Y" race, religion, creed or culture, and the numbers reflect a representative proportion of each, then no one could cry foul.
 

@NoGuff actually what I was stating was that despite any effort on my part (education, perseverence, etc.) I had an edge for being a white male. If I were to gamify it, it would look like this:
"get decent job" requires 20 points.
Gain 5 points for a good education
Gain 5 points for perseverance
Gain 10 points for being in the right socio-economic demographic in terms of income and family status
Subtract 5 points for being an ethnic minority
Subtract 8 points for being in the wrong socio-economic demographic
Subtract 3 points for being female
Subtract 10 points for being LGBT and not "in the closet"
Subtract 3 points if you are in the closet
Add 10 points if you are white and male

Sure, this is an arbitrary "gamification" with arbitary points, but the point I am making is that I am surrounded by many people who hold their station because they were white, male, and in the proper socio-economic demographic (worth 20 points without bothering to put in effort).

Hope that clarifies.

On your last post, arbitrary demographic identification (while potentially a possibility with big data these days) would probably be a disaster and no different than the results of current affirmative action plans. The point people (validly) make about affirmitive action is it leads to situations where optimal hiring choices are overlooked in favor of quotas. This is just as likely to happen because of industry situations where there is a dearth of minorities in the field, forcing the business to hire someone who is unqualified in order to meet the quota, as it is for someone to arbitrarily hire the first minority they encounter just to speed up the process. The affirmative action process doesn't address the root of the problem (fixing it so minorities are comfortable in a wider range of career choices and get better education options) but the end point. This is the same situation with healthcare in the US, where we continue to debate who's going to pay the bill without addressing outrageous and artificially inflated medical and pharmaceutical costs that continue to go unregulated.

 

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree on this one Tobold, but I don't think anything I say will make you question your stance more than I'm sure a delusional Gevlon agreeing with you already does.
 

@NoGuff In re-reading your post I think it's important to be clear that I agree with you that anyone who is screaming "entitlement" as the sole basis for their claim for special treatment is also part of the overall problem. It is not, however, the reason to dismiss the reality, which is that for every guy who's trying to jump in to a job because he feels entitled, there are five other guys who never even got the educational opportunity to make that interview, or whom were skipped over entirely in the hiring process.

The problem as I see it is the "entitlement" crowd is loudest in cities where there is the lowest level of discrimination and the strongest efforts to work on equality already. Those voices aren't being heard at all in "mainstream America" where they never even got a call back for the interview. In the years I lived in Seattle I saw plenty of cases of people who were hired to meet quotas. Even in Seattle I saw covert discrimination among some grumbling co-workers who didn't like "that guy" because he didn't seem to know what he was doing and was black. But...the system worked at least in so far as the people hiring and firing weren't basing their decisions on whether those co-workers were relevant to the picture. And estimating the performance of these black co-workers who were accused of meeting quota and being unqualified? In reality they were doing a perfectly good job, but no level of performance and skill they demonstrated was going to change the mind of the passive racist co-workers who were judging them.

Now I'm in New Mexico where I regularly encounter people who comment about the "poor performance" and "confrontational attitude" of co-workers who happen to be black, and since this is a right-to-work state these employees tend to get dismissed an awful lot if they aren't in a protected position (government or school). I run a small local business of about 26 employees and have a couple staff who are black that handle a meaningful percentage of my work. The number of complaints I get on these two is extraordinary by comparison, and ironic...it is rarely about their skill (which is superior to most of my staff, these two are invaluable to my operation) but entirely about their attitude. They aren't "kind enough" or "friendly" or "deferential." Endless reams of nonsense that are proven continually wrong when I review the recorded conversations and find, time and again, that the other party, the accuser, is either outright fabricating the accusation, inflating the issue or most commonly, they are the rude ones and my staff demonstrated the patience of a saint.

"Your employee refused to give me her phone number. She was rude to me!!!" --actual complaint.

Actual call: employee politely explains the 800 number is her main line, but just ask for her name, and the call will be directed. Friendly tone, explains that she doesn't have a personal line but it's a small office so she will get the call....just use her name.

What motivated the complaint? Was it that my staff member sounded too "black" to them? Why do none of my other non-black staff get hit with these complaints?

Anyway NoGuff, let me know where you live to I can add it to my list of awesome places.
 

@Nicholas: I think we all agree that racism exists. What I want to know from you is why you think that discriminating against a highly qualified Asian-American student is "justice". Aren't we just changing who we are racist against this time around? How does that solve anything of the problems you listed?
 

Hmm. Seems that some folks need to pay attention to the words of Martin Luther King Jr., paying special attention to his Dream speech. He said it much better than I (or Tobold) can.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I'd also like to note that accepting folks with lower test scores to difficult degree programs because of their skin color hurts everyone. Those folks have a harder time handling the material and flunk out at a much higher rate, while the college either dumbs down the material at the cost of their reputation or graduates fewer people, and the people who had a better chance of making it through have to do something else. LOSE-LOSE-LOSE.
 

@ Nicholas

The affirmative action process doesn't address the root of the problem (fixing it so minorities are comfortable in a wider range of career choices and get better education options) but the end point.

But don't you think that this also puts the emphasis on, and supports the wrong mindset? If we have to consider a certain "minority" as part of a decision on whether to admit someone to college or hire them for a job, someone else is still going to lose out based on this. This is why I propose population-percentage representation.

The issue that I think you are trying to address doesn't exist on some grandiose scale where secret agendas drive hidden hiring practices or admissions acceptance practices, but rather it is a training issue that is being affected by policies set in place as a result of affirmative action itself. I've sat in training sessions where the use of affirmative action tenants were wrongly used as a basis of how to train people to screen applications. Look at it this way: If I am a hiring manager and I had to screen 100 applications for employment for 2 open positions, and then cut that number down to 20 to be interviewed based on education and work experience, and then after interviews hire 2 people for the open positions, there are still going to be 98 people whose lives that I have just affected in a negative way. Are those 98 people going to believe that I used, what they would consider to be fair hiring practices, as they exit the building? Or should they believe that maybe they should increase their education, submit a better resume and possibly not wear jeans and t-shirt to an interview?
 

Affirmative action is definitely a problematic way to deal with the consequences of hundreds of years of racial oppression. That said I don't really see a better way to handle it. If you make admissions a purely meritocracy then it is clearly going to advantage the people who already had the most advantageous situation to begin with. At that point I guess you have to ask what are the goals of your institution? I mean would you fault a homeless shelter that refused a bed to Scrooge McDuck, who sought a bed there to save on the cost of a motel for the night?

I don't think a government should mandate affirmative action unless they find evidence of deliberate discrimination. But if an institution wants to take that on themselves then I see no reason to get up in arms about it. I think if I were to be in charge of such an institution I would seek to balance the numbers such that the student/employee population matched the populations demographics in so far as possible.

All that said I find the whole angst about not getting into this or that school to be hilarious tribalism. There are so many colleges in the USA that finding one that will accept you shouldn't be a big deal unless you have an over inflated ego and or are unwilling to relocate. I personally know a kid that went to college on a full ride scholarship because he was white and didn't mind going to a school where he was in the sub 1% minority. And I'll grant that there is some difference in the quality of education between colleges and universities, but once you're in the work force most of that ceases to matter very quickly, unless you went to some ritzy school where the real benefit is the relationships with other rich people.
 

@Tobold

So how do you justify towards a young Asian-American student that he needs a SAT score of 140 more than a white student to get a place in Harvard?

The same way I already mentioned: proportionality. According to your own article, "Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander." In the US, Asian-Americans make up 4.8% of the population. So there are already 5 times as many Asian-Americans at Harvard than the general population, even with whatever scheme they have making it harder. Caltech presumably has no scheme, as evidenced by its 42.5% Asian population. College admission is a zero-sum game, so a strict meritocracy would likely result in most non-white, non-Asian students from being pushed out of the top universities. Are you fine with that outcome?

@Gevlon

a black guy with a Muslim sounding name got a job of PRESIDENT. Twice. Cut the crap!
Traditional racism doesn't exist outside of redneck trucker bars in ex-Confederate states.

Got some studies? Because I do. Not that I would need them, considering what I witness first-hand on a daily basis as part of my job. Have you even ever stepped foot in America?
 

Why would proportionality be a justification for anything? 5% of the population has an IQ below 75 (by definition of the IQ). Does that mean that 5% of all rocket scientists should be people with an IQ below 75 to respect proportionality? If Asian-Americans work harder in school than other races, how does that justify discrimination against them?
 

@Azuriel

That only means that Asian-Americans busted their ass a whole lot more to get into a good school. Plus it's no big surprise considering the cultural norms in Asia, i.e. studying until your eyes bleed if you are still in school. If a non-Asian student is not willing to study 10 hours/day, then no, he does not deserve his spot and a 42% SEA population in CalTach seems just fine.

@Tobold

As you've seen by the comments, you stirred up quite a debate. I mostly agree with your points, but in the US currently there are people of the opinion that you cannot possibly discriminate or be racist against white people; it simply is not feasible. It's obviously bullshit, but the whole thing is gaining a lot of traction on the left.
 

george: "If you make admissions a purely meritocracy then it is clearly going to advantage the people who already had the most advantageous situation to begin with ... would you fault a homeless shelter that refused a bed to Scrooge McDuck?"

What people are pointing out is that under affirmative action as currently constituted, Scrooge McDuck gets the college place ahead of another duck, who is poorer and has better academic qualifications, because he has the right coloured feathers.
 

@Nicholas Bergquist Nobody is saying racism doesn't exist, but I can give you way worse examples of black on white racism in my work place. I work for a major metropolitan city and blacks can literally get away with assault now (I have witnessed this - police report filed, grievance, the whole paperwork trail ended in white guy getting moved to another department). So no - affirmative action (aka racism) is not the answer.
 

Why are you surprised black people are discriminated against in a WASP settled country? What country's native population doesn't act exactly the same with a non-native population? Seriously have you not travelled outside of the US? I was treated like shit in Paris, almost got my ass kicked in Mexico - all for being American - and I am a good person! Azuriel you have no common sense and probably do not have a real world job as most lefty crazies like yourself and Antifa loonies. Ride with your local PD or ems - get a good look at the real world please.
 

@Azuriel: yes, I have studies: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2017/08/azuriel-and-his-bad-science-and.html