WHY IS THERE A HOSTILE, RESENTFUL MOOD
WHEN WE DISCUSS EQUAL OPPORTUNITY + AFFIRMATIVE ACTION?
Thats what the media has been talking about in light of the scandals and job discrimination…any thoughts on this?
Because the words reek of social engineering and political correctness gone mad.
For example “affirmative action” is a very rosy term for something highly contentious. A classical liberal may prefer the term ‘racist action’, as it seeks to make entrance criteria lower for a particular race. According to their definition of racism, that is definitely racist.
I’m not saying one term is better than the other, but to refer to ‘affirmative action’ is not to be neutral. By cashing out the term in a euphemism, the left seek to legitemate their politics in an underhand fashion.
We should be just as sceptical of terms such as “affirmative action” and “equal opportunity” as we should be of “Ministry of Love” or the “Final solution”. It is sophistry to mask politics with pleasantries.
for real. Political discourse is like that though, irrespective of the subject. Whoever shapes the popular perceptions of the meanings of words controls the shape of public discussion. Fox News has been doing this forever…
Forever? They haven’t been around that all that long. I would say they’re biased to the right, but no more so than CNN, CBS & ABC lean to the left.
Affirmative action to me seems like racism, by definition. Sad thing is that it sends a tacit message that minorities can’t compete on their own without special treatment, which is definately not the case. Truly PC madness.
I don’t understand how affirmative action implies racism.
I don’t think that’s true at all. If all other things were equal, then it would send the tacit message that minorities can’t compete on their own without special treatment, but that definitely isn’t the case. It’s just a fact that statistically african & latin american children find themselves of school districts of lower quality and in worse financial circumstances. Success and earning power later in life is pretty strongly tied to education and the income of your family. Not to mention there are probably still alot of racist business owners and employers.
Affirmative action is just a way to correct for existing socio-economic inequality.
That’s one opinion.
It’s not really an opinion as much as it is a sociological fact of life. It’s an aspect of the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth (ITW). The ITW is a sociological phenomenon, which stipulates that a child inherits his her or her family’s socio-economic status. This status affects socio-economic mobility. For instance, if a child is born into an impoverished family, it is highly likely that said child will also end up just as poor due to a lack of available resources and opportunities in their respective communities - exceptions to the rule accepted. The latter also corresponds with other socio-economic states, however, the correlation differs slightly; The likelihood of socio-economic mobility decreases or increases depending on the “starting point” from which the child builds on.
Minorities in general, having inherited less wealth [note 1] since integration and slavery (blacks in this very specific case) into mainstream American society, are less likely to be socio-economically mobile, particularly if they must rely on their own efforts. Affirmative Action is a response to a past socio-economic paradigm that stifled the ability of minorities to gain wealth.
Note 1: Wealth is not to be confused with income. Wealth is the control of capital (resources, manufacturing, labor and retail etc.).
i dont think its quite so complicated, public schools are funded by local property taxes. that means that if you are only able to live in a poor neighborhood, your kids will be damned to go to a poor public school, because tax paying, children-having white people are too disgustingly selfish to share the goodness of their own childrens education. its the most pathetic aristocratic policy in existence today and it really requires some violently angry curse words directed at our politicians.
there are clear, identifiable reasons why poor people have children who grow up poor, and those things can easily be rectified if the government gave a god damn about people who dont contribute money to their campaigns.
however, i think affirmative action is a bad idea due to what i heard from a rich white business man. when a company is required to hire affirmative action employees, the other, white employees wont exactly know which employees were forced to be hired, but they will know that some employees are being hired that are likely not actually as qualified as they could be. they also know that all of those less-qualified employees are not white. what this means is that if they have the slightest reason to suspect a minority employee is less qualified, they will totally not respect him because they will assume he is the affirmative action hiree and is actually less qualified. they will actually justifiably be racist and will totally learn to respect black people even less than they would have otherwise.
what we need is not silly programs like this, but to fund public education equally. what is dubyas plan? punish schools that do badly by giving them less money, even if their problems are caused by a lack of money.
NO! none of these corporate owned stations said a word about the fact that bush lied about giving most of the tax cuts to poor people and they all think al-jazeera is the devil, and none of them talk about any foreign (especially non-european) points of view. the “left” stations appear to be “left” because fox news has set a new standard of neoconservativism, and the center is now considered the left.
the real left that is comparable to fox news is something like “dollars and sense” magazine, which youve probably never heard of because massive corporations dont fund leftist media.
word.
“It’s not really an opinion as much as it is a sociological fact of life”.
No, Phaedrus is right, it is an opinion. Kerintok had said “Affirmative action is just a way to correct for existing socio-economic inequality”. One can accept your sociological facts (although its doubtful they have no normative component), but still reject that ‘affirmative action’ is the approriate way of dealing with the problem.
Research will surely show that certain racial groups come from a lower socio-economic grouping than others. Research could also show that lazy people tend to be in lower socio-economic groups. Lazy people have been discriminated against for centuries. Research can show that there is a systemic prejudice against the work-shy by motivated people.
It does not follow that ‘affirmative action’ should apply to lazy people also. Whatever the facts say about blacks’ socio-economic status, no fact can tell you that blacks as a race are owed any government assistance. That requires a value judgement that poor blacks are owed more government assistance than poor whites.
You have sought to couch a value judgement in terms of fact. This is the illegitate leftist tactic that I was referring to.
Another one of my favourite leftist sophistries is “homophobia”. It is used, even in court cases, to refer to all those who dislike gays. The term should only apply to those who are actually fearful of gays. Instead the left try to class it as a pathology so that they need not listen to arguments. Instead of treating dislike of gays as an arguable position, they treat its as an illness to be ignored.
Clearly it’s an opinion. It’s an opinion in the very same sense that the proposition “Evolution is the way human beings have come to be as they are now” is also an opinion. But it is more a point of fact than it is an opinion, which is what I stated. I did not say it was not an opinion.
Laziness is in no way an analogue of race or minorityhood.
In practice, no, you are correct, Affirmative Action should not apply to lazy people. One, Affirmative Action deals with minorityhood and, two, it does not deal with simple matters of work-ethic, which can change.
I don’t dabble in Politics and I have only pointed out a sociological phenomenon and that, I quote: “Affirmative Action is a response to a past socio-economic paradigm that stifled the ability of minorities to gain wealth.” I have not said, that Affirmative Action is better, or placed any aesthetic evaluation on the matter. Your point is moot.
I share the same position. Phobias are an irrational fear and while I’m sure that there are people who are in fact homophobic, simply disliking homosexuals is not a matter of pathology. I don’t like low-fat milk, for instance, but I’m certainly not “lactosephobic”. However, this seems rather immaterial to the point at hand.
“It’s an opinion in the very same sense that the proposition “Evolution is the way human beings have come to be as they are now” is also an opinion”.
Not in my opinion 
I make a distinction between a scientific theory and the notion that affirmative action is the way of dealing with socio-economic deficiencies which is obviously more contestable. I propose that scientific method has no influence on the latter.
“I did not say it was not an opinion”.
Oh, I’m sorry. You said it was not "really an opinion.
“Laziness is in no way an analogue of race or minorityhood”
Any distinction is one of value judgement, not facts.
"I have not said, that Affirmative Action is better, or placed any aesthetic evaluation on the matter. Your point is moot. "
No you didn’t, and I don’t claim that you did. I do claim that Kerintock did so and that was what I was affirming with Phaedrus as a matter of opinion. I had no intention of debunking your explicit opinions on aff action which I knew not of.
"However, this seems rather immaterial to the point at hand. "
I don’t see how it would seem that way. I proposed it as an analogy to terms such as “affirmative action” and “equal opportunity”, which purport to descibe contestable opinions as sceintific fact. Whether or not I’m right, it’s clearly material to the topic of why people refer to said leftist terms in teh way they do.
Affirmative action is in effect a form of reverse racism. It is forcing employers to hire people specifically due to race and thereby disregarding qualifications.
To use a common analogy: If my house is on fire I want the best qualified fireman coming up the ladder for me, not one who got the job just because the government said “you dont have enough blacks or latinos here so you better hire some more”