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Originally Posted by raytri";p="
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Originally Posted by Blade";p="
They do it because academics are one of the four pillars of liberalism in this country (along with the media establishment, most of the judiciary, and corporations).
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Unfortunately not.
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Another reason is it makes them feel magnanimous to the blacks, and has the wonderful side benefit that it costs them personally nothing - their "magnanimity" is at the expense of white students and the taxes of their parents.
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But it's at the expense of the majority of their customers. So you're trying to argue that colleges are acting directly against their own self-interest.
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They think they can get away with it, and they have. After the
Gratz and
Grutter cases, which represented a mindf___ing overturning of the constitution, NOW they can say to parents "we're just doing what the court says", but they got away with at least as far back as
Bakke. Why? Maybe because of the near-monopoly of libs in higher education - there's no going down the street to the school that doesn't discriminate.
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Yeah yeah, this is the ol' "qualified" argument for anti-white discrimination - universities prior to "affirmative action" always took the MOST qualified candidates - rejecting a MORE qualified candidate in favor of a "qualified' candidate is unjust.
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The question, though, is what makes a candidate "qualified." You're arguing it should strictly be grades and test scores. I'm arguing that there is more to life -- and predicted academic and professional success -- than that.
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We dealt with that before, remember? I said I would agree to those other non-quantifiable subjective factors except that universities misuse them for anti-white discrimination.
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OBVIOUSLY, the ones who are turned away because they didn't make the cut for legitimate reasons, viz, not having high enough grades, can be disappointed.
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Again, though, the argument really gets down to what are "legitimate" reasons for selecting one student over another.
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Yeah - I think it's scholastic merit, and you think it's skin color.
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This is nonsense - the white applicants grasp "the real world" just because a minority student is sitting in the classroom. It is in fact the professors' job to teach "the real world".
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You went to college, yet you don't realize that students bring nearly as much to the classroom as the professor does? Especially in the areas of life experience and worldview? Beyond expecting a cloistered professor to be entirely aware and current on such things, are you really arguing that it woudl be better to study such things in the abstract rather than experiencing them as part of everyday campus life?
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Professors aren't teaching "life experience" (except maybe in the fraudulent "studies" departments) - they're teaching french and chemistry and law and electrical engineering.
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If you went into a japanese business school marketing class now, or at anytime since say the 1970s, you would see japanese students that looked like xerox copies of each other. Would they be out of contact with "the real world"? Apparently not - they sold their products all over the world.
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And yet their homogeneity also sowed the seeds for their downfall -- not understanding their markets and customers as well as they would have had they actually been exposed to them prior to trying to sell them stuff. There's a reason Toyota's American branch is now largely run by Americans.
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The japanese are doing fine, and have had a spectacular post WWII run, especially considering their cities were flattened in WWII. The had one downturn in the 1990s because of an out of date banking system. Had nothing to due with lack of "DI-versity".
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It's similar to other criteria used by schools, such as geographical distribution. Many schools strive to draw students from all over the country, and from both rural and urban areas. The goal is again the same: a diverse student body that will challenge students, or expose them to thoughts and viewpoints they might never have encountered before.
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That is PRECISELY the professor's job.
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No, it's not. It's also beyond the capacity of most individuals, professors or not. I can't possibly know what it's like to grow up poor in Texas or rich in LA -- and I can't teach it, either. Even if I could, wouldn't it be better to have someone who actually *did* grow up poor in Texas or rich in LA?
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I hold three diplomas, in physics, astronomy, and computer science. The only time any student added to the class was the ones who worked in high tech and added some insight. The people who did were ones who had had job experience, and also there was the very smart ones. It had nothing to do with race, geography, sexual orientation, or lefthandedness.
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Your problem is that you are fixated on groups, whereas just action can only be rendered to individuals. Your notion is no different than if one particular white guy robbed a bank and was caught, the judge said throw this guy and ten another white people in jail.
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I agree in general, but there are times when the only possible justice is group-based. Let's modify the hypothetical a little bit. Instead of being immediately overthrown, the elders of Clan A kept the rebels at bay until they died of old age.
If we follow your "individuals only" theory, then we get the following situation: You're perfectly fine with the children of those elders inheriting all that ill-gotten wealth and economic advantage, and benefiting from it, while the children of Clan B, whose futures were stolen from them, get nothing.
That's justice?
When a group (Clan A) undertakes an immoral action that benefits their group at the expense of another group, then it makes sense for the restitution to occur at the group level as well.
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As applied to the american experince with blacks, this is completely false. In the case of slavery, almost all southern capital, locked up in slaves, vanished with the stroke of a pen at the end of the war - there was nothing to "pass on" - Lincoln wiped out the slave capital, Sherman burned down the houses, and the carpetbaggers took the rest. As for the Jim Crow era, as I've already said, that probably
cost, didn't
benefit whites - as one might expect nothing good really comes from irrationality.
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Distance in time matters, of course, for both moral and practical reasons. Which is why making Rome's descendants pay for the actions of the Romans would be unfair, not to mention impractical. But if the actions were relatively recent or longstanding (both of which are true of antiblack discrimination in this country) then some form of redress makes more sense.
The real questions then are how much, what form it should take and how long it should last.
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And that time, if it ever existed, is
long gone.
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That is the KEY to this whole thing - the very heart of anti-white discrimination devolves around this evil idea of group responsibility, which strikes at the very core of the concept of justice, which is that individuals get their merited rewards and punishments.
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As noted above, though, there are times when group punishment makes sense.
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We'll just have to agree to disagree.
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Another bogus argument. I grew up in an extremely poor environment. Exactly how did I benefit from "lingering effects of past racial discrimination"?
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Maybe you didn't. But maybe you did -- arguably, being white is still an advantage when it comes to getting a job (most employers are white, and most don't harbor anti-white bias), and I'll bet you were never arrested or overly scrutinized because of your skin color, as blacks still are in many places.
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As I told you, I went through university and my work life up to the current time, stuggling like crazy in school and only getting money I had to work for from assistantships. This is because "affirmative action" assumes I had "lingering advantages" - which I didn't. Conversely, "affirmative action" assumes, say, a middle class black girl with professional parents had "lingering disadvantages", so it dumps all the goodies on her. "Affirmative action" is thus complete madness, precisely for the reason that it it implements sledge-hammer policies for groups, instead of regarding people as individuals. In that regard, it's a mirror image of the racism that it is purports to counteract.
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An argument can be made that whites PAID, not benefitted, for former mistreatment of blacks, starting with the hundreds of thousands of union troops who died dismantling slavery.
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Some paid; most didn't. And the question there is whether that sacrifice outweighs the price paid by blacks. If I steal $100 from you and give you back $10, would you feel I paid a real price?
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It's more like you steal $100 from me, and I steal the $100 from someone else entirely to get even.
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In later years, if one accepts blacks' (and liberals') claim that the residual poverty in the ghetto and its consequences are due to past discrimination, then whites are paying for that too, with taxes for trillions of dollars for war on poverty programs, welfare checks, black on white crime, and other things that are easy to hypothesize such as higher taxes since blacks have less wealth to tax.
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Good point. Yet I suspect you oppose most or all of those programs. And anyway, most of the beneficiaries of such programs are white, simply because they are the majority at every economic level
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Blacks disproportionately benefit from them, and I do oppose almost all of them, because I think ghetto blacks condition now is largely a result of their voluntary social pathologies.
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As I've said before, I'm all for a system that helps people based on economics, not race. If blacks are being discriminated against, such a system should help them disproportionately. If they're not, it won't. Seems like a nice way to sidestep the whole race issue.
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And I oppose it - merit is merit.
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No, because you either have merit or you don't.
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But again you miss what defines "merit." I think the guy who gets a "B" average while holding down two jobs and caring for his invalid mother has more merit than the guy with the full-ride scholarship who gets an "A." The former faced huge obstacles that the latter didn't, yet still managed to get decent grades. You have to take into account the hurdles people face before you can judge the results they get.
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I went through immense stuggles in early life, and I didn't see anybody taking that into account. Instead, I saw Ohio State hand out fellowships by the hundred for grad school to blacks for being black, while I had to work 30 hours a week as a TA and RA.
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I was in for a giant shock when I first got to university - I made a "D" average because of the low standards of the ghetto government schools I had attended. I realized at that point what my situation was, dug in like crazy and EARNED a 3.5/4.0 grade average when I graduated - in physics.
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You illustrate my point. With your D average, you obviously didn't belong there, according to your own standards. You were unprepared, and your spot should have gone to someone more deserving. You didn't have enough "merit."
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But I scored a combined 1430 on my SATs.
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Please explain why you would have let yourself into college, if we were running things your way.
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See above.
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Within a democratic polity only, I agree with broadly based assistance to poor people, not selecting out particular ethnic groups for privileges. That assistance should be of the kind that encourages such people to improve themselves. In no case do I support racial discrimination.
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On this we agree. I'm simply able to also see a legitimate (minor) role for considering skin color, for specific purposes -- the strongest of which is assembling a student body that reflects the broader society, and the most precarious of which is "redressing past discrimination."
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It's not "minor" - probably every black student in the country and very many black employees benefit from "affirmative action" - which ONLY takes place with anti-white discrimination.
P.S.: Have we got to the "He who posts last wins" phase?
11-13-2007, 12:52 PM
You should know
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