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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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In the USA in 2022 the vast majority of skin color based discrimination occurs under the guise of so called "affirmative action" programs. These programs pretend to be anti racist but at their core they are just racial discrimination against whites and Asians. So the question becomes, "what is the most effective way to fight affirmative action" and I think the answer is just spreading awareness of the extent of discrimination that goes on, especially in elite universities. Affirmative action already polls as quite unpopular but I find that in my own social circle many less online people are shocked to see the extent of discrimination that is going on. In public school I was fed lies about affirmative action, I was told it never meant picking a less qualified candidate it only meant considering the underrepresented candidate thoroughly or using race as a tie breaker for equally qualified candidates. A quick look at admission statistics disproves these lies quickly. Another pervasive lie is the idea that AA helps underprivileged students but at elite universities the main beneficiaries are wealthy blacks, not kids from the ghetto. I think if this knowledge was more widespread public support would collapse even further and hopefully the supreme court would be pressured to make a strong ruling.

It may even hurt qualified minorities because employers may assume they were recipients of AA

In the USA in 2022 the vast majority of skin color based discrimination occurs under the guise of so called "affirmative action" programs.

Looking at the way policies are de jure defined, of course, but if one starts from the assumption that disparities in outcomes reflect the magnitude of discrimination, you can conclude that there must be a lot of "discrimination dark matter" out there that necessarily more than cancels out any official policies pointing in the other direction. So the direction one would go with this challenge depends on whether one makes that assumption or not.

Literally God of the Gaps, social justice version. Also this is a form of circular reasoning.

Well if you start with false assumptions you can literally prove anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

but if one starts from the assumption that disparities in outcomes reflect the magnitude of discrimination

One can always prove too much if one starts from false assumptions.

If one starts from that assumption, then one would observe that there are minorities (Jews, some Asians) who are More Likely than whites, yet have suffered more discrimination than them.

This would mean that it has to be a Jewish and partially Asian conspiracy to suppress all the other races, and that any observed historic anti-black discrimination is marginal compared to the discrimination dark matter of the Jews.

Barring a very small minority, people don't start from that assumption. They use the historic treatment of blacks as a rhetorical club, and under no circumstances permit actual science or reason to touch their assumed Original Sin substitute. But it's so stupidly obvious when you add more data points than white American and black American, and look at the relationship between historic oppression and current outcomes, I tend to default to assuming that no one actually starts with that assumption.

I don't think anyone takes that assumption seriously though, they just apply it selectively to professions that their preferred group is underrepresented in. Downthread, people bring up the NFL and NBA, which seem like pretty good examples of desirable jobs that have one race wildly overrepresented. The MLB has a big overrepresentation of Latinos. Marathoning is dominated by East Africans. Physics and mathematics have way more Jewish and Asian-American representation than the general population. Software has more Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans. All of these examples make it seem entirely obvious that there are contingent reasons for differences in representation and that rounding off to "disparity = discrimination" is ridiculous.

The original disparity = discrimination impetus was feminism.

Why aren't there equal ratio of female CEO's?

While the approach isn't sound logically, it is extremely powerful at a memetic level, bonding feminists together in a holy war against their obvious perceived oppression.

It was so succesful with feminism that it was ported into race relations, and gay issues, and now trans movement.

Well, yes, I've said as much before. If you're flexible with the application, or just use this formula:

Group Doing well? Doing badly?
Oppressor: Undeserved Deserved
Oppressed: Deserved Undeserved

You can be quite supremacist in your pursuit of equality.

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