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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#581

Post by s1artibartfast »

kenjackson wrote: post #36
endisneigh wrote: post #19

I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)? Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with. In any case I doubt this will c…

The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it. I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.

It's not a matter of ruling narrowly. Gender and sex based discrimination is already illegal in admissions.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#582

Post by cod1r »

High quality education and resources being gate-kept makes less sense moving forward. Easiest solution is to let a LOT more people in regardless of background. Letting more people in means you get more money anyways. Who cares if letting in more people makes things less "elite". Elitism is cringe.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#583

Post by ekam »

dmvdoug wrote: post #501
Georgelemental wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue is personal for justices Thomas, Jackson, and Sotomayor especially. I think that is reflected in their opinions.

Sotomayor as well. What fascinates me about Thomas’s dissent is towards the end he talks about HBCUs and how effective they are. You’ll find language of his in a lot of places suggesting black separatist—type sympathies. He was a genuine radical in his college years in that respect, and he’s still clearly sympathetic to sone extent. Cards on the table: I think Justice Thomas has a genuinely nutty jurisprudence. Like…

Yeah he does seem to have a somewhat cohesive and distinct philosophy of his own that undergirds his decisions and that's been underappreciated given his influence over the Court and American jurisprudence

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#584

Post by cvoss »

joshuaissac wrote: post #336
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judicial branch does not make laws. You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case. They did no such thing. They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law. Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.

> The judicial branch does not make laws. > They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law. This is not how it works in common law jurisdictions. Common law judges can and do make law. This is called case law (or common law), in contrast to statute law that is enacted by the legislature. That goes beyond just interpreting statute law but also making new laws w…

This is just a dispute of semantics over what the word "law" means. The fact remains that the United States government has been designed from the start to have legislative bodies that pass statutes, and judicial bodies which do not pass statutes. If judicial bodies effectively pass or amend statutes by exercising too much control, then we have a fundamental breakdown occurring with respect to the design of the system.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#586

Post by chmod600 »

mcv wrote: post #255
pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia ), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether peopl…

Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both. And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people,…

“you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.”

For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided.

When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage.

Should students whose parents arrived from China in the 80s be discriminated against so that you can discriminate in favor of someone whose parents arrived from Kenya in the 80s? There are a zillion scenarios like that, and when you add them up they aren’t the edge cases, the complexity is the normal case. America is a place of immigration and mixing.

History is history. A lot of it is bad. You can only fix the future, and a never-ending argument about history isn’t going to do that. We know discrimination based on race is bad. If an individual needs help, help them regardless of race.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#588

Post by endisneigh »

chmod600 wrote: post #586
mcv wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both. And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people,…

“you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.” For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided. When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and vi…

The problem with your logic is that if you leave the past the past then there’s effectively no punishment for discrimination in the present.

Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#589

Post by Melchizedek »

NoRelToEmber wrote: post #389
pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia ), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether peopl…

> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status. Let's explicitly look at how this affected race (instead of leaving it to readers imaginations), since that was the issue the court was asked to consider. The student…

So clearly non-Jewish whites are by far the most discriminated against considering their share of the population and SAT scores. Why is this fact never mentioned in the media?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#590

Post by mrguyorama »

scohesc wrote: post #302
dudul wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it. I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People ne…

I've heard people make references to the Occupy Wall Street protests a decade+ back being the catalyst for corporations and governments to start using "diversity" as a wedge issue to distract and divide people into groups to keep people from organizing. (Further down the conspiracy rabbit-hole, the CIA has been known to work with entertainment and critical industries to push opinions and ideas to sway the populace) I…

Or maybe you just weren't as aware of the problems black people face in america? The amount of times my conservative family members tell me "Such and such wasn't a problem when I was a kid" while completely ignoring the problems proves it isn't a genuine concern.
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