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Comment by nodiscpls | Hacker News Reader

Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide discrimination is now ok, just because. It ends up with parody situations, like here in the UK, there is the joke about a lady making an absolute fortune, companies being desperate to hire her, because she is disabled, ethnic, lesbian, has diverse politics - and so in one hire, the company can tick every positive discrimination category.

Back to the real world though - what a shitty thing to do to someone - to care so little about them as an individual, but to only give them a place because they meet this week's PC hiring criteria. For shame all of those who promote or continue with positive discrimination.

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  > Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and
  > stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive
  > or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide
  > discrimination is now ok, just because.

Seriously? "Just because?" The ignorance here is staggering. Or there is dishonesty. There's lots of room for arguing the theory what should be done about America's racism problem, or whether anything will work at all, but none whatsoever for suggesting that people are doing things "just because."

Next, your use of the word "insidious." This means something that appears innocuous but is actually a creeping evil. There is nothing "innocuous" about affirmative action. It's not banal. Nobody thinks it makes no difference.

Insidious is something like claiming to strengthen democracy by eliminating voter fraud, but actually attempting to suppress the votes of African-Americans. THAT is insidious.

Openly favouring applications of one group while openly claiming that you believe this will right a systemic wrong is not insidious. You may feel it is wrong-headeded, but there is no deceit involved.

Finally, you may not intend it this way, but your phrasing is misleading. It makes it seem as if affirmative action, by being "the most insidious discrimination," is somehow more dangerous and damaging than the everyday discrimination minorities face every day in North America and have for more than a century.

Affirmative action may be misguided, but under no circumstances is it the same level of threat to our stated principles of equality as the existing systemic and cultural discrimination minorities face. To use words so carelessly as to equate the two is irresponsible argumentation.

Racism is intrinsically wrong because it is discrimination for discrimination's sake. Races don't exist, they're a fiction.

Ethiopians and Papuans are both "black", Japanese and Indian people are both "asian", Spaniards and Bosnians are both "white", and nobody can agree on what the hell "hispanic" means.

None of these people have anything in common, culturally, genetically, linguistically, you need a bogus concept like 'race' to do that.

It's fine for universities to use a form of affirmative action to correct society, they're called grants.

So then you're saying that Harvard is being discriminatory right? Because they are accepting students with test scores WAY below those of the superior test scores of the asian pacific islander visual demographic. In that way they are being discriminatory, in other words, they don't want too many asians around and they have a certain look for the school they wish to achieve or maintain. So racism. People these days aren't used to hearing about Asian discrimination because black discrimination is thrown in our face so much it's almost fatiguing.

This instance is very much a first world problem (I couldn't get into harvard because I'm asian, but that white or black person did even though they scored lower.) but it's one we have proof of and it's very much worth fixing to set an example everywhere.

You read harvard's reply or reasoning that what they do is ok. Actually depending how you interpret it it could be a complaint by harvard. They said are following STATE Law. Maybe, if we interpret what they said another way, we learn they don't like doing things that way and really shouldn't be held accountable for any so called legal discrimination because they are following the law. Maybe harvard wants us to blame the law and not them. Maybe harvard would like to bring on more asians or more whites but can't even though they perform better and do more research.

Any attempt for harvard or any other school to bring up the holistic student argument is ridiculous. Because Asian students very much participate in extracurricular activities here and in asian countries, objectively so. You won't see a lot on the football or basketball team. You will see a lot of them in other things sports and clubs of all kinds.

Also what do you mean to affirmative action will "correct" society? In what interpretation is a society "corrected" if as you said races are a fiction in your mind? If there's no race, then there's no racism, it's just a bunch of people interacting with a bunch of other people of various colors and any "trends" are meaningless.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say it's a fiction but then wish that any places you go was would be more "correct" if it were more color diverse, (tossing out all concept of people's personal choice or their capabilities.)

Races do exist because groups of people evolved based on their environments and their ancestors ability to procreate. We may not know exactly why because people move and separate and that long span of time has no written record really. But we do know people look different, their languages are different behaviors however "anecdotally" are often different. Their prevalence of various conditions, disease and health are different. Artifacts were different too. Their capabilities on tests across the world are clearly different.

And if various experiments weren't shunned we'd likely understand more about race. They acquired various levels of intelligence and physique due to conditions. The problem is a lot of these things that make people different aren't studied enough. Because universities fear their reputation because even true scientific findings can and have been hidden due to political implications. Thankfully learning about the brain and understanding people are sciences that won't be stopped. So we'll probably learn more over time about race. We most certainly won't be able to find ways to boost equality in humans or find how or where they best flourish if we can't study and be able to honestly interpret the differences in humans.

>being "the most insidious discrimination," is somehow more dangerous and damaging than the everyday discrimination minorities face every day in North America and have for more than a century.

This is why it's so dangerous, no one takes it seriously.

The actual purpose of Harvard is to mix the children of the elite (regardless of their ability) with talented children of a broad cross section of the rest of society. One can observe this directly by searching "harvard" on wikileaks: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/20/deborah-friedell/how-to...

or by, say, observing the life of Barack Obama.

The stated mission of Harvard college is to "educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society"

In neither case is their any value is filling up the school with people with highest test scores. The primary use of the test scores is to select from the cream from a broad cross section of society, because the entirety of society is whom the graduates of are expected to lead (serve or exploit). A secondary use is to extort larger sums of money from the elite whose children score exceptionally low.

Working class whites complain that lower scoring african americans get jobs as police or firemen over higher scoring whites. They ignore that purpose of the tests is simply to weed out people who can't do the job.

Scholastic test scores serve a similar purpose. Harvard has an exceptionally high graduation rate. There is no reason to believe that Harvard is admitting students who can't benefit from what is offered. Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

I am glad to see that someone understands this. These schools exist for the benefit of the wealthy.

> Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

Perfectly stated.

Well, the general idea is "there are groups of people who are being discriminated against at some level, so we'll discriminate for them at this level, to even the scales out."

A better solution would be to stop negative discrimination in the first place, but sometimes that's too hard. When you pile hacks on hacks, you end up with crazy edge cases.

Yeah, I think achieving this - or even coming sufficiently close to achieving this - is impossible. Tracking discrimination is very difficult.

A person is an incredibly complex array of both discriminatory and nondiscriminatory features. A tall, poor African American with a really great support network might actually face less discrimination than a fat, middle-class European American who has that one goofy ear. It's just impossible try and rectify this after the fact. Stopping negative discrimination in the first place is not just a better solution, it's the only solution.

I think I'm inclined to agree.

Spreading that fictional "parody situation" is fuel for real discrimination. At best, you've got it backwards.

People of colour & women who are perfectly competent at their jobs fall under more suspicion, have to prove themselves more, and are assumed to be less competent than white men doing the same work. There are so many studies affirming this.

It's pretty ugly behaviour to hold onto the idea that a single PoC might be an incompetent "diversity token" rather than just ... someone doing their job.

> People of colour

Are Asians not POC?

The term is nonsense anyways.

>It's pretty ugly behaviour to hold onto the idea that a single PoC might be an incompetent "diversity token" rather than just ... someone doing their job.

I've got news for you: People don't hold white males in high regard because they're white males, they do so because they're privileged.

I've never met a "SJW" that actually knows what it's like to be poor, it's all well-off, college educated, mostly white people. Some social justice warriors even go so far as to split people up into groups (PoC?) while at the same time espousing ideas of "equality".

I think most poor people who make their way to the top don't actually get any help, so they end up forming conservative view points, whereas the rich white people just can't understand why poor people don't just stop being poor. It must be because they're black! Congratulations you're a racist.

>Spreading that fictional "parody situation" is fuel for real discrimination.

No it's not. You're basically saying that by not taking race into account at all you're fueling racism. Institutionalized discrimination fuels racism. Why do you refuse to accept that people who are against affirmative discrimination may in fact be for RACE BLINDNESS and not just letting people be racist?

Why can't being blind to race completely be an option? Why does everything that doesn't go your way have to be racism? It sounds more to me like you're just trying to control the narrative to push some political agenda.

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