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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (149491)	8/12/2002 1:07:06 PM
From: steve harris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580155

Ted, I don't know if it would help for you to complete your thinking through your choices. You might try. Your first reaction feels good, but you fail to provide the long term answer. Paying off the minorities so they will not riot is not a solution. Paying off the lazy so they will vote for you is not a solution. Paying off the terrorists so they will leave you alone is not a solution. I think it would not be a waste of time if you would spend some time with Martin Luther King ideals, and less time with the media and Jesse Jackson's sound bites. Continuing your thinking, you better pack your bags and leave the lands we stole from the American Indians. That is a terrible part of our history. I'm for equal rights Ted; just not your form of socialism. Steve

To: tejek who wrote (149491)	8/12/2002 3:55:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580155

Tim, AA is the implementation arm of the equal opp. laws. It is in opposition to both the letter and the spirit of most of them. It directly results from and is in answer to the 60's racial riots. I don't care what it was in response to. Its the wrong thing and if anything makes riots more likely as it deals with people by race and not as equal human beings. People don't burn cities when they are happy; they burn them because they are pssed.* Lots of people get pissed. That doesn't mean that the feeling is rational or that giving them special preferences that unjustly discriminate against others is right. Fortunately most people don't riot when they are pissed or the world would be an even bigger mess then it is. Fifty years after the passage of the Equal Opp. laws, of all people below the poverty limits, the greatest percentage are people of color, the lowest paid people in our society are people of color; the poorest sections of our cities are inhabited by people of color; the shortest life spans in this country are people of color. Can you develop the argument based on these observations rather then trying to have them stand by themselves. Given the context of our discussion you are obviously not arguing against equal opportunity laws but your paragraph in isolation would make it seem like you are. You probably mean that equal opportunity laws are insufficient to even out the disparities that you list. If that was all you meant then I could agree with you, but it isn't. Your don't actually state it but your implied argument seems to be that because equal opportunity laws don't produce equal results then affirmative action is needed. But that argument falls down in several different ways. One simple one is that affirmative action also doesn't produce equal results. Another one is that even if equal results are are goal that doesn't mean that any action that can help achieve them is desirable or even just. But the most important way the argument falls down is the idea that we should pass laws to try to produce equal results. It would be almost impossible to actually produce equal results and the attempt can produce results that range from mildly negative to disastrous. You all want to convince yourselves that whitie is getting screwed under AA, go for it. But don't forget LA rioted just ten years ago. Yes, just 10 years ago after years of affirmative action (which apparently started in 1965). What a perfect example of how affirmative action prevents riots. Tim