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Comment by jonnybgood | Hacker News Reader

> The leader of Students for Fair Admissions and the architect of the case against Harvard is Edward Blum, a longtime crusader against affirmative action who has recruited plaintiffs, hired sympathetic lawyers and raised millions of dollars from conservative groups to challenge voting rights laws and affirmative action policies, often successfully.

Is this really about discrimination against Asian-Americans?

View on HN

Thoughts 1) a lot of this sounds like a fishing expedition 2) Asian-Americans certainly face discrimination in other walks of life 3) “But what about Asians?” is pretty much like “But what about black-on-black crime?” of conservative talking points trying to deny the reality of race in America.

In short, this is a devious way of disrupting affirmative action and I’m simultaneously impressed and horrified.

Yea "devious" if you're not Asian. Affirmative action is a garbage policy. It should be predicated directly on financial means instead of race.

Yes, affirmative action is unfair. Everything should be based on the wealth of your parents, which is fair.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>sarcasm

>strawman

I'm Asian, my kids are going to apply to universities in America in a few years, and I'm OK with Affirmative action.

Yes, I know they might have slightly better chance of acceptance if Affirmative action is gone. So what?

Radiolab's More Perfect had a pair of very interesting episodes on Edward Blum:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/more-perfect-plaintiffs/

and

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/architect-edward-blum/

Not really, if Asians were actually being treated the same (and the schools admission rates shifted to a higher percentage of Asian students) then people would start bitching about privileged Asians.

Meanwhile Asian people are actually pissed off for the right reasons.

it can be both

> Is this really about discrimination against Asian-Americans?

It's not at all. Unsurprisingly, East Asian and South Asian community groups have by and large gone incredibly far out of their way to distance themselves from this lawsuit. It took Blum a comically long period of time even to find people with standing who were willing to participate in it.

You won't find that to be the predominant sentiment on HN, but HN has never been particularly representative of other populations when it comes to political topics, especially race and discrimination.

Sincere question: what do you mean by "other populations"?

> Sincere question: what do you mean by "other populations"?

HN does not provide a representative view of any group other than "HN readers".

It doesn't even do a great job of representing programmers, or people who work in tech. So if you come to HN and expect the things you read to be representative of any group broader than that, you'll end up pretty far off the mark.

Nitpick but it actually represents "HN commenters" because there almost certainly a lot of people who do not comment and those people don't necessarily have the same view as the commenters.

Thanks? I really don't know why I would have the expectation that the views expressed on HN would be representative of the views of a group other than "People who comment on Hacker News".

Same goes for any other site that people comment on...

My sense would be they are just implying that HN is overwhelmingly white, which wouldn’t be surprising.

Not OP, but I’ll just observe that HN does have a recognisable political slant. Not everyone on it shares the views of that slant, but if you haven’t noticed it’s presence, it’s probably because you do share those views.

I'm not sure how that's answering my question...?

That "recognizable slant" is in the eye of the beholder. On divisive issues, the community is simply divided, as is the society at large—or rather, the societies, since HN is a majority-international site. But that's not how it feels, because of this effect, which a reader pointed out yesterday:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751922

I guarantee you that readers with opposite views to yours have opposite views of HN's "recognizable slant". Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407769. Or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134205 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16750306. And so on.

HN is a majority-international site

Sorry, but is this claim based on pageviews, or the origins of the comments being posted?

It's not like guardian.co.uk/international is in fact international news and opinion.

I mean that no country has a majority of the users hitting HN. In terms of posting comments it's a bit more than 50% from the US.

The point, though, is that people coming here are coming from many different countries, so opinion is more divided than it would be from just one. There aren't only political and ideological divides, but national, cultural, and linguistic ones. Understandably—because the information isn't available—people don't take this into account. That unfortunately leads to a lot of misunderstanding and even ill will.

It is heartening to know you do gather information of this granularity.

Why not make it available?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521

where HN community are based

A vague question

The numbers depend on how you measure 'user' and 'location'

Gets a vague answer.

My question was specifically about the commentariat not eyeballs.

I don't think myself as worthy of an answer specifically to me. I think it would be for the best benefit of others if not buried in some obscure thread.

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