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Comment by DistressedDrone | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to attack the author rather than the article, but it's hard to take them seriously when they use terms like "liberals hate" and "lol" in an article that aims to be empirical. It's just so needlessly adversarial?

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Unfortunately, having a thoughtful discussion on college admissions is seemingly impossible.

I'm a member of a number of alumni groups of academic institutions and have seen Facebook discussions devolve quite like the author describes. Presenting actual data refuting emotionally held positions gets you labeled and libeled.

Yeah. I find intentionally divisive articles like this hard to respect. The author is either trying to game engagement through division or insultingly bucket people into their camps because they really see the world this way. I wish people would stop legitimizing this.

Edited- fixed stuff, finished my thought

I find the concept of removing entrance tests so more black people can be accepted into college divisive too. Sometimes divisive issues just need to be addressed head-on in a way that avoids unnecessary flamebait or emotional amplification. I feel the article did an OK job at that, considering how sensitive the topic is.

I suspect it’s out of frustration of knocking down the same baseless arguments over and over again.

I completely agree. Up until the final paragraph of the article, the point the author seemed to be making is "rich people will do better in college so only rich people should go to college."

If the author gave you that impression then he truly failed to communicate his point. The author is a Marxist who has written a book (plugged in the article) against the entire system of education-based meritocracy. He most certainly does not believe education should be reserved exclusively for the rich. Instead, he’s in favour of a large social safety net that allows struggling students to opt out of the education system without giving up on life.

I had a Marxist teacher in high school, and I wanted to learn more about it, so I read a lot of Marx and other foundational socialist literature. I was very confused every time he infused racialism into contemporary issues, which didn’t seem to exist anywhere in the doctrine. I came to understand that racialism and genderism are mostly just tactics to dismantle capitalism ‘by any means neccessary’. But these are the same division tactics that utopian Marxists accuse capitalists of exploiting in class warfare. From that vantage point, the distinction fades between the depictions of capitalist exploitation and of revolutionary Marxism. It turns out that politics and war are defined more by tactics than doctrine, and tactics themselves by effectiveness rather than any moral or rational basis. This seems to be the point actually, of revolutionary Marxists, who observed that “power comes from the barrel of a gun”, and adapted their tactics to match, to win the battle over their utopian doctrine. If they had logically recursed one layer deeper, they would have seen that they are not fighting for the doctrine, they are fighting for the fighting. The other side is also full of empty philosophy, and the distinction between doctrines fades away when given either their best interpretation, or their worst.

So I wonder what he means by calling himself a Marxist. Clearly he’s diverging from the party lines.

> he truly failed to communicate his point

Yes, exactly. His ultimate point in this article, if I understood that right (i.e., affirmative action can be helpful, but it is the beginning, not the end of the support for those people it helps) I find quite reasonable. Everything leading up to that point seemed to be saying "the system is doing exactly what it was intended to, the people who think this is fixable are fools, we should just leave it alone." I think a lot of people who might otherwise agree with his point would get lost in the liberal-bashing.

More like, affirmative action actually secretly benefits rich people versus poor boat people.

“ I’m supposed to understand that a first generation kid whose parents started their flight from Laos on a raft made from tires are the beneficiaries of the cultural biases of a bunch of ETS employees?”

Which he doesn’t cite statistics showing these folks are the ones disadvantaged by the policy (though I agree lumping all Asians together doesn’t make sense).

Irritatingly, an article that bemoans a homogenous view based on race repeatedly views members of a particular political leaning as ideologically homogenous.

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