This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway, it's not a good goal. People are different and they're going to have different outcomes, even if only considering chance. But they should have the same opportunities regardless of race, gender, etc. Making policy to address this is tackling the root of the problem instead of the symptoms.
> This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway,
For this statement alone the left can label you as far right. In the past 10 years or so, I repeatedly hear a consistent message: we fight for equal outcome. And of course, identity is a critical factor, if not the only factor, in this fight. I'm actually very curious how the American elites reach this conclusion, and how they reconcile the bloody history of people pursuing equal outcome (or in the name of it).
I always thought of myself as quite left of center. Now I find myself on the right, and I don't understand if I became more conservative as I got older, or if the center moved past me to the left.
The center has not moved as much as the willingness of journalists and news organizations to ignore their duties to provide a truthful and unbiased service to their readers and constituents. Allowing their built-in left-leaning biases to affect their mission has given the impression that the population has shifted left.
The next few elections will possibly shake some of this out. I just hope it doesn’t swing too far the other way.
I largely agree, but here's an attempt at a "steel man" of the opposing point of view:
Unjust discrimination is complex, often subconscious, and deeply rooted in institutional structures and culture. It's too complex and elusive to address directly beyond the obvious removal of explicit regulations (desegregation) and finger wagging. Those things have already been done and yet extreme inequalities persist, so addressing outcome is the only way people can think of to go any deeper.
The problem with this argument is it assumes the differences are due to discrimination, but when we try to measure that we almost can't detect the effect of discrimination because it's so small. The differences are not skin deep like that, but usually have deeper roots. To be clear I'm not saying there are no biases like racism, but that it doesn't seem to be the dominant factor causing differences in outcome. Often the roots are deeper, like higher divorce rates, worse schools, differences in parents' socioeconomic status. Between men and women the salary difference is almost entirely a difference between women with children and men and women without.
it's turtles all the way down. people will simply say the roots of the other problems that cause disparities are discrimination. And if you try to disprove that.. you see where this is going.
It starts at kindergarten and before. Minority children should enter schools where they have a chance, with the resources to take advantage of that chance. But we don't. And here in California, blacks graduating high school on average only read as well as 8th grade blacks.
Attempting to create equality of outcome after that is a lost cause.
I can think of a dozen policies that would be more effective at helping blacks than discriminating against Asians at elite universities. My favorite example is that research says that homework provides little net benefit on average, but specifically hurts children in disadvantaged families where parents themselves lack the skills to help their children understand the material. Therefore dramatically reducing homework will help blacks. (And will also make families with teenagers much less stressful places.)
I wonder why reading Anglo-gibberish is a standard?
Does a bridges proper engineering rely on detailed emotional understanding of Shakespeare?
Human language is only 5,000 years old they say. Leaving human intuition for quantity millions of years to fine tune itself; enough food, enough heat, to prevent biological death.
Nothing about human biology is fueled or relies upon grammatically correct English and everything to do with correct use of mathematical measurement.
Deeply rooted institutional and cultural discrimination can only exist if discriminating behavior is acceptable when it done against the right target. Changing which demographic is permitted to discriminate (and hate) against only changes the smallest amount of variable, which is the opposite strategy of going deeper in the effort to eliminate discrimination.
It is very similar to violence. People abhor violence when it done against the wrong person and love violence when it feel justified against the right target. This is why laws regulating violence is often written to be as broad as possible. If you give people the right to turn to violence when they feel its justified, you get mob justice which only create spirals of more violence.
When people feel extreme inequalities persist even when laws should prevent them, people reach for mob justice. Riots, occupations of buildings, looting and shooting. The result is rarely that the extreme inequalities goes away. The cure is almost always the same, which is restricting violence even further and working directly at removing violence from institutional structures and culture.
To continue the steel manning, here's a thought experiment:
What if a large percentage of people decided to exclude you from everything for some arbitrary reason. Just you.
People know who you are and pass you up for jobs, promotions, home loans, value your contributions less, etc.
The reasons don't make sense. They're impervious to argument. In some cases people deny that they're doing it, or seem genuinely unaware, but they're doing it just the same.
To you. Only to you.
Nobody is initiating violence. Nobody is actively stealing from you or harming you. They're just boycotting you, excluding you, assuming the worst about you by default...
What would you do? How long would this have to go on for you to turn to violence if nothing else made any difference?
First off, I would define that as violence if it came to an extreme. Imprisoning people is to exclude people from everything, including space to move around. Society in general define that as violence. So following this thought experiment we must then enter the philosophical discussion to define what violence is.
Excluding people from everything in modern society causes harm. Starvation, exposure to the environment, psychological harm, atrophy of muscle and body. Excluding people from health care lead to further harm and eventually death. Taken to the extreme and we got murder.
If a majority of people voted to allow murder and violence then the most likely outcome is a civil war, but if in this thought experiment we are talking about only allowing murder and violence towards a single person, the best strategy would be to flee and seek asylum.
If we however limit this thought experiment to an degree which isn't murder and violence, and within the already set limits that government laws has specified (such as the European law of human rights), then if a large percentage of people decided to exclude me from a limited number of things, the best approach would be to political active to make the law even better while at the same time personally avoiding those people. No violence required. Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent resistance is a good model when laws are unjust and need changing.
But what’s missing from your steelman is why returning to racial discrimination will solve the problems of past racial discrimination — rather than making them worse, by teaching a whole new generation to be racists.
Forget making it worse as the primary concern. I am concerned about fascism emerging as a backlash to anti-White discrimination. People are pissed that their society has turned against them and will abandon democracy to fix the situation.
But people love it when the other side gets “pissed”, even if it’s mostly in their imagination. Social media is almost full of schadenfreude, with no system in place to dampen it. On the contrary, any attempts at understanding the other side is called “defending them” or “weakness”.
To go with your analogy, when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms. I don’t see why you would not attack things from both angles.
To understand that, you really have to go beyond the analogy. I think trying to address differences in outcome by discrimination is morally dubious and potentially could backfire and make things worse.
> when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms
Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes. The analogy of a cytokine storm taking out healthy cells to drive off infection becomes grim when the "healthy cells" are people.
