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Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

politico.com

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Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#131

Post by catlover76 »

cataphract wrote: post #82
catlover76 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith. > People do not want to import this shit into the US. You realize people discriminating on this basis are the ones "importing this shit into the US", right? > I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about You realize that this law wouldn't involve the government compiling a list of…

Regardless of the merits of this law, your take is very simplistic. All laws are trade-offs and they achieve their purposes imperfectly and with side effects. Not to mention the administration of the law (the justice system) is far from perfect. Just to give a perhaps contrived example based on what the GP said. We can imagine that companies start worrying about the caste of their employees (or just if they're indian…

How is my take simplistic? I wasn't even really arguing in favor of the law, nor was I opining on the concern you raise about the chilling effect on companies in terms of hiring Hindu employees (I think your point is reasonable).

I was merely pointing out several inane things about the post to which I was replying. That post raised no reasonable arguments for its position, and showed a lot of ignorance about what the law would actually do.

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#132

Post by catlover76 »

addicted wrote: post #78
catlover76 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but there are already legal protections for discrimination on basis of race and religion. > There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all? Are you going to enumerate them all in defense of caste discrimination on the faulty logic that we have to eliminate every other possible injustice before we tackle caste discrimination?

What would cover discrimination based on religion if religion was not in that list? The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary. Adding caste, assuming Newsom’s argument is correct, would then be the equivalent of adding religious denomination because an Evangelical Christian is concerned a Catholic is discriminating against them. And most likely that would never even see the light of…

> The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary.

It seems that there is caselaw in California indicating that courts do not believe ancestry covers caste (?)

It's unclear really; nobody in this thread has posted any caselaw either way. It could be that the issue is so unsettled that maybe it would make sense for advocates of the law to first try to establish that ancestry covers it--or build up some clear precedent that ancestry is inadequate in the process.

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#133

Post by [deleted] »

TMWNN wrote: post #120
innagadadavida wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place! Newsom vetoing the bill is on similar grounds - no one should care or talk about cast and certainly it should not be mentioned in any CA bill.

I know. I am going further, and stating that if South Asians are arguing *in the US* about the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination, and it's gotten to the point that a law was proposed and almost enacted, maybe we Americans should question whether we should have the arguers, as well as the arguments, in the US in the first place. I mean, you can say that the South Asian presence in the UK is because of…

[deleted]

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#135

Post by catlover76 »

function_seven wrote: post #83
catlover76 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess you could argue that all Californians—regardless of their ethnicity—are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of caste. The law would literally prohibit everyone from discriminating on the basis of caste. There's nothing arguable or debatable about that. As I posted above, I think it's a valid point for Hindus to make that they feel kind of targeted, but the flip side of that is that they feel that wa…

> The law would literally prohibit everyone from discriminating on the basis of caste. There's nothing arguable or debatable about that. I'm not debating the literal law, I'm debating the effects of the law. Harsher sentencing for crack cocaine literally applied to everyone of all races. But... yeah, it was done that way to target Black offenders, sentencing them more harshly for a couple rocks than White stock broke…

> Step up enforcement of existing laws so you can deal not only with caste-ism, but also sectarian strife among other groups. Shia or Sunni, Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox or Reformed, etc.

That's a pretty good point that nobody here has raised yet

If there was a way to ensure basically that people didn't discriminate against people of their own broad religion who were of a different sect, and that such a law would automatically cover caste discrimination by people of upper caste background against people of lower caste background (whether or not either claim to profess any specific religion termed Hinduism), that would certainly be better.

There are a couple issues with this in practice, however, and this suffers even more strongly from the conceptual problem that discrimination between a Shia and Sunni or between a Catholic and Protestant, etc., is almost certainly already covered under religious discrimination, whereas caste apparently isn't.

A big part of the problem with this bill is that we actually don't seem to have a clear answer on the latter question--it seems like almost everyone is kind of just assuming that caste is or isn't already covered by existing law based on their preferences. Doesn't seem to be a lot of definitive caselaw either way.

From that perspective, it's pretty reasonable for Newsom to veto it for now until the situation becomes more clear (though it's probably the case that his move was driven more by political calculation than wise leadership).

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#136

Post by catlover76 »

booleandilemma wrote: post #103

I can think of few things more un-American than the concept of caste. We should not even acknowledge that caste exists any more than bodily humors. All men are created equal.

Whether or not the law is good or bad, this is such a dumb comment.

Obviously, the law would not somehow create caste as a legal category, or otherwise confer recognition, legal or otherwise, that there is validity to the concept of "caste". Surely you understand that right? Your comment suggests you think the law is some kind of proclamation that caste is a real thing that exists, but I mean, surely you just can't be so dumb as to think that (?)

What it would do is try to curtail people who do believe in caste from discriminating against others on the basis of their perceived, supposed "caste".

Surely you understand that the law would thus be "anti-caste"?

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#137

Post by nitwit005 »

huytersd wrote: post #64
function_seven wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would be the only group “exposed” to this law. The vast majority of non-Indian people in California have very little idea how caste works, and how to identify membership, etc. So now there’s this new law that de facto only applies to a specific ethnicity of Californians. I guess you could argue that all Californians—regardless of their ethnicity—are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of caste. But to me…

Indians can’t even tell castes unless they are from essentially the same county/local cluster. This is only really a problem because you have a lot of people from the same part of Andra pradesh coming and working in the tech sector.

You can always ask about someone's background, or look it up.

Google suffered a backlash in Japan when they made ancient maps easy to find, as people feared it'd make it easy to connect them to frowned upon ancestry: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7514420&page=1

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#138

Post by huytersd »

nitwit005 wrote: post #137
huytersd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indians can’t even tell castes unless they are from essentially the same county/local cluster. This is only really a problem because you have a lot of people from the same part of Andra pradesh coming and working in the tech sector.

You can always ask about someone's background, or look it up. Google suffered a backlash in Japan when they made ancient maps easy to find, as people feared it'd make it easy to connect them to frowned upon ancestry: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7514420&page=1

You can’t look up this stuff, it’s too local and none of it is written down or relevant even if it was. Just families classifying families in their towns. Geography means nothing, families of most castes live right next to each other.

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#139

Post by [deleted] »

serial_dev wrote: post #88
ethanbond wrote: post #2

The large and vocal constituency activated against the bill is good evidence that in fact it is not already accounted for under existing civil rights law.

No, it is not. If I propose adding "don't be sneaky little hobbitses" to the MIT license and people don't want to add it, is it evidence that we have sneaky Hobbits infiltrating the software developer community? Or something more serious, people who are against the PATRIOT Act are evidence that we need the laws and they are not patriots, anyway? Is it the level of discourse we want? You take what's in the bill at fac…

[deleted]

Re: Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

#140

Post by ethanbond »

phpisthebest wrote: post #54
locofocos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. I'm trying to understand the resistance in good faith, but the article didn't explain their position very clearly. "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition? "Passing a law against discrimination of X will stigmatize X" - Imagine someone was making this argument for an existing federally protected class.

>>so why the fierce opposition? Because anytime you pass unnecessary laws you open the future up to some judge somewhere, or some prosecutor some where twisting the words to mean something completely different Happens all the time in society and the fact that people believe it is acceptable to simply duplicate laws is very dangerous We need a massive curbing of the number of laws in society as it is, personally in th…

Would make sense if this wasn't being proposed specifically in response to specific real things happening in actual reality today which the law is failing to address.
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