US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3488

On February 08 2022 05:38 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


If I'm reading this situation correctly, NYC was originally offering an accelerated kindergarten program to a small minority of students, and now they've decided to teach that accelerated program to all kindergarteners. Is that accurate? It seems like making this change is offering "equality of opportunity", which is what we all generally seem to be in favor of.

On February 08 2022 06:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I saw that the racial imbalance was mentioned, but it seemed like the arguments issued by the opponents were hardly factoring this, rather focusing on the problematic aspect of 'judging 4 year olds based on a single test' or something of that sort.

I'd oppose the program even if it existed in a 100% ethnically homogenous country/environment.

On February 08 2022 07:01 JimmiC wrote:

The question is why is it skewed that way, is it systemic? And if so how can that be addressed.

On February 07 2022 11:17 ChristianS wrote:

Big quote chains on this forum have a tendency to devolve into multiple parallel disagreements rather than focusing on the larger point. For instance, I have a temptation to split up this reply in a section arguing CRT frequently does resemble cancel culture, a section arguing "free speech" as the ACLU has historically defended it has very little to do with questions of internet moderation, etc. I'll mostly skip those conversations because I think this chain will rapidly become unreadable – I will, at least, say that I think a case like James Whitfield's firing in Texas has all the characteristics a typical "cancel culture" case has, and if you have time to research it, I'd be very interested to hear if you feel differently and why. (The link is to a This American Life story on it, feel free to find alternate sources if you hate Ira Glass or something)

Instead I'll argue something I think is frequently missed (especially by conservatives, but often liberals, too), which is that I think fundamentally, "cancel culture" is a systemic issue. Since "systemic" is a word used very differently in a lot of different contexts without much explanation, I'll try to clarify my usage: some societal problems are individual problems, meaning that there is an individual or group of individuals who are misbehaving. If you imagine a "contract" + Show Spoiler [diction] + between those individuals and society, by which they are expected to act in certain ways and they get various benefits in return, those individuals aren't meeting the terms of the contract. Littering, for example, is an individual problem: there are specific people who are misbehaving, and if we convince those people to stop misbehaving, the problem will go away.

Systemic problems occur when an individual person is meeting the terms of their contract, but they're not getting the benefits they're entitled to. That is, if we consider the contract between, on the one side, the individual person and, on the other, a theoretical entity or "system" representing the mental aggregation of all the people on the other side of that contract, the "system" isn't treating them fairly. The hard part, though, is that if you change your focus to any of the individuals that make up that "system," they're all more or less meeting their contracts, too. The fault doesn't exist in the people, it exists, somehow, in the spaces between them.

Consider one component of "cancel culture," online harassment (we can leave out actions from authorities, like being banned from Twitter, fired from their job, etc. for now). An individual says or does something that at least minorly offends "the internet." They become the main character on Twitter or something. That individual will now find that any time they open Twitter, they're bombarded with (at least) thousands of notifications of various strangers on the internet dragging them in various ways. That's already a miserable experience, sometimes traumatizing. Suddenly millions of strangers know their name, and are competing with each other to curse it in varyingly clever ways. And in all likelihood, if we examine the individual's "offense" for which they're receiving this "punishment" we'll think it's extremely minor, if it's an offense at all. They'll probably feel like they've been dealt with pretty unfairly.

But whose fault is it? All those millions of strangers aren't really doing anything wrong, per se. Some of them are probably being at least uncivil, and in a real world case a few might be sending mean DMs, doxxing, sending death threats, etc., which are malicious acts. But even if nobody crossed a line like that (and since this is my hypothetical, I can just say nobody did), the individual will still (reasonably, I think) say this isn't fair. And if some people do start doing obviously malicious things, I don't think it's sufficient to say "this is an individual problem of a few bad actors sending mean DMs, etc., and the solution is just for nobody to do that." The system has offered up this individual's actions to the drive-by judgment of millions of people, and handed every one of those millions of people a button they can push to do a malicious act in response; even if only .001% of them choose to push that button, it will still be thousands of people's malicious acts piled on that one individual.

That the problem is systemic should not diminish any of your sense of injustice about it. But it does help to understand why it's so difficult to solve. I think conservatives tend to attribute "cancel culture" as a problem caused by "the left's censorious attitudes" or some such, which is a sufficiently diffuse culprit that they can feel righteously indignant without having to offer much in the way of solutions besides, I don't know, winning the culture war and forcing all the leftists to hide in holes. But if their concerns about "cancel culture" were sincere they would find, even if they won the culture war, that the problem hadn't been solved, or even really ameliorated, because the problem was never localized to those leftists in the first place; it's an emergent property of the sorts of associations people are forming with each other, and the rules by which those associations proceed.

On February 07 2022 14:59 gobbledydook wrote:
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines the effect of policies and systems on race, and how policies and systems with no explicit race discrimination can nevertheless favour the majority White race over other races.

There are a few points of contention right now, which are often conflated and result in meaningless arguments.

1) Is the academic CRT theory being taught in schools? Clearly the answer is no.

2) Are white people, overall, achieving better outcomes than black people in the current systems? Clearly the answer is yes.

3) Does the fact that white people achieve better outcomes than black people on average mean the system is unfair? This is something that can be debated. I am inclined to believe that it is indeed harder for black people to excel, given equal talent.

4) Are white people inherently privileged because of that? I find it difficult to argue that this is valid on an individual level and I find it insulting when someone gets told to 'check their white privilege' because they are white.

5) Should it be taught in schools that white people are privileged because of their race? Some school districts were trying to put elements of this concept in their curriculum. I think this is a clear no. I think this is also what most parents that are against CRT are really against, but for lack of a better term blame CRT. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the conclusion of CRT theory is that white people are privileged.

6) Should standards be lowered for 'non-privileged' races? This is the core concept behind affirmative action, particularly in college admissions and in race quotas. This can be debated, but I think it should be no, and the equity problem described in 3) should be solved by improving the resource allocation earlier in life so black children have the same opportunities as white children, instead of lowering the standards after the fact.