111–120 of 585 posts
Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way).
We can do better.
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I love this policy. If it's free then no-one brings their own, and no-one is looked down at. BUT... I checked the menu of a school where I used to live... Pizza, hot dogs, fries... We can make the most delicious vegetables, roasted, ... And they get carbs. Nutrition taken from nature decomposed in its elemental components put back together for the perfect addictive meal...
I’m not opposed to the carbs. I think if they’re in a whole food form, the kids are so much better off than if they’re eating processed… Anything. Not teaching kids to eat whole foods is one of the greatest assaults on public health we’ve done in the last century, from what I can see. They become adults who normalize eating these perfect addictive meals, who allow their own kids access to the same junk, and then they…
I remember in school we had a lot of programs for nutrition which were basically health-food propaganda. Yes it was the "Food Pyramid" so not ideal, but there was a clear message to eat minimally-processed foods (fruits, vegetables, dairy, grains) and avoid junk. We watched "Supersize Me" and a documentary which explained all these "vegan / whole foods" diets. But kids still eat junk because they're kids and they don't really understand or care, and everyone around them eats junk; and then grow up and continue to eat junk because it's cheaper/easier and they did as kids.
Also, we had fruits and vegetables in every school lunch, as well as salads and wraps as alternatives to the hot meal. But the fruits were often wilted or bruised, and vegetables canned and/or overcooked. If we had good-tasting healthy food, I'm sure more kids would eat it; but the school lunch was school-lunch quality, and bad quality degrades healthy food more than it does junk food.
The problem is, if we want to teach kids how to eat unprocessed food so that they actually listen, we need nuance and funding. To teach them "healthy bad tasting", we need to give them access to good-tasting healthy meals, which are hard to cook. Or if we just keep scaring them into eating less junk, we need to change society so that it's more ingrained that junk food is bad outside of school; right now they get mixed messages, where 1 semester of health class says "junk food bad", but few people care anywhere else. But nuance, funding, and affecting culture are things the government is really bad at, especially when it's an issue as "insignificant" as eating healthy.
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Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were…
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
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Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were…
I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate. Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need…
Many Americans will stop you at that first word. Who is this we you speak of?
If the pandemic taught me anything, it's that to all too many Americans the most important freedom is freedom from strangers' problems. They don't want to see them, they don't want to hear them, and they sure as hell don't want to pay for them.
Now, if THEY happen to have that problem, that's a different story...after all THEY are real people, unlike...checks notes..."foster kids".
This is what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation, not because their skin color or gender.
Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were…
Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
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In the United States, a lot of times the individual situation is correlated to their skin color. The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected. The idea that you c…
I don't think anyone here is denying that there is a correlation, but there's a very legitimate question over whether policy should target the correlated trait (skin color) or the hardship itself (poverty) when trying to fix the problem.
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> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
Learn like kings Grow like kings Dream like kings Give back like kings
This is what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation, not because their skin color or gender.
Just to play devils advocate… Foster children are not a protected class under the law. Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws. I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and negl…
Squint and we might start looking like college tuitions in Europe.
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Equality is very different than equity. https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...
> Equality is very different than equity How old are these definitions? I've only seen them used this way in public policy circles, and left-leaning ones at that. It's also totally discontinuous with the treatment of equality in classical literature. Put another way, isn't equity just a masking term for top-to-bottom wealth transfers?