Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (18335)	7/28/2002 10:14:31 AM
From: Poet	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21057

That would help......(she said as she rummaged through her sock drawer). Here's an interesting piece from the NYTimes on race blindness/ race neutrality. My head hurts too much to read it all the way through, so I'm not sure I agree with it. July 28, 2002 When Color Should Count By GLENN C. LOURY BOSTON Ward Connerly is the black businessman who spearheaded the successful campaign for Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative that effectively ended public affirmative action in the state of California. He is back in the news again, this time promoting what he calls the Racial Privacy Initiative. Asking citizens to check a "race" box on a school or government form forces Americans to pay attention to immutable and meaningless characteristics like skin color and ancestry, Mr. Connerly argues. His basic premise is that people otherwise disinclined to do so ought not be compelled by government to put themselves into a racial category. This argument, which at first blush looks like the logical extension of the campaign against racial preferences, will appeal to many voters. The initiative, submitted with 980,000 signatures, has already qualified to be on the March 2004 statewide ballot. Yet, despite its superficial appeal, race-blindness is an ideal at war with itself: Strict adherence to this principle would impede its own enforcement and inhibit addressing the harmful effects of its own past violation. Fair employment laws are most effectively policed when courts and government agents can compare the racial composition of a company's work force with the racial demography of qualified prospective workers in that company's local labor market. But doing so requires the collection of data that classify individuals by race. And as the Supreme Court has acknowledged, rectifying the effects of past discrimination can sometimes be a government interest compelling enough to justify the use of racial preferences. The trouble is that race-blindness is a narrow, technical aspiration and not a genuinely moral end. In matters of race, the most fundamental moral question is not about blindness at all. It is about what I call "neutrality." Race-blindness means having no information about a person's race, while race-neutrality means having no interest in the racial aspect of a social disparity. Blindness asks about what a public decision-maker can know; neutrality deals with the goals that a decision-maker can rightly pursue. Mr. Connerly and his opponents are arguing over whether we should be race-blind. But a question of far greater consequence is whether we should be race-neutral. Although a majority of voters may find race-blindness to be an attractive ideal, I believe many fewer are prepared to endorse race-neutrality because, in light of our history, race-neutrality is not a very attractive moral stance. The single-minded adherent of race-neutrality would see no problem in the fact that black Americans are vastly overrepresented among those going to prison and among those infected with the AIDS virus. If one begins seeing the race of an inmate or AIDS victim as a matter of no moral relevance, one might conclude that we should pay no heed to the racial dimension of such problems. But racial inequality in the United States is a problem that profoundly affects the entire society regardless of whether it is due to current racial discrimination. I believe a great many Americans, even those who firmly oppose racial preferences, would agree with me about this. They want race-blind law enforcement, but they also worry that some 13.4 percent of black males age 25 to 29 were in prison or jail in 2001, compared with 1.8 percent of whites in the same age group. They endorse the race-blind provision of health services, but are disturbed to learn that blacks, about one-ninth of the population, were over one-third of Americans living with AIDS in 1999. They may want to use non-discriminatory college admissions rules, but are not indifferent to the racial composition of the entering class. The distinction between blindness and neutrality becomes clear when one considers that often a choice must be made between alternative race-blind policies, some of which ameliorate and others that exacerbate the social disadvantage of blacks. While a race-blind public policy explicitly intended to harm blacks would never be acceptable, race-blind policies adopted for the purpose of reducing racial inequality are commonplace and well accepted. For example, to have city council members run for office from a number of nonracially drawn neighborhood districts, instead of electing them at-large, is to choose a race-blind electoral system. Yet this system could well enhance racial minority representation in city hall by allowing minority neighborhood residents to vote for someone from their district. Similarly, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit forbade the practice of affirmative action at the University of Texas, the Texas Legislature responded by guaranteeing a place at any public university to the top 10 percent of every high school class in the state. This 10 percent rule mainly benefits students at less competitive high schools ? in large part, black and Hispanic students, and certainly this was the intent. Both of these policies respect race-blindness while intentionally using a proxy for race to promote the higher goal of racial equality. And neither policy has been legally or politically controversial. These examples show why the key moral questions are most often about neutrality, not blindness: on the whole, most Americans still see reversing the effects of a history of immoral race relations as a good thing and perpetuating those effects as a bad thing. Once it is acknowledged that racial disparities are rightly a matter of public concern, we can see that the most transparent, effective and efficient means of dealing with these disparities will often entail making use of racial information. We should be willing to allow for modest violations of race blindness that yield significant reductions in racial inequality as a morally acceptable tradeoff. Unfortunately, the failure to make a distinction between blindness and neutrality has led to doubts about the validity of discussing social justice issues in racial terms at all. Whatever the racial privacy crusaders may intend, and however desirable in the abstract their colorblind ideal may be, their campaign runs the risk of devaluing our collective and still unfinished efforts to achieve greater equality. Fervency for race-blindness has left some observers simply blind to a basic fact of American public life: We have pressing moral dilemmas in our society that can be fully addressed only when viewed against the backdrop of our racial history. Glenn C. Loury, professor of economics and director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, is the author of "The Anatomy of Racial Inequality."

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (18335)	7/31/2002 9:33:48 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21057

How Weblogs Keep the Media Honest By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 31, 2002; 8:41 AM Bloggers are busting chops, big time. The latest evidence: Some big media organizations are now quoting their criticism of other big media organizations. It's called influencing the debate, in real time. Web loggers, for those who have been vacationing on Mars, are one-person Internet blabbermouths who pop off to anyone is willing to listen. They often slam each other like pro wrestlers, but some of the best take on – sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, often ideologically – the big newspapers and networks. Some media critics dismiss bloggers as self-indulgent cranks. That's a mistake. They now provide a kind of instant feedback loop for media corporations that came of age in an era of one-way communications. Sometimes these are just policy arguments dressed up as media criticism, but that's okay. They also call attention to good reporting, although that's not as much fun. Many seem to be picking on the New York Times these days. That may be in part because it's the nation's biggest metropolitan daily and hugely influential. It may be in part because critics say the liberal former editorial page editor Howell Raines is pushing the paper to the left. And it may be that some detractors just resent the Times's power. (There was even a daily assault called SmarterTimes.com until the proprietor became managing editor of the New York Sun.) U.S. News columnist John Leo taps into the blogging phenomenon, and in particular its anti-Times strain: "When the New York Times ran a front-page report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan ('Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead'), bloggers descended on the article like ants on a picnic. . . . "On his site, the Politburo, blogger Michael Moynihan noted that the Times's source for the toll of 812 dead was Marla Ruzicka, identified as a field worker in Afghanistan for Global Exchange, 'an American organization.' What the Times didn't say, Moynihan wrote, is that Global Exchange is a far-left group opposing globalization and the U.S. military. . . . "The mighty Times may not have noticed that a lot of bloggers – some with small reputations, some with no reputations at all – now swarm over its news columns searching for errors and bias. The established media learned long ago how to marginalize critics and shrug off complaints of bias as the ravings of right-wing fanatics. "But the bloggers aren't so easily dismissed. They don't bluster. They deal in specifics and they work quickly, while the stories they target are fresh. They link to sources, to one another's sites, and to the articles under attack, so readers can judge for themselves. The blogging revolution, says commentator Andrew Sullivan, the best-known blogger, 'undermines media tyrants.' "On June 16, a startling front-page article in the Times reported that Alaska's mean temperature rose 7 degrees over the past 30 years. Sullivan checked with Alaska weather authorities and wrote that the Times figures were greatly exaggerated. The Times published a correction, stating that Alaska temperatures rose 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, not 7, over the past 30 years. But the Alaska Climate Research Center said the correction was incorrect. The Times correction of 5.4 degrees was still double the real temperature increase. "Sullivan argued that the Times had 'cherry-picked' data for maximum effect, measuring the 30 years from 1966, one of the century's four coldest years, through 1995, one of the hottest. A report from the Center for Global Change said Alaskan temperatures did not rise consistently over the 20th century – the pattern was back and forth: warming until 1940, cooling until the 1960s, then warming again." (Sullivan, as we noted awhile back, has blamed Raines for the paper's decision to drop him as a contributor without a word of public explanation.) "Sullivan was also one of the bloggers who attacked the anti-Bush polling story run by the Times on July 18 under the headline 'Poll Finds Concerns That Bush Is Overly Influenced by Business.' That story seemed like an attempt to turn a poll favorable to the president into a vague vote of no confidence. . . . "Jack Shafer of Slate joined the Times-bashing bloggers, complaining about a July 1 story, 'Bush Slashing Aid for EPA Cleanup at 33 Toxic Sites.' That story misrepresented a partisan squabble over whether cleanups of 'orphaned sites' (whose owners have gone bankrupt) should be financed by tax revenues or a revival of the Superfund tax, phased out in 1995. Shafer wrote that funding has remained steady in recent years and the Bushies want a modest increase for 2003, so the headline could have been, 'Bush Superfund Budget Grows Slightly.'" Now Shafer's at it again, as we'll see later. <snip>