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US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

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Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#221
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think conservatives have a monopoly on this, then take a look at some of the most important Supreme Court cases from FDR through the 1970s or so.

The Supreme Court is a political organization that likes to pretend it's something else. I think that's always been the case and I agree it isn't inherently one party or the other. That said, with the notable exception of the Warren court, SCOTUS has been conservative for its whole history.

SCOTUS has frequently made decisions that overturned a conservative prescedent in favor of a liberal one. Many 'landmark' SCOTUS cases are exactly this.

Take a short browse down this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisio...

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in California, I don’t think there has been enough time to really know. It was a recent change iirc.

It was 1996, pretty long ago. Looking at a UC vs a private uni, the most obvious difference is how UCs tend to have majority Asian students. UC Berkeley chancellor publicly denounced the ban when it was upheld a couple of years ago. Then Cal removed SAT/ACT as an admission requirement. Next admission cycle, she sent out an email to all students and alumni (me) cheering that the school is now more diverse. The percent…

You're right, I was confusing with Prop 16 in 2020.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#223
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the distinction between old-school liberal (judge by content of character not colour of skin; what you do behind closed doors is your business as much as possible; free speech) and more recent liberal, which seems far more likely to keep the middle of those three, but jettison the others. Bill Maher's journey over the last 2 years has been interesting to watch as he tries to berate the modern left into return…

Are you conflating liberal and libertarian? MLK, of course, coined the phrase "content of character not color of skin" and he was very much in favor of affirmative action.

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was 1996, pretty long ago. Looking at a UC vs a private uni, the most obvious difference is how UCs tend to have majority Asian students. UC Berkeley chancellor publicly denounced the ban when it was upheld a couple of years ago. Then Cal removed SAT/ACT as an admission requirement. Next admission cycle, she sent out an email to all students and alumni (me) cheering that the school is now more diverse. The percent…

You're right, I was confusing with Prop 16 in 2020.

Yeah, Prop 16 was the "no" outcome that the administration was upset about.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#225

> Students for Fair Admissions, accuse Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants in order to boost representation from other groups. Why does this argument need to be framed entirely as discrimination against Asian Americans? Affirmative action clearly harms White people too. Are White people so incapable of advocating for themselves that they can only point out a policy is bad when it harms another…

Well when the narrative is that all white people are at least slightly racist and that only white people can be racist to begin with, white people aren't really allowed to advocate for themselves, and any instance of it would immediately be designated as a hate group.

I'm waiting for the day that "caring about discrimination against asian americans" is listed by the ADL as a dog whistle for white supremacy.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's complicated, and you can have your own takeaway, but mine is that merit often defined wrong. I'm on the lookout for people who did more with less, or even did equal or near to it with less. To me, that is more a measure of merit than top line measures like test scores. I agree with this, and the problem is how many schools look directly at race for that. This reminds me of predictive policing ML models that ta…

> This reminds me of predictive policing ML models that take race as a factor. In statistical systems you often have to take in race as a factor to remove it as one. You can't debias a system if you can't determine the bias. There are many things that highly correlate with race: a notorious one being zip code (byproduct of red lining). But there's also a lot of non-obvious ones and considering historical data is used…

The system developer has to look at race to de-bias a system, but the system shouldn't take race as input, unless it's somehow able to de-bias itself. In this example, I'd wonder why ZIP code is even an input.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And?

(1) it is not the case that they serve lifetime appointments "because they don't want to give up power." They serve lifetime appointments because the framers of the constitution decided it was better for the court to be structured that way hundreds of years before they were born. (2) Forcing them to give up power, as you put it, would require a constitutional amendment, which is not something any one person can do.

What I'm questioning is that the motivation for lifetime appointments ever had anything to do with avoiding political interference. Regardless of the claimed justification, I think lifetime appointments were just a naked, cynical power grab by factions that favored oligarchy over democracy, and have remained so to this day.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics Ever talked to someone from Harvard? (they'll usually tell you in the first 4 minutes you meet them telling you they went to school in Boston). They admit quite a number of conservative people if that's what you're worried about, and even their more left people are pretty center-right, as in they really don't want to pay more taxes. > they could…

> They admit quite a number of conservative people... Nope. Fewer than 10% of students are conservative.[0] > and even their more left people are pretty center-right... Nope. ~65% self-identify as "Very Progressive" or "Progressive"! [0] There is no pretending that this is an accident, given that conservatives outnumber liberals by ~40% in the general population! [1] [0] https://features.thecrimson.com/2022/senior-su…

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Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#229
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Supreme Court is a political organization that likes to pretend it's something else. I think that's always been the case and I agree it isn't inherently one party or the other. That said, with the notable exception of the Warren court, SCOTUS has been conservative for its whole history.

Constitutional reality is right-biased.

The US constitution and the bill of rights are based on classical liberal ideas, like inalienable rights, the consent of the governed, secularism, etc.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#230
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has traditionally built laws to hinder one race in particular. Affirmative action targeting race aims to compensate for some of those

That's true, and those laws are supposed to right decades of misappropriation of education, finance, basic rights back to those that were wronged. The intent is sound, but the execution of it? I'm not sure it's been done fairly. Consider this: Asians have been discriminated in many cases in the past as well. Goes way back to the days of slavery: > After slavery was abolished in the United States, Chinese laborers wer…

Unspoken, but because they are perceived to be “working too hard” to succeed. For example, there are very few among the homeless population in CA.

AA is not designed to solve this problem—of past transgressions that have been largely overcome.

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