jonottawa, on 2016-November-18, 14:26, said:
"Kaitlyn, it's also worth noting that by Mike's own definition, he is a racist. I'm confident that he favors discriminating against whites in hiring or in university applications. I'm confident that he supports racially/religiously polarizing organizations like La Raza & Black Lives Matter & the Muslim Brotherhood. I'm confident that he hasn't spent a minute of his life advocating for more 'diversity' in China, or in Africa, or in India, or in Japan, or in Israel, or in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, or in Bangladesh, or in South Korea."
"Just to be clear, I am NOT calling Mike a racist. I am saying that Mike, if he were being intellectually honest and consistent, would call HIMSELF a racist.
"
Now Mike, here's how an intellectually honest person would reply to my argument:
Either deny that you favor/support the things that I say I'm confident you favor/support.
OR
Explain how favoring/supporting those things doesn't constitute having "opinions of or behaviours towards people [that] are influenced by the race of such people."
Here's how YOU replied:
IQ differences!
I'm amused at being called a racist!
I'm going to keep misusing the word bigot no matter how many times you post its definition!
You're a white supremacist!
Shame on you, sir.
Ok.
Favouring affirmative action is a complex issue, and not prone to simple binary views, in which favouring it is seen as racial discrimination against whites or men.
Understanding the arguments for affirmative action requires more than knee-jerk name-calling.
The arguments that I would advance include:
Cultural values evolve slowly
role models are important
For virtually all of recorded history various forms of prejudice influence life in all cultures. I happen to have an interest in the history of science as well as the evolution of life in general and human life in particular, so I have read extensively, albeit as a layperson with no particular training.
Read anything written 100 years ago...or 150...or....and you will see discrimination that forms part of the background to the story. It is so omnipresent that it seems that the writer and intended audience weren't even aware of the biases, in much the same fashion that allows Kaitlyn to repeatedly protest that she isn't at all racist.
Thus how many female astronomers had doctorates 80 years ago? How many women were medical doctors in the 1950's. How many were lawyers?
Ask the same question about blacks, or latinos. Look back at history and find when the first Jewish member of Parliament was elected in the UK. Heck, I belong to a club here in Victoria that only voted to admit women some 20 years ago....fwiw, I refused invitations to join until that was rescinded.
When I was in Engineering, more than 40 years ago, there were no more than one or two women, and the undergraduate society was openly sexist: at one 'smoker' the class president screwed a hired hooker on stage.
So as a young woman, back in the 1950s or 60s or earlier, when deciding what career to choose...it took a lot of independence even to think of a career other than finding a husband.
As a young black, whether male or female, but of course twice as difficult for a female, what career could one look towards?
It wasn't and isn't merely the resistance that some professions put in the way. It is also about the examples in one's life.
I do a lot of work that involves the assessment of possible career paths that would have been followed by young people who have now been disabled by accidents. So I deal with experts in this area all the time, and myy understanding is that children generally, though by now means always, tend towards careers similar to thise followed by older family members. I stress that this is only a generalization and by no means even close to being 'more likely than not'.
However, I know many lawyers who have at least one parent as a lawyer, and the same for doctors, accountants, carpenters, electrcians and so on.
We rely on role models.
So imagine that as a society we have decided that the prejudices of the past are unfair, and we want or professions to more accurately reflect a fair and just society?
We could take the long road and not touch the old boys prejudices....let the old boys die off, and hope that as the generations pass, we see a slow increase in the participation of women or blacks or...
Or we could say: one good way to make young people realize that they can in fact hope to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer, is to confer advantages on those people, until such time as it becomes as easy for a woman or for a black man to aspire to become a lawyer, etc as it has been for a white.
Bear in mind that the oppressed (and I know that term will drive jon nuts), continue, usually, to suffer from ongoing discrimination. Affirmative action isn't imposed on a level playing field. Were it to be so imposed, then I would be opposed to it. It would be unjustifiable.
But despite the mistaken beliefs earlier espoused by Kaitlyn, discrimination is rampant, and so too are the effects of socio-economic disparities, that are themselves both causes and results of generations of systemic discrimination.
The playing field remains tilted against those favoured by affirmative action, so the discrimination created by affirmative action serves to offset, and only partially offset, the background bias.
Affirmative action is a form of discrimination as a response to a problem, and not a goal of its own. That is the difference between supporting affirmative action on the one hand, and engaging in voter suppression (as did many Republican States) on the other, or of electing only white males to office.
Btw, for anyone interested in how racial prejudice impacts bright African-americans, read Neil deGrasse Tyson's stories about the obstacles he had to overcome to be an astrophysicist.
I don't 'support' La Raza, altho the limited information I have on that suggests that it is not engaged in promoting race divisions or hatreds. Whether I would endorse amy of it aims would depend on what they were. BLM: from what I have heard, it seems to have some fairly cogent things to say about the state of race relations in the US. I don't know much about it, and it may or may not be that I would approve some, all or none of its stated agenda.
Do I think that there is compelling evidence that blacks are disproportionally wrongly shot by police in the US? Yes, I do.
Do I also accept that the proportion of citizen-police interactions that result in the police killing an unarmed or surrendering or fleeing suspect is roughly the same for whites and blacks? I am uncertain because I haven't read the paper that apparently suggests this to be the case, and I know, from having looked into internet references to 'sources' that not all sources are reliable and not all papers are valid. However, I am willing to entertain the notion, while still noting that blacks are proportionately far more likely to be confronted by armed police than are whites, thus generating a far higher per capita rate of shootings.
The problem, iow, isn't that police kill blacks who they have stopped far more frequently than they kill whites they have stopped. It is that they stop, and thus create high risk encounters, blacks far more often than whites, based on population statistics.
As for the Muslim Brotherhood: again I have limited knowledge. I do not 'support' entities whose beliefs or practices are unknown to me. If they advocate, for example, the peaceful interaction of peoples without regard to religion, then I'd likely support them, but I have a sneaking hunch that at least some of the members don't think that way. In addition, and as a general but nout universal bias, I think that anyone whose prime identifier is their religious belief is delusional. Organized religion, in my opinion, is on balance, a terrible force for evil. There are notable exceptions: Mycroft, as one example, and I have profound differences about religion but I have great admiration for what I know of Mycroft's character. So, I suspect I would not support the MB were I to be bothered to learn more about it.
I have already addressed the silly points about my lack of advocacy on issues arising in and affecting other areas of the world. I tend to form and express opinions about subjects where I have some understanding of the issues. Unlike many right wingers, I am very comfortable with acknowledging that opinions should be based on evidence, not belief. Belief flows from considering the facts. The facts are not the result of the belief. Had Kaitlyn understood that, many of her more offensive posts would not have been written.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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