tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post1900355939760928446..comments2023-10-16T07:13:12.123-05:00Comments on A plain blog about politics: What Mattered This Week?Jonathan Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15931039630306253241noreply@blogger.comBlogger81125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-67035602499950043802013-08-09T10:02:16.026-05:002013-08-09T10:02:16.026-05:00They don't claim what I see as the truth, whic...<i>They don't claim what I see as the truth, which is that they have a list of people that they hate and want to disempower as much as possible, with WCMs at the top.</i><br /><br />If there are such "progs," I can't speak for them, because I'm in that other group, the one that publishes in tiny academic journals that no one reads. (Not a great way to advance a power agenda, I'm finding.)<br /><br /><i>.....why aren't they clamoring about the incredible overrepresentation of Jews in positions of wealth and power?</i><br /><br />Um... because that's a proven bad way to start a political conversation? Some other countries have tried figuring out what to do "now that Jews run so much." It hasn't ended well, especially when genetic theories got involved.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-15018210746057927262013-08-09T03:43:37.036-05:002013-08-09T03:43:37.036-05:00No, I'm saying that progs claim to be interest...No, I'm saying that progs claim to be interested in balancing power between different races/ethnicities. They don't claim what I see as the truth, which is that they have a list of people that they hate and want to disempower as much as possible, with WCMs at the top. <br /><br />Now that so much power has shifted to Jews, the obvious question to progs is, "you guys talk a lot about power distribution. Do you think that Jew/gentile should be in the Uniform Guidelines as protected classes now that Jews run so much and make so much more than the reviled WCM?"<br /><br />Keep in mind that I don't think that Jewish bias has much to do with Jewish wealth and power relative to WCMs because I believe that evolution affects humans. But progs don't, so why aren't they clamoring about the incredible overrepresentation of Jews in positions of wealth and power?backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-8736061607383027052013-08-08T20:03:20.813-05:002013-08-08T20:03:20.813-05:00.....that power should not rest too much in the ha...<i>.....that power should not rest too much in the hands of any group. Jewish dominance of WCMs.....</i><br /><br />Hold on. I thought you were just misusing "dominance" to mean overachievement in school. You actually mean Jews are exercising too much power over Women Chess Masters, I mean, over White Christian Males? And something should be done about this? Is that what I'm hearing?Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-55538421075403398912013-08-08T19:35:03.385-05:002013-08-08T19:35:03.385-05:00Because progs claim that power should not rest too...Because progs <b>claim</b> that power should not rest too much in the hands of any group. Jewish dominance of WCMs is now obvious to see. Honest progs will question how far Jewish dominance should go. I mean, unless progs are committed to the idea of completely disempowering white males, the giant shifts should be noteworthy. backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-39980877328457276882013-08-08T14:25:59.222-05:002013-08-08T14:25:59.222-05:00I'm not sure why you prefer links to blogs ove...<i>I'm not sure why you prefer links to blogs over academic studies and the like.</i><br /><br />Because blogs are public fora that show what committed partisans care about. It appears to those like me that progs believe the reality of Asian normalization and Jewish dominance of the workplace in a country supposedly run by the enemy WCM is a story to be avoided at all costs. Progs appear deeply committed to the idea of WCM dominance because it's a simple story that complies with the egalitarian idea that the state can shape the populace if the right progs are in control. So the existence of minorities that dominate the enemy WCM are not a cause for study or celebration to be copied by NAMs and loudly proclaimed by progs, but an indictment of a worldview. If your view that progs are mostly not hucksters were true, then the story would be on every prog's mind when the subject of NAM inequality in the workplace arose. From long experience on blogs and IRL, I can tell you that progs HATE it when these ideas are brought up and generally go into a purely defensive mode. Zero interest in this reality.<br /><br />There are a million prog blogs that tout the idea of WCM hegemony and those blogs are more indicative of the prog mindset than what a tiny cadre of academics publishes in unread journals. For some reason, progs seem allergic to the idea that Jews dominate WCMs.<br /><br />It's possible to embrace human evolution and still be a pure prog. I only know of one case on the web, but his outlook is that large scale redistribution is needed to counteract NAM genetic low IQ. And pro-market cultural progs like McArdle are pretty normal.backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-46241333506857015002013-08-08T11:29:54.837-05:002013-08-08T11:29:54.837-05:00I don't know what's in McArdle's head,...I don't know what's in McArdle's head, but my guess would be that she sees a difference between the boundaries around a well-established superpower, over which we've had unrestricted movement amounting to 3% of the total population, and the complicated multi-nation mess that the Western powers created on an undeveloped continent they hadn't bothered to understand.<br /><br />I'm not sure why you prefer links to <i>blogs</i> over academic studies and the like. The discussion you wanted to know about on the left may not have its close equivalent of a Sailer, or a Mark Steyn or John Derbyshire, but it's quite active. Nobody denies the fact that some groups persistently do better in school, on average, than others. Perhaps some on the left have even come to embrace genetic explanations for this along with your suggested remedies. We wouldn't know, because those analysts would no longer identify as "left" at that point and would more likely align themselves with the right. Likewise, if Derbyshire wakes up one morning and decides that problems of group underachievement are the legacy of colonialism and of many generations when people were deliberately held back, you and Sailer will start calling him a "prog," and we'll be right back where we started. To keep pointing out that progressives are those who hold progressive views is, you know, true but not terribly insightful.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-38838190246027262882013-08-08T09:44:06.044-05:002013-08-08T09:44:06.044-05:00It is difficult to get a man to understand somethi...It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when repairing his damaged, fragile ego depends on his not understanding it.purushanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-10571161603125901632013-08-08T04:31:41.588-05:002013-08-08T04:31:41.588-05:00McArdle claimed in that link that a big problem wi...McArdle claimed in that link that a big problem with Africa was the setting of boundaries that mixed people of different ethnicities together when she's also a booster for open third world immigration to the US. This is common among Progs, who don't <i>even see</i> the contradiction in holding these ideas simultaneously.backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-13758223638584285802013-08-08T04:23:10.412-05:002013-08-08T04:23:10.412-05:00Jeff,
I've read McArdle for years. On race sh...Jeff,<br /><br />I've read McArdle for years. On race she's a prog whose concession to open mindedness is to say that IF it were shown conclusively that the measured low intelligence of NAMs was because evolution affects humans, THEN there should still be affirmative action.<br /><br />The only reason I can see that progs like TNC enough to call him the world's greatest blogger is because he's black. Really smart for a guy who's pretty black, but not really smart for a blogger. <br /><br />And I'm not surprised that you couldn't link to any examples. It's a lot easier to find a prog blogger fantasizing that a bombing is due to a WCM than to find one who even mentions that Jews dominate WCMs. I've been kicked off of dozens of prog comment boards for linking to BLS statistics showing that Asians make more than whites and the most common response I got was "model minority" hand waving. None ever talked about Asians as a useful model for NAMs.backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-69178524612547069422013-08-08T00:47:32.448-05:002013-08-08T00:47:32.448-05:00And to answer your last question, yes, I myself te...And to answer your last question, yes, I myself tend to think that African-American experience owes relatively little to Africa, and much more to the conditions imposed by slavery and thereafter. But I'm not an expert and I know there are others who disagree. I'm open to learning more about this.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-44856631143906997382013-08-08T00:42:40.352-05:002013-08-08T00:42:40.352-05:00Again, we're outside my area of expertise. Of ...Again, we're outside my area of expertise. Of the ideas I summarized above, though, none is original with me, which means that I've picked them up from reading. As Megan McArdle said on her blog, there is a vast literature just on the question of African underdevelopment alone:<br /><br />http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2007/10/why-is-africa-so-screwed-up/2072/<br /><br />Although generally a libertarian herself, McArdle seems to be specifically responding here to the Sailers of the world or those he influences.<br /><br />Actually there's a vast literature on each of thes interrelated topics. On the effects of the great migrations, I learned much of what I know from Ira Berlin's <i>The Four Great Migrations: The Making of African America</i>). On the rise and perpetuation of urban ghettoes and poverty, the following item is useful as a summary of the discussion, with footnotes to most the classic works on it:<br /><br />http://journeytohistory.com/History111/Readings/The%20Origins.pdf<br /><br />On differences in educational achievement, again, there are big debates, even within what you might call "the left." My summary above generally relies on what people writing in this area would call "cultural-deficit" theories. These are controversial, as is everything else on this topic. (Google that term and you'll see.) Finally, casting further back, the discussion around Jared Diamond's much-touted <i>Guns, Germs and Steel</i> gets at the big issues and controversies regarding cultural development globally, like why the technically advanced civilizations arose in some places more readily than others. The book's Wikipedia entry summarizes these controversies:<br /><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel<br /><br />As to blogs that touch on race and related questions, I suppose you're already aware of Ta-Nehisi Coates'. If not, I join everyone and his dog in recommending it:<br /><br />http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/<br /><br />I think what you'd find on further investigation is that what you've been calling "the left" here is more properly understood as the right's idea of the left.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-65607327862116683642013-08-07T22:35:27.324-05:002013-08-07T22:35:27.324-05:00Jeff,
I didn't notice any links. Where can I ...Jeff,<br /><br />I didn't notice any links. Where can I go in the nurture-only progosphere to find people talking about the dominance of Jews and the fairly equal position of Asians relative to the old enemy, the WCM? Who among them are actively trying to figure out what works from this context? Progs blog about race/ethnicity constantly, so there must be some who fit the bill instead of acting like the worst of the Trayvon tards, which is what I usually read. I can point to several learned and engrossing blogs where people don't confine themselves absolutely to nurture as the reason why groups of people who evolved separately for thousands of years have different average outcomes. <br /><br />Do you know of any prog-blogs that address the permanent state of poverty in virtually every principally black city, state, region, and country? I mean, Steve Sailer wants to know why sub-Saharan Africa has the one slightly decent country of Botswana. Do any progs talk about this?<br /><br />I note that you begin your story of Africans at slavery. I guess that the state of Africans prior to that is immaterial?backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-28088240607710765632013-08-07T21:24:55.964-05:002013-08-07T21:24:55.964-05:00.....enough for now. Sorry, lied. One more point, ...<i>.....enough for now.</i> Sorry, lied. One more point, by way of illustrating just how complex and difficult it is to find solutions: I mentioned cultural traditions above that point in opposite directions. For instance, persecution and second-class status can both help encourage a community's sense of cohesiveness and mutual aid, and cause all sorts of damage, which is part of why groups that were discriminated against in America haven't all fared the same as a result. Or consider this: Asian-Americans have been helped toward success by traditions promoting respect for authority, while Jewish-Americans have been helped by traditions promoting <i>disrespect</i> for authority -- y'know, all those Jewish comedians and political agitators -- traditions that go back to an era when the authorities their great-grandparents were subject to were often persecutors. In higher education, as it happens, students benefit both from respecting authority (which makes for disciplined study) and being skeptical toward it (which makes for freethinking and inventiveness). So, ideally, we should find ways to encourage <i>both</i> these attitudes. Except: they contradict each other! So is this even possible? Anyone who says the right policies are simple and obvious just hasn't given problems like these any serious thought.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-74741869094620505752013-08-07T21:03:40.709-05:002013-08-07T21:03:40.709-05:00Concluded:
Repairing family and community structu...<i>Concluded:</i><br /><br />Repairing family and community structures broken by centuries of abusive policies and generations of residential exclusion is even harder and more complicated. Which new approaches actually succeed and should therefore be "copied" is hard to determine because there are so many variables, and I can't even begin to settle all those controversies here. But I do think there are plenty of people on the left who are sincerely interested in finding and doing what works. The hucksters and race-baiters whom you rightly find offensive are usually gaming a system that was set up to do something good, like intensify public investment in degraded inner cities where it's badly needed. Policies designed to rein in the cops are driven by a recognition of the way urban police departments were allowed to function for too long as essentially white gangs set against black and Hispanic gangs. All approaches, obviously, are subject to abuse and must be continually monitored for uninteded consequences. That's very different, though, from cynically dismissing them all and telling people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.<br /><br />OK, enough for now. Believe it or not, this is the <i>short</i> answer to your question. The long one is a big academic and political discussion that probably has another few generations yet to run.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-82799140383195464462013-08-07T21:03:02.431-05:002013-08-07T21:03:02.431-05:00(.....)
> Native Americans: Remnants of commun...(.....)<br /><br />> Native Americans: Remnants of communities mostly destroyed in a holocaust carried out on American soil.<br /><br />> African-Americans: (Mostly) descendents of slaves, i.e. people denied education or opportunities for advancement, subject to having their communities broken up and their own family members sold "down the river" (especially during the forced internal migrations of the early 19th century), then "emancipated" without compensation, denied access to normal schooling, professional positions and most other cultural advantages, and kept in appalling conditions for generations both in the South and, after the "Great Migration," in urban cores that were "redlined" to prevent normal movement and assimilation and were consequently allowed to decay -- especially as, in an unrelated development, changes in global industry caused manufacturing jobs to disappear. As happens in any collapsed society anywhere, underground economies then developed based on trade in contraband, and this plus the absence of nonracist, decently funded police protection encouraged the rise of local warlordism that we call "street gangs."<br /><br />> Hispanics: A made-up "group," hence difficult to describe in terms of a common set of historical experiences -- but, on the whole, descendants of people who were not the "winners" in the struggles between, first, native Amerindians and the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, and then between the "Anglo" and the Spanish-Portuguese nations that developed in the Americas.<br /><br />Now, reviewing those groups from that perspective, what does "copying success" mean? Ideally, it would mean rerunning the history of the last three to five hundred years, replacing some of the damaging conditions and experiences just recounted with better ones. But we can't do that. What then? Well, presumably we should at least encourage the kinds of family cohesion, and the high value placed on education, that has helped Jewish- and Asian-Americans. Great. What makes you think "the left" <i>isn't</i> doing that? Obama, for one, regularly speaks to those very issues, especially when he's addressing African-American audiences. Stoking people's educational aspirations also means helping them see such aspirations as realistic. That means that people who identify as African-American need to see others they identify as African-American succeeding in those arenas (and women need to see other women doing so, etc.). Affirmative-action policies, for all their problems, were efforts to make that easier by getting more people who might be so identified into universities, onto university faculties, and into professional and executive positions so they could "role model" those paths of upward mobility. The idea was to replace the vicious cycle of exclusion with a virtuous cycle, in which the previous, exclusive "old-boy networks" are broken down and new networks of self-help and mutual aid are developed that serve the previously disadvantaged in the way those old networks served "white gentile males."<br /><br /><i>continued.....</i>Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-6285662041484157982013-08-07T20:34:14.860-05:002013-08-07T20:34:14.860-05:00OK, that's a fair question. I'm not really...OK, that's a fair question. I'm not really competent to answer, but before giving it a shot, let me say what I would like to see from an "honest right." We're talking about questions of cultural development and formation, of how values, attitudes and skills are transmitted through generations, and of how and why different regions of the world have differed in these regards over a long period. These are <i>immensely</i> complicated questions that we have barely begun to study, let alone understand. The social conditions we see around us were the work of centuries; we've had maybe three generations now to try to get a grip on them. The modern disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and economics came into being only around 1900, and modern biological sciences (to the extent those are relevant, as you've suggested they are) are even more recent than that. An honest right, I think, would take note of this and show some humility about jumping to massively consequential policy conclusions, especially conclusions involving simplistic nostrums that tend to throw all the responsibility for overcoming the burdens of these complex historical developments onto individuals -- as if the nation's collective responsibility for an atrocious record of multi-generational abuse and mistreatment somehow magically dissolved in 1965. That's what I'd like to see from the right. Solutions will come from people of goodwill across the spectrum trying to understand and address these problems in all their sometimes baffling complexity.<br /><br />So, that said: I'm all for "drilling down" and copying success. (This, of course, presumes that success isn't genetic.) Put briefly and overly crudely, here's what we're working with:<br /><br />> Asian-Americans: People from* countries that, broadly speaking, were isolated from the West until modern times, that stressed family and social cohesion, respect for authority, and "Confucian" values including education. Upon arriving in America, they were victims of a kind of discrimination (partly based on physical appearance) that tended to keep them isolated in ethnically defined local communities ("Chinatowns") and such).<br /><br />( * By "from," of course I mean the individuals themselves or their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents.) <br /><br />> Jewish-Americans: Some similar cultural antecedents to thsoe just mentioned, plus a history of persecution based on religion that tended to encourage identification with the group (for those who didn't convert and assimilate); also, an unusual social position in the medieval / early modern West that encouraged working in finance, commerce and trade, and a faith tradition that (for men) stressed working closely with texts and ideas, i.e. the stuff of modern higher education, as well as admiring people adept at this kind of work.<br /><br /><i>tcontinued.....</i><br /><br /><br /><br />Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-74045663226689835072013-08-07T17:51:04.993-05:002013-08-07T17:51:04.993-05:00Jeff,
Since Asians and Jews have come equal with...Jeff, <br /><br />Since Asians and Jews have come equal with or surpassed the once-dominant white gentiles in the workplace, why isn't the honest left principally focused on whatever made that possible to copy it for NAMs? To fix a problem, one focuses on past victories and solutions. That's how we advance. If honest progs consider this problem worthwhile and achievable, then why don't they principally talk about current Jewish dominance and Asian normalization in the workplace? Why should any white gentile male view the current left as anything but a bunch of hucksters if it won't drill down on the obvious and normal route to success... which is copying wins. Why do they instead put so much energy into a racist system while claiming that race is a social construct? backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-76880187816901131032013-08-07T11:43:22.625-05:002013-08-07T11:43:22.625-05:00Who is writing this -- Calvin Coolidge?
I don'...<i>Who is writing this -- Calvin Coolidge?</i><br /><br />I don't know about backyard, but some of the contemporary right's talking points have been coming out of (or glomming onto) the work of Amity Shlaes, a revisionist historian of the Great Depression who's a big fan of Coolidge.Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-39721850380319977222013-08-07T11:16:21.983-05:002013-08-07T11:16:21.983-05:00Ask Detroit what happened when they persistently t...<i>Ask Detroit what happened when they persistently treated management as the enemy and used gov power to get their "fair share" from management.</i><br /><br />Who is writing this -- Calvin Coolidge?purushanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-71434919512809642062013-08-07T10:47:33.892-05:002013-08-07T10:47:33.892-05:00backyard, we're not going to agree on this, bu...backyard, we're not going to agree on this, but just for the record:<br /><br /><i>As I see it, the <b>intended</b> effects are to grow the scope of government.....</i> (etc., emphasis added)<br /><br />This level of cynicism is really remarkable to me. If there's one thing I thought was almost universally agreed, it's that certain groups were horribly treated and held in varying degrees of serious oppression in this country literally for centuries. You really think the people who wrote the Civil Rights Acts and other such reforms were <i>intending</i> not to right those wrongs, but to do the various things you say? That they weren't seriously motivated by the sorry history I just mentioned? I think you've confused two things: the impetus behind the legal arrangements we have now, and the fact that <i>any</i> set of arrangements or policies, in a big and complex society, will attract a certain fringe of hucksters who figure out how to game the system and who use the well-meant policies for their narrow advantage. Monarchy had its useless courtiers and hangers-on, democracy has its demagogues, capitalism has its banksters, shady financiers and pump-and-dump artists, and the future Country of Ideal Libertarianism will have some version of this crowd as well. Their existence does not negate the original intentions.<br /><br /><i>No one is "protecting" managers.</i><br /><br />Wow. You have never been involved in a serious dispute with an employer, or observed one, apparently. Well, good for you.<br /><br /><i>The world is not zero-sum. Harming management/organizations harms everyone.....</i><br /><br />I understand that argument. It's true in part, but there's a fallacy: it overlooks the reality of zero-sum transactions within a larger non-zero-sum system. We see this all the time. Families, for instance, have broadly shared interests and are better off overall if all the members pull together -- yet they have internal arguments all the time, arguments that someone wins and someone loses or that force uneasy compromises. Conversely, the logical end result of treating <i>all</i> labor-management transactions as non-zero-sum would be that no one ever argues with management about anything. Even if that were wise policy, which it wouldn't be, it's not viable in a free society. Might work (for a while) in Singapore or China, but in the US, the rise of a labor movement some hundred or so years ago was not an accident, it was the response of free(-ish) people who rightly felt they were being mistreated and that a better deal was possible. (And incidentally, that movement did not prevent American capitalism from subsequently thriving. Progressives believe it <i>helped</i> with this.)<br /><br /><i>Ask Detroit what happened when they persistently treated management as the enemy and used gov power to get their "fair share" from management. Consumers quit buying their embarrassing cars and the factories are now vine covered raccoon tenements.</i><br /><br />Right. Detroit's former managers weren't a bunch of cosseted hacks with less sense than the aforesaid raccoons. No, they were visionaries who saw where the global auto industry was heading, and who were all set to launch first-generation, American-made, fuel-efficient subcompacts back around 1965 - 1970. But a sclerotic labor movement demanded that they keep building fleets of giant Buicks and Oldsmobiles instead. Right. Duly noted. ;-)Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-43737493787353653112013-08-07T02:31:46.264-05:002013-08-07T02:31:46.264-05:00Jeff,
No. I'm open to continued argument over...Jeff,<br /><br /><i>No. I'm open to continued argument over how exactly the rules should be drawn to best achieve their intended effects.</i><br /><br />As I see it, the intended effects are to grow the scope of government, disempower white male gentiles (who are supposedly the most powerful people in America), and buy the votes of white women and Hispanics. If it were truly about figuring out problems, then progs would spend all their time talking about how Asians succeed around crazy-racist whites so as to copy that success. Or about copying the always avoided Jewish hyper-dominance. Or the fact that getting rid of white people is the quickest path to poverty and chaos for blacks. One would think that if the presence of empowered white racists lead to black poverty, that ridding a city of whites would lead to a slow improvement in black outcomes. Look at a list of cities or regions that have been nearly cleared of whites.<br /><br /><i>To me, in the scheme of things, there are more important goals than protecting a management class made up of people who -- again, in my experience -- make some pretty sweet salaries for treating people like me badly</i><br /><br />You make two prog errors here. No one is "protecting" managers. You want to continue a program that directly <b>attacks</b> managers and presumes guilt for the most ignorant of reasons.<br />But it's worse than that. The world is not zero-sum. Harming management/organizations harms everyone because it increases the resources that have to go into production, raising prices and leading to work rules that are designed to make terrible products. Ask Detroit what happened when they persistently treated management as the enemy and used gov power to get their "fair share" from management. Consumers quit buying their embarrassing cars and the factories are now vine covered raccoon tenements.backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-6622628375830611972013-08-07T00:10:21.975-05:002013-08-07T00:10:21.975-05:00backyard, I've already conceded that our solut...backyard, I've already conceded that our solutions to the historic problems that brought equal-opportunity laws into existence are imperfect. I don't know exactly <i>how</i> imperfect, so I will further concede that I may have more to learn on that subject, and I appreciate your pointers about where some of the problems might be found. In general, I am pro-labor, and if you want to find some way in which my (perceived) self-interest drives my politics, it's in that regard more than with regard to affirmative action. My own experience has been that even with the restrictions they operate under now, way too many employers are capricious assh*les -- excellent examples of the <a href="http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/liberty-of-local-bullies.html" rel="nofollow">"local bullies" </a>that I believe are (much more than "government") the source of most ordinary citizens' actual day-to-day experience of oppression and unfreedom. They certainly don't police themselves, and if they weren't policed at all, as libertarians seem to want, they'd be even more out of control than they already are. We know for a fact, plainly, that if they could cater to the prejudices of a majority (or a powerful overclass) at the expense of a disfavored minority, way too many employers would happily do so, because that's exactly what they did for generations back when the law allowed it.<br /><br />So, do I want employers treated unfairly? Roughed up? Worked over by the jackbooted thugs of the EEOC? No. I'm open to continued argument over how exactly the rules should be drawn to best achieve their intended effects. But there are limits to the energy any of us can bring to politics, and therefore we have to decide which issues and causes we find most urgent. To me, in the scheme of things, there are more important goals than protecting a management class made up of people who -- again, in my experience -- make some pretty sweet salaries for treating people like me badly, and already have excellent lawyers on hand to carry their water if anyone complains. (And yes, I say this as someone with friends and even parents who have run small businesses and experienced many of those pressures, including frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. Even so.)Jeffnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-52731138497454747612013-08-06T22:43:53.572-05:002013-08-06T22:43:53.572-05:00Jeff,
My understanding is that an employer so acc...Jeff,<br /><br /><i>My understanding is that an employer so accused gets a defense, and is permitted to justify its hiring decisions on grounds of "business necessity" or by citing (for instance) test results that favor the people it's hiring, so long as the tests are in fact testing for qualities or skills needed to do the job.</i><br /><br />I'm assuming that you've already perused the Uniform Guidelines, read about the years long and expensive Ricci and Vulcan cases, read about Chicago's black police officers being unable to read, and talked in depth with Human Resources Officers who were willing to tell you how they induce managers to hire fewer white males and more unqualified NAMs to avoid being sued and forced to pay out to avoid going to trial and being called "racists" for months on end in a public forum. <br /><br />And you simply trust our incredibly violent government with too much power. So there's no way for you to see the problems in a situation where an employer is <i>presumed guilty of implicit racism based on inumerate statistical arguments and Census data about what you call a false category and then allowed to defend himself in court by proving the business necessity of a test that he uses to decide who he's going to pay money to or promote.</i> It's some backward ass situation. And the fact that the categories of female, Hispanic, and black are on the Uniform Guidelines, but that discussing whether Jewish should be included is a blaring siren. Any gentile can see what's going on.<br /><br />Additionally, even if you don't think that the roots of low NAM IQ are genetic, the low IQ still shows up everywhere it's tested. So an employer with a race-blind admissions test of ANY kind is going to run afoul of of the UGs and run the risk of getting thrown in the Ricci meatgrinder. Because greater intelligence is useful to most employers (and other useful traits like low time preference is strongly correlated with it) smarter employees are almost always better.backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-78706863584909367692013-08-06T21:53:34.993-05:002013-08-06T21:53:34.993-05:00CSH,
you have one UCLA Finance MBA and a universa...CSH,<br /><br /><i>you have one UCLA Finance MBA and a universally-disregarded Harvard PhD against a giant mountain of evidence. Think about it)</i><br /><br />The fact that you disagree with me about so much is one of the reasons that I'm on this site, but you keep saying things that are stupid and wrong that you can check for yourself. Please shed your ignorance. I mention Sailer the most because he's a popularizer who aggregates the work of scientists. You could start with someone who's more <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/05/why-race-as-a-biological-construct-matters/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GeneExpressionBlog+%28Gene+Expression%29#.UgG0s73n8m_" rel="nofollow">techy</a>, but you need to learn a bunch first. This blogger will tell you what you need to study so that you can basically understand what the demographers, geneticists, etc. that Sailer links to and contextualizes are saying, but it's too much work. You won't bother with it.backyardfoundrynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6926413038778731189.post-9055152834264603742013-08-06T08:59:35.425-05:002013-08-06T08:59:35.425-05:00Mushed a point there. I meant to say that the EEOC...Mushed a point there. I meant to say that the EEOC is (in my experience) remarkably deferential -- in general -- to employers' claimed defenses, and also, separately, that it takes seriously claims from "whites" like me that they're being disfavored on racial grounds. Again, I'd be happy to learn more about specific cases that suggest otherwise.Jeffnoreply@blogger.com