Comment on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 18:45:05 GMT

It is explicitly aimed at adjusting for wrongs done elsewhere ... balancing unfairness in one place against opposite unfairness in another.

Oh, boy! Why in the world would anyone think this is a good justification for anything? And you see the problems, as you say

I am not claiming that this is a good idea ... Only that that's the intention

How intending to do something which is a bad idea is a good thing? Moreover, the whole concept of counterbalancing unfairness elsewhere by introducing new unfairness... let's say it has deficiencies :-/

So the Affirmative Actor is an idiot. I can agree with that, but I am not sure that you want to come to that conclusion.

In general, I'm not pretending that reasons to support affirmative action do not exist. But I shortcut to the balance and I find the balance wanting.

What makes it special is the fact that people have been discriminating on the basis of race for years and years, and often still do.

Yup. And the same is true about height. And conventional prettiness. And being disfigured in some way. And just being weird. And not coming from this village, but from that village over the ridge. So what's special about race, again?

And it's not as if racism (of the usual anti-black sort) stopped when the "Civil Rights era" began.

As you know, I believe that blacks' average IQ is lower that that of whites by about a standard deviation. That is quite sufficient for many (probably most) people to call me a racist and point to me as exhibit A that racism still exists and needs programs like affirmative action to combat it.

Of course there is a slight problem in that if my belief is true, affirmative action (and similar attempts at forced equalisation of outcomes) can never reach its goals and so will remain in place forever.

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