November 12, 2009

Affirmative action strikes again

From CNN:

A second former medical school colleague of Hasan said several people raised concerns about Hasan's overall competence.

Even though Hasan earned his medical degree and residency, some of his fellow students believed Hasan "didn't have the intellect" to be in the program and was not academically rigorous in his coursework.

Hasan "was not fit to be in the military, let alone in the mental health profession," this classmate told CNN. "No one in class would ever have referred a patient to him or trusted him with anything."

The first classmate echoed this sentiment.

Hasan was "coddled, accommodated and pushed through that masters of public health despite substandard performance," the classmate said. He was "put in the fellowship program because they didn't know what to do with him."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

104 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting.

Though I believe Arabs generally don't receive affirmative action in the broader education system.

Anonymous said...

I actually don't think that people of Middle Eastern descent get affirmative action.

Truth said...

Since when do Arabs get "affirmative action?"

Cordelia said...

From that same article:

"Hasan's family has revealed little about him, saying in media interviews that Hasan was a 'good American'...."

Obviously he wasn't:

"The source recalled another instance in which Hasan was asked if the U.S. Constitution was a brilliant document. Hasan replied, 'No, not particularly,' according to the source."

Anonymous said...

Arabs are officially classified as Caucasians in the United States and they do not receive affirmative action. Blaming affirmative action, which does more good than harm, is totally off base here.

RKU said...

That's silly. Everyone knows that Arabs get Affirmative Action...along with absolutely every other group which conservatives don't like.

Chinese and other East Asians certainly get massive Affirmative Action, which explains why they so totally dominate California's UC system, as we hear from Steve's endless complaints.

Anonymous said...

Arabs usually dont't get AA but the Army is desperate to recruit muslims to diversify.

JGP

Udolpho.com said...

I don't think the affirmative action that Hasan benefited from was an official quota (as used with chronically underperforming blacks and hispanics), but rather the SWPL "diversity is our strength" variety of affirmative action where a culture of "let's see more colored people and women around here" allows failures like Hasan to find a niche in the system despite their incompetence or even insanity.

It's becoming more evident that this sort of thing is absolutely rampant, particulary as contemporary white collar business culture sets the bar for achievement so low and puts such a heavy emphasis on HR-driven politics. And of course since 9/11 the feds have been adamant about refusing to face realities regarding attitudes and loyalties of immigrants with very strong religious/ethnic identities. The 9/11 hijackers were far from clever, but the system was designed to ignore blaring alarms lest some thin-skinned faggot screech his outrage.

SWPL also get to feel like patrons when they shield women and minorities through (it's perhaps more pervasive with women). As in, look at how I am helping this underprivileged person who is a victim of our horrible culture. I think I'm pretty awesome!

This of course feeds resentment among the failures--there's nothing more humiliating than realizing that your position and status have not been earned but rather given to you out of pity for your obvious inferiority. SWPL condescension stings like sulfuric acid. Just look at Henry Louis Gates. All it took was some college town flatfoot to put his massive insecurities on the front page.

keypusher said...

There are not a lot of places where there are large numbers of Arabs. But affirmative action was certainly practiced in favor of Arabs in Michigan before Prop 2. No doubt it still is.

http://aapf.org/focus/episodes/oct30.php

Is it practiced in the U.S. military? I would assume that it is, but I don't know. Does anyone?

Anonymous said...

My experience with African Americans in a master's of education program...coddled, accommodated and pushed through...

The Anti-Gnostic said...

affirmative action, which does more good than harm

How so?

Anonymous said...

Just because it isnt called AA doesnt mean its not happening.

A Muslim officer in the army - whats not to like? You can imagine all sorts of box-tickers and diversity cheerleaders pushing this guys career all the way to the top.

Anonymous said...

Steve -
It is kind of interesting that the HBD angle is being discussed here. I dont recall a similar discussion about George Sodini, the PA fitness club mass murderer, when police found two typed notes in Sodini's bag that spelled out his his extreme frustration and depression with women. He complained of "never having spent a weekend with a woman" -- a theme shared in his chilling blog posts. Additionally, in those blog posts, which were never widely discussed in the media, he revealed a morbid fascination with black men who he believed were stealing white women from white men. What gives? Can't psychtoic mass murderers latch onto any ideology that they want to. I am no fan of PC but lets be even.

Richard Hoste said...

Maybe getting into the program there was no AA, but they themselves said they were reluctant to kick out one of the few Muslim doctors in the military.

Dahlia said...

Right on, Steve

Lawrence Auster has an extremely good post on this:

"Nidal Hasan, the mass murderer of Fort Hood, is a poster boy for Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society. The Law states that under liberalism, the more incompetent, unassimilable, or hostile a minority or non-Western person is, the more lies must be told to protect him, because the more negative the truth about a minority person, the more racist it is to speak the truth about him. Thus, because the truth about Hasan was not just bad, but horrendously bad, to speak the truth about him would have made the speaker seem, not just racist, but horrendously racist....
Hasan was blessed with a trifecta of undesirable traits that assured his success in today's Army. He wasn't just unassimilable, believing in the sharia law which is totally incompatible with the American law and way of life; and he wasn't just hostile and dangerous, openly expressing enthusiastic support for Muslim terrorism against Americans, but, in addition to all that, he was, according medical colleagues of his interviewed by CNN, woefully sub-par intellectually. He survived as a medical student and as an Army psychiatrist, because, in keeping with the First Law, the less he belonged in medical school, in the medical profession, and in the Army, the greater became the compulsion on the part of those institutions to keep him there."
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014758.html
A Consummate Son of Liberalism

Anonymous said...

IF he did get it, then it goes further than one might expect as partially explaining things. For example, let's assume:

1) He was under qualified.

2) Reality has a way of letting people know when they're in over their head.

3) Cognitive dissonance sets in.

4) Rationalization is used to reduce said cognitive dissonance.

5) Either admit I am under qualified or declare one's difficulties as being the result of being a victim.

6) Victimhood begets villains and villains deserve no mercy.

You see how being in a world where you're under qualified exacerbates such a system of thought?

When you have the twin phenomena of being a) dumber than the population (or peers) and b) possess an above average self-esteem, you get anti social behavior. The intervening variable is reality, which must be modified for your beliefs to mesh. AA doesn't help, because it sets up a mis-match from the start. I’ve seen this hyper aggression and sensitivity in the workplace from people who were in way over their head and their position was granted via AA.

(see the work of Roy Baumeister for data on self-esteem combined with lack of competence being predictors of violence)

Anonymous said...

Since when do Arabs get "affirmative action?"

Arabs are officially classified as Caucasians in the United States and they do not receive affirmative action. Blaming affirmative action, which does more good than harm, is totally off base here.

Oh come on.

You guys cannot POSSIBLY be that naive.

Varangy said...

Interesting.

This occurred to me after reading his PowerPoint presentations with his numerous misspellings.

No way a real physician would make those sorts of embarrassing spelling mistakes on a presentation.

Anonymous said...

Just make sure folks, when the doctor oeprates on you or your loved one that he is not an A.A. clown but a doctor who truly DESERVED the position. You can always save your liberalism for later.

Anonymous said...

"Since when do Arabs get 'affirmative action?'"

What they get is discounted loans and outright grants from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Administration to purchase gas stations, liquor stores, grocery stores, motels and the like.

It's not AA per say; but a powerful, subtle variant. Asians get it too by the way.

Tanstaafl said...

Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society really works.

When I pointed out to him that it applies best of all to jews he got extremely hostile and accused me of that super-special form of "racism" known as "anti-semitism".

QED

Baloo said...

There's Official Affirmative Action, where you carefully count up your Black, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, etc., and then there's defensive affirmative action where you make sure to coddle anybody who isn't a White Christian male.

Black Sea said...

'Hasan "was not fit to be in the military, let alone in the mental health profession," this classmate told CNN.'

Actually, I suspect a fair number of nut-jobs gravitate toward the mental health fleld, hoping to make good on the proverb, "Physician, heal thyself."


Somewhat incidentally, yesterday morning on Al Jazeera there was a call-in show about the "adverse event" at Ft. Hood. The show's two guest experts were both Muslims who'd apparently grown up in America (accentless English).

One of them, a journalist, said the mainstream media in America was really playing up the fact that the shooter was Muslim in a attempt to fan the flames of Islamaphobia. (This wasn't exactly my impression from the Iowahawk satire, but whatever.) The other guest, some sort of community representative, kept reiterating the fact that "we don't yet know what the motivation was," and that any speculation regarding Islam reflected the extent to which Islam was "misunderstood" in America.

Despite this call to refrain from judgment until all the facts were in, everybody, including the show's host, agreed that Hasan had been subject to intense anti-Muslim bigotry. Of course, this is a sort of chicken or egg question. Did Hasan roam the halls of Walter Reed advocating the beheading of infidels because he'd been subject to anti-Muslim slights, or was he the subject of anti-Muslim slights because, you know, he kept urging the slaughter of infidels? Or maybe he was just paranoid psychotic. The show's panel didn't explore this tangle of cause and effect.

The guest-journalist did, however, with a straight-face, claim that Hasan was obviously suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, this despite the fact that the guy had never been anywhere near a combat zone (until he created one, that is). Presumably, the stress involved related back to the intense atmposphere of anti-Muslim animus in which he'd been immersed.

Anyway, the high point of the show came when a caller from Virginia, clearly himself a Muslim (accented English plus Islamic first name), pointed out that Hasan was Palestinian, and suggested that this, rather than Islam, might have been the crucial factor in explaining his homocidal rampage.

The guests, as well as the host, were clearly discomforted by THAT particular idea, and quickly returned to the mantra of "we just don't know what his motivations were."

And I guess we never will.

Anonymous said...

"How so?"

It creates better lives for the disadvantaged, especially folks who come from lower income households. I don't see that as a bad thing.

coldequation said...

Just make sure folks, when the doctor oeprates on you or your loved one that he is not an A.A. clown but a doctor who truly DESERVED the position. You can always save your liberalism for later.

Screw that. Let the libs deal with the consequences of their policies. Somebody has to. They should be guilt-tripped and forced to feel cognitive dissonance when they make an unprincipled exception.

Anonymous said...

I don't doubt that Arabs receive some sort of informal affirmative action in certain institutional settings.

But they don't receive it on a more general basis, such as admissions to top universities.

Bob said...

Wait a minute paranoid people:

You think Muslims from the Middle East get affirmative action? But don't you also think the Jews control everything, or at minimum the big institutions that have affirmative action?

The same folks who drop bombs on Muslims in Palestine several times a year every year and want the USA to bomb Iran?

Keep your conspiracies straight please!

Black Sea said...

"It creates better lives for the disadvantaged, especially folks who come from lower income households."

You might want to check out Thomas Sowell's arguments on how AA in university admissions channels "disadvantaged" students into academic programs from which they are unlikely to graduate. This tends to result in the following outcomes:

1. They switch to a less rigorous program within the university, often a diversity-studies program, which offers little in the way of career prospects, though they may graduate.

2. They simply drop out or flunk out of the university, and abandon higher education completely.

3. They conclude that in fact the system is rigged against them on the grounds of their ethnicity, because they see non-"disadvantaged" peers generally succeeding, while they see many of their "disadvantaged" peers, and themselves, failing.

In brief, it's better to graduate with a degree in Management from Cal State Fresno than to leave degreeless from UC Davis.

There are some pretty cogent reasons to conclude that AA, in addition to wasting social resources, actually leads to negative outcomes for many of its supposed beneficiaries.

Bob said...

Dear people who think Asians get affirmative action (RKU):

"Compared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage."

Source: http://m.insidehighered.com/views/2009/11/12/radford

Or to put it another way, Asians are discriminated against in favor of whites (by 140 points) by more than whites lose out to Hispanics (130 points).

JC said...

Arabs/Muslims are a proportionally small component of the military and are certainly beneficiaries of institutional affirmative action.

eh said...

I think people who question whether 'Arabs' get affirmative action in some kind of official sense are naive. The goal of affirmative action is 'diversity, and that the makeup (of whatever) should be representative. No question that an 'Arab' would be seen as adding to diversity, and since 'Arabs' are also seen as a growing population fraction, adding the odd 'Arab' would also be seen as ensuring the makeup is representative. It's all rather diffuse, and people making those kinds of decisions feel they have the leeway.

Bob said...

Seeing Arab Muslims in elite US institutions is extremely rare.

When you meet someone in the US or Euro elite or middle class from the middle east, 98% of the time it is member of a persecuted-by-Arabs-minority.

Jews most prominently, but also Armenians, Arab Christians, Lebanese, Zoroastrians, or Middle Eastern Greeks (the ones expelled from all around the middle east after the Ottoman Empire fell).

France is almost 10% middle east Muslim, but they do not even make up 1% of the French elite.

SF said...

Gee, do you suppose Anderson Cooper is a reader now?

CJ said...

Yes, affirmative action strikes again. And again.

Allegedly Drunk United Airlines Pilot, Erwin Washington, to Be Tried in London

Udolpho.com said...

It creates better lives for the disadvantaged, especially folks who come from lower income households

Time to hit the books, chief, affirmative action is used to help keep upper middle class blacks in the upper middle class, it doesn't do shit for Leron who works a shift at Jiffy Lube. It's not even clear how it could help lower income (and really borderline retarded) blacks, since at the end of the day someone like a doctor still has to know which end of the scalpel to hold.

Anonymous said...

This is consistent with my picture of him so far - a mediocre dullard not at all qualified for his post.

Dennis Dale said...

This is an example of an incompetent finding a home in the less lucrative, therefore less-demanding, military.

You've been watching Mad Men; this is like the young doctor (who's married to the buxom redhead Joan) washing out as a resident and then accepting a commission in the Army, where he's assured he will be a surgeon. Weiner's done his research.

Perhaps things have improved, but any former serviceman of a certain age will tell you this rings true. Come to think of it, the quality of officers generally was decidedly mixed; one of the first I worked for was a Naval Acadamy graduate utterly lacking in social skills.

Shunted off to guard duty to babysit us newbies and screw-ups, he was obsessed with and lectured us frequently on the immorality of masturbating while on post.

Anonymous said...

"Time to hit the books, chief, affirmative action is used to help keep upper middle class blacks in the upper middle class, it doesn't do shit for Leron who works a shift at Jiffy Lube. It's not even clear how it could help lower income (and really borderline retarded) blacks, since at the end of the day someone like a doctor still has to know which end of the scalpel to hold."

Not all of affirmative action helps poor people but clearly some of it does. Take a look at the homeless girl who got accepted into Harvard. We should be encouraging minorities with potential to succeed. Do you have a problem with upper middle class blacks or something? What? Do you think they don't deserve their money because they are black and according to you, stupid?

Curvaceous Carbon-based Life Form said...

"Anonymous said...
"How so?"

It creates better lives for the disadvantaged, especially folks who come from lower income households. I don't see that as a bad thing."

Seriously? You advocate putting into crucial positions where, often -- as in the case of firefighters, Army officers and doctors -- life-and-death decisions are made for the rest of us, people who are not qualified, in order to give "better lives" to some disadvantageds? Really?
If giving more money to disadvantageds is the goal, society would be in better shape just be honest about it, give the jobs to those with the competence, and just give the incompetents staight-up handouts under some "disability" program.

Curvaceous Carbon-based Life Form said...

"Or to put it another way, Asians are discriminated against in favor of whites (by 140 points)"

At that, it seems to me, is perfectly acceptable. Unless said Asians are 3rd or 4th generation, then their parents came here to give their kids the advantage of schools built by Whites, with White taxpayer moneys, intended for the Whites' kids. This ought not be. Had those Asian parents stayed in Asia, the Asian kids would be attending the Asian schools the Asian parents built them. The White kids for whom these American schools were built OUGHT to get first access.

Anonymous said...

"Time to hit the books, chief, affirmative action is used to help keep upper middle class blacks in the upper middle class, it doesn't do shit for Leron who works a shift at Jiffy Lube. It's not even clear how it could help lower income (and really borderline retarded) blacks, since at the end of the day someone like a doctor still has to know which end of the scalpel to hold."

We're forgetting about Ricci already?

rightsaidfred said...

Here's a cartoon picture worth a thousand words.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

ake a look at the homeless girl who got accepted into Harvard. We should be encouraging minorities with potential to succeed.

That's not what AA does. All AA does is cherry-pick the Talented Tenth, who don't need it, and shuttle them off into white society, and promote incompetent people over their heads.

The practical effect is 'Yale or jail' for an entire cohort who would be better off learning a trade commensurate with their abilities.

J said...

Are Palestinian Muslims entitled to AA preferencial treatment in the USA? Why? They are a people like every other one, dentists, poets, suicide bombers, airplane hijackers, pizza delivery boys, terrorist bombers, fanatic jihadists, car washers, military mass killers, etc. Just like anybody else.

Anonymous said...

Call it what you want, but this isn't affirmative action. There's actually a lot of Muslims in Psychiatry. And Arabs don't get affirmative action.

general torpor said...

"Do you have a problem with upper middle class blacks or something? What? Do you think they don't deserve their money because they are black and according to you, stupid?

It is not always "their" money. Programs for "minorities" are funded with tax-payer money.

I don't know if you're serious or not, but on the possibility that you are, here is what:
AA was to help "disadvantaged" persons. It was assumed blacks did less well because they were disadvantaged. Upper middle class blacks, who may have been in this socioeconomic group for a few generations, are in no way disadvantaged. If you accept that the bar must be lowered for them to get into a school or job, then you are saying they are intrinsically and forever intellectually inferior and will never be able to to compete on an equal playing field. There is no reason for Affirmative Action to apply to a black person who grew up in 100,000 p.a. household. None. If you believe blacks are just as smart and just the same mentally as whites, then it is time they were held to the same standards. Unfortunately that would decrease the number of black college grads, not to mention the Ivy League kind, by many percentage points.

Anonymous said...

Blaming Affirmative Action is on target if you consider people are to PC brainwashed by the multicultural crowed to even consider NOT applying the same rules of Affirmative Action to anyone with non white skin. Even though Arabs are Caucasian. Goes to show how many different layers of stupidity are involved here.

TomV said...

Morally superior anonymous:

We should be encouraging minorities with potential to succeed.

Tautology. They "succeed" because you "encourage" them by preordination*. Not just in college admission, but in every step before and after, as Hasan's case demonstrates. And that comes at the expense of whites and Asians with true disadvantages and potentials.

By your mantra, we should be encouraging the Hasans of the world because Arabs are a minority in America. How's that "success" working out?

In any case, whites will in time become a minority. One with a great "potential to succeed" at that. Will they get affirmative action, too? How about just a level playing field?

---
* The few affirmative action beneficiaries who can succeed on their own merits are just that. They don't need preferences.

Svigor said...

Keep your conspiracies straight please!

Bob, since you're, erm, a gentile, you might want to broaden the range of topics you consider comment-worthy here.

Svigor said...

Dear people who think Asians get affirmative action (RKU)

Good job, that's what I was talking about. Now please learn to recognize sarcasm.

Svigor said...

Do you have a problem with upper middle class blacks or something? What? Do you think they don't deserve their money because they are black and according to you, stupid?

I just can't tell any more! Pushing the limits of false-flag liberal obliviousness? Or is it sincere?

There really is room for malicious/comedic genius here, since liberalism is by necessity so far gone...

Seamus said...

If you read his PowerPoint presentation on Muslims in the U.S. Military, you have to wonder how he ever got an undergraduate degree from Virginia Tech, much less a medical degree.

read it said...

"Shunted off to guard duty to babysit us newbies and screw-ups, he was obsessed with and lectured us frequently on the immorality of masturbating while on post."


Hilarious.

Svigor said...

OT but, has everyone seen the link at Drudge, ACORN Sues Over 'Unconstitutional' Funding Cuts By Congress?

Lulz city. Lobel is calling Congress' withdrawal of (Congress') funds from Acorn a "bill of attainder."

OT from my OT, but doesn't American politics seem to be moving steadily toward a permanent state of hysteria where Coke and Pepsi never have to actually serve their constituents, escaping instead into a "lesser of two evils" scenario where stopping the evil opposing brand is as far as they have to go? Each side's base seems perfectly content to "defeat" the other, and get nothing done of what they actually want.

DCThrowback said...

@Dennis Dale - Nice Mad Men pull. That's a great point and as a former active duty Army guy, with doctors it was generally known that the variability among military doctors was quite high. You could get a great Major was just looking to pay off his debt by serving or a horrible Lieutenant Colonel who would never make it in the real medical world.

@Anon Take a look at the homeless girl who got accepted into Harvard. We should be encouraging minorities with potential to succeed.

Dude. Who on this site is against seeing folks succeed? There's a reason black folks have what is called the "talented tenth"; the top 10% of IQ'd black folk who generally assimilate into the upper middle class. Those folks, disporportionately, receive much of the benefit of affirmative action. The issue is the huge competition for those intelligent black folks under the rubric of "diversity" to the student body when in fact they offer little in the way of tangible gain to those who are around them. Writing policy based on the "good will hunting" theory is just stupid. The cream of the IQ crop generally rises to the top, homeless or non-homeless.

Anonymous said...

> Do you have a problem with upper middle class blacks or something? What? Do you think they don't deserve their money <

Those upper middle class blacks who get affirmative action and other race-based preferential treatment do not deserve their money. If they did, why would they need affirmative action et al.?

Does the business world exist to keep blacks down, or does it exist to make money as reliably as possible? I affirm the latter, you affirm the former.

But the truth is that - as a rule - qualified people of any race, while they could all surely use any boosts they can get, don't need these boosts ultimately.

My grandfather was an indentured servant in 1915, in a remote area of Kentucky. My family came from no money at all. I grew up in a rural area with no more access to high living than Turkistan has. This baleful legacy doesn't give me the right to one penny out of anyone's pocket. But being kept out of some lunch counters and having a great-great-great grandfather who was a slave is supposed to justify transfer payments in the trillions? It doesn't wash, Bob, not anymore.

Anonymous said...

"Not all of affirmative action helps poor people but clearly some of it does. Take a look at the homeless girl who got accepted into Harvard. We should be encouraging minorities with potential to succeed. Do you have a problem with upper middle class blacks or something? What? Do you think they don't deserve their money because they are black and according to you, stupid?"

The reason the black homeless girl getting into Harvard got mentioned in the newspapers was because it is so rare; a true man bites dog story. A few years ago a survey of black Harvard students was done and it found that 99% of black Harvard students had a father with a B.A. and over half had a father with a graduate degree. These are definitely not poor kids from da hood for the most part.

As for encouraging minorities with the potential to succeed, you are are correct. We shoud do this. However, after a couple of generations of outreach and AA, there aren't many to be found among the underclass anymore. (In fact, due to AA, there are already more NAMs among the upper middle classes than would be there under any reasonable meritocratic criteria based on their populations' g distributions.

"because they are black and according to you, stupid"

This is simply a silly statement and nobody here believes it. You've created a classic straw man. What the HBD community believes is that different groups differ in their population means and distributions of g and other psychological traits and that these differences are partly genetic in origin. Hence, differences are statistical in nature. Nobody thinks all the individuals of any group are bright or stupid. However, the evidence is becomming increasingly overwhelming that there are large disparities in the proportion of members of different ethnic groups represented at high levels of g.

Homo Racistphobe said...

Dear people who think Asians don't get affirmative action:

The National Minority Supplier Development Council, 'certifiers' for the SBA, etc, says these people get special, favorable treatment in just about any gov't contract:

"Asian-Indian: A U.S. citizen whose origins are from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh."

"Asian-Pacific: A U.S. citizen whose origins are from Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Trust Territories of the Pacific or the Northern Marianas."

Whiskey said...

Dennis Dale lives in the past. His comments are irrelevant to today's military. At Grad school I knew a variety of Commissioned officers from the Navy, Army, and Marines. Some Academy grads, some ROTC. All seeking a career post-Military as Clinton downsized everything.

They were generally among the top scorers on tests. First, because they were organized and disciplined, they studied effectively. Second, because they had familiarity with leadership/management concepts, the way say a female colleague from Marketing would not. Organizing purchases and loading of supplies onto ships in the Gulf is a different matter from producing powerpoint presentations. Third, they were generally pretty smart.

Udolpho is correct on the patronizing. See the trailers for "the Blind Side" in which a White woman played by Sandra Bullock treats some Black kid like an abused dog rescued from a shelter. When the guy's success at Left Tackle was due to rigorous training and coaching.

And yes, women particularly go in for this stuff.

albertosaurus said...

Chinese and other East Asians certainly get massive Affirmative Action, which explains why they so totally dominate California's UC system, as we hear from Steve's endless complaints.

This statement could hardly be more wrong. When I was teaching in an information science faculty a decade or so ago, I asked a Chinese colleague if he resented all the discrimination against asians. He said it was neccessary, otherwise the entire student body at at UC in computers would be Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Asians are the primary victims of AA, not its beneficiaries.

No one who has had any direct experience with asians in software development could think that they need any unfair advantage in order to succeed.

As for Hasan, like Obama we need to see his SATs and grades.

RKU said...

Dear people who think Asians get affirmative action (RKU)

Good job, that's what I was talking about. Now please learn to recognize sarcasm.


Ha, ha. Human intelligence may be one of the main topics of Steve's blogsite, but I must say that the average IQ of a given comment thread seems to depend pretty heavily on how much Svigor is posting...

Truth said...

"t's becoming more evident that this sort of thing is absolutely rampant, particulary as contemporary white collar business culture sets the bar for achievement so low and puts such a heavy emphasis on HR-driven politics."

"Just because it isnt called AA doesnt mean its not happening."

"
It's not AA per say; but a powerful, subtle variant. Asians get it too by the way."

"There's Official Affirmative Action, where you carefully count up your Black, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, etc., and then there's defensive affirmative action where you make sure to coddle anybody who isn't a White Christian male."

OK; I get it now, we should try to get a law passed that goes as follows:

"Any white natural-born looser can charge any non-white person with any job or business with having received affirmative action to get where he is."

Works for me.

rob said...

At Grad school I knew a variety of Commissioned...

Did this graduate school even try to teach you when to capitalize English words? Do you know what a proper noun is?

ben tillman said...

Arabs are officially classified as Caucasians in the United States and they do not receive affirmative action.

Officially, except at the level of certain city councils, NO ONE gets affirmative action. It's done in secret, with unwritten rules, for good reason. The demos HATES it.

Anonymous said...

According to the wiki article on IQ and the Wealth of Nations Egypt and Lebanon both have IQ scores in the mid 80's so the Palestinians probably score around the same.

The chances of Hassan succeeding on his own as a psychologist are about the same as a US Black.

ben tillman said...

"You might want to check out Thomas Sowell's arguments on how AA in university admissions channels 'disadvantaged' students into academic programs from which they are unlikely to graduate."

Yes, that's a good point with respect to school admissions, but it doesn't work with affirmative action jobs.

A better response to the earlier commenter who said that affirmative action does more good than harm is that he might want to check out the costs of affirmative action paid by innocent white people.

What kind of person discounts such harm and looks only to the "benefits" conferred on non-Whites?

I'll tell you: a bad person.

ben tillman said...

You think Muslims from the Middle East get affirmative action? But don't you also think the Jews control everything, or at minimum the big institutions that have affirmative action?

Why don't you take this act to the organized Jewish community? You think Muslim immigration is bad for that community. That community doesn't, and that is why there is Muslim immigration to the U.S. There never was, and there never will be, any support for Muslim immigration among American gentiles. It's all done behind our backs, and against our will.

And you know that.

Svigor said...

This statement could hardly be more wrong.

I saw it as obvious sarcasm. Am I just way off the reservation or what?

Anonymous said...

Svigor said,

"Each side's base seems perfectly content to "defeat" the other, and get nothing done of what they actually want."


Huh. We should be so lucky.

Jimmy Crackedcorn said...

At that, it seems to me, is perfectly acceptable. Unless said Asians are 3rd or 4th generation, then their parents came here to give their kids the advantage of schools built by Whites, with White taxpayer moneys, intended for the Whites' kids. This ought not be. Had those Asian parents stayed in Asia, the Asian kids would be attending the Asian schools the Asian parents built them.

And that, it seems to me, is the real point. What we often miss is the fact that the United States, contra the neocons, is not an idea - it's a piece of property. What is the value of all of the property owned by government - lands, waterways, mineral rights, roads, schools, buildings, ad infinitum, not to mention the aestheic value of living in the United States as opposed to Calcutta or Mexico City? $30 trillion, maybe?

And yet when someone immigrates here they get all of that - built, bled for and paid for by our ancestors, not theirs - for free.

Jimmy Crackedcorn said...

OK; I get it now, we should try to get a law passed that goes as follows: "Any white natural-born looser can charge any non-white person with any job or business with having received affirmative action to get where he is."

Well if we didn't have affirmative action and set-asides that wouldn't be an issue, would it? Any black with a great job could look the white natural born "looser" in the eye and say "I earned it."

Anonymous said...

How did you figure his IQ?

Because I've been scrutinizing the guy for about two years now, and I have a pretty good handle on just who he is.

[And no, he wrote neither Dreams nor Audacity.]

Dennis Dale said...

Dennis Dale lives in the past.

While this is generally true, at the moment I was recollecting the past.

But yes, what's four years of living, working and deploying halfway around the world with a given class of people have on your experience with a small, highly select (and self-selected) group? How many did you know? Hundreds? Thousands? Let's acknowledge we're both dealing in anecdotal evidence (and the anectodotal is already too prevalent comments here).

In addition to their financial disadvantage, the military has the additional problem of investing more up front in the education and training of its personnel--particularly officers. The University system serves the private sector much more effectively, to which it is geared. While a degree may be more a signal of character than a useful credential, at least majors programs are specific to the jobs they prepare one for.

Other than support functions such as law and medicine, the specialties of the military--armaments, aviation, tactics, etc--are taught in military schools or ROTC programs, on the military's dime.

Incentive pay is not an option. Goldman Sachs can sit back and pick from the cream of the nation's universities, pay them a salary lucrative by standards outside of the industry (but chickenfeed to them) and tie pay above that to performance. If not for the appeal of patriotism and adventure, the military wouldn't even be in the game.

The services are loathe to release any from their commitment,and have at their disposal the extraordinary obligation imposed by the military contract or commission. This allows them to take a washout from one occupation and put him wherever they choose, and the unappealing assignments ("sh*t details") are as numerous as the "sh*t birds"-as with the example of the Lieutenant I mentioned (God how I wish I could remember his name, a sort of born-again Michael Scott, he used his Marines as a literal captive audience, proseltyzing and lecturing us on matters great and small).

But then, I could be wrong. It's been a long time. I see three beneficial events improving either the pool of candidates or the appeal to them:

the Clinton cutbacks (necessary and appropriate, if seized upon by the same co-opted demagogues who would later bring us Iraq and "nation-building" in Afghanistan);
post 9/11 patriotism;
and the current recession.

Finally, what our fire-breathing keyboard commandos who fetishize the military need to remember one important fact: the military is a massive government bereaucracy of the worst sort.

"Promotion to the highest level of incompetence" is a huge problem.
The institutional cross-rot of "diversity efforts" is another, growing factor in diluting the candidate pool.

Anonymous said...

"A better response to the earlier commenter who said that affirmative action does more good than harm is that he might want to check out the costs of affirmative action paid by innocent white people.

What kind of person discounts such harm and looks only to the "benefits" conferred on non-Whites?

I'll tell you: a bad person."

You are being dramatic. So I am a bad person because I think society should help out talented individuals who happen to be disadvantaged economically? No, the only bad person here is you for not wanting minorities to excel in any capacity. America was not built on tribalism and it doesn't exist soley for WASPs. Immigrants have made it great but it's white supremacists such as yourself who don't want to see minorities in any positions of power. You guys love to blame African Americans and Latinos for America's woes, but they aren't running things, white people are. It must suck going through life full of so much hate.

Anonymous said...

Albertosauros responded thusly:


"Chinese and other East Asians certainly get massive Affirmative Action, which explains why they so totally dominate California's UC system, as we hear from Steve's endless complaints."

This statement could hardly be more wrong. When I was teaching in an information science faculty a decade or so ago, I asked a Chinese colleague if he resented all the discrimination against asians. He said it was neccessary, otherwise the entire student body at at UC in computers would be Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Asians are the primary victims of AA, not its beneficiaries.


I think you turned off your sarcasm detector.

Bob said...

"Bob, since you're, erm, a gentile, you might want to broaden the range of topics you consider comment-worthy here."

Svigor you are too cryptic for me.

I suppose I am a gentile, but I identify more with high IQ people of whatever race than with any particular ethnic group.

To the extent that I think of myself as ethnic at all, it is "white American" not "gentile" which is a sort of odd and negative (not Jewish) way to define oneself.

Tino said...

“Even though Arabs are Caucasian.”
Yes, even though ironically Hassan himself did not seem to realize this, since he talks about “Arabs and Caucasians” as separate groups in his presentation.

Truth:

“OK; I get it now”

No you don’t. You are not even trying to.

“Any white natural-born looser can charge any non-white person with any job or business with having received affirmative action to get where he is.”

It is not “any non-white person”.

It is Hassan, an evidently incompetent person, clearly unsuited for the job, with supportive arguments for his incompetence. If you want to defend Hassan’s competence or worth for the military please go ahead.

You don’t, probably because you can’t. Instead you attempt this pathetic straw-man.

I also notice your obsession with accusing critics of racial preferences as “loosers”. First of all you have no evidence of this. Second it is ad hominem. Let’s say that the person who pointed out that Hassan was worthless at his job and with high likelihood protected because of at sensitive minority status was a “looser”. That does not make the AA policies you defend less harmful.

patrick said...

Arabs don't get affirmative action, at least not officially.
This guy was treated with kid gloves because the military didn't want to seem anti-Muslim, and because in any large bureaucracy, a certain number of incompetents and psychos slip through the cracks.

Gene Berman said...

Truth (and Tino):

In the spirit of constructive nit-picking, "looser" is the comparative form of "loose"; the putative guy to whom you refer is a "loser."

Gene Berman said...

Ben Tillman:

"a bad person."

I don't know whether you meant a deliberate exxageration by way of emphasis or not but would point out the old (and sound) advice not to attribute to malevolence what can be ascribed to stupidity (and even granting that stupidity can render some malevolent).

It's simply a fact that even extremely
intelligent people can be stupid about all sorts of things; and, further, that when a large preponderance of the intelligent in positions of social leadership harbor stupid ideas and positions, disaster of one or another sort is virtually assured.

In that wise, what I'd explain to you (and to others of like mind) is that your opinions, in general, somewhat mirror those of others you would view as adversaries and, in fact, are essentially irreconcilable from theirs, permitting only such relief from conflict as might result from truce, cease-fire, armistice, and the "divvying up" of spoils, rights, territories, privileges, etc.

Humans, like all other living things, are possessed of an indwelling urge to
grow and reproduce to the extent of their abilities, dependent, ultimately, only on limits imposed by scarcity of those things required for such growth (as generally formulated and expressed by Malthus). As a very general rule, between all living organisms there must always exist an underlying conflict over procurement of scarce needs, especially between like species (due to similarities in their needs); changes in some (evolution, i.e., mutation) permit those to eke out advantages over kin and, thus, to survive, producing "advantaged" progeny.

Humans are different. Constrained by scarcity as any other species, the peculiar faculty or instinct we term "reason" enables some to see more than one method for success both for their own chance to reproduce and for that of their progeny as well. First (and more easily understood) is the idea, essentially, of unremitting conflict between individual and "others" whose existence depends on the same material entities. Second is the idea of cooperation betweeen those who would otherwise be in conflict. Though there are other species who may also exist in similar cooperation with others of their kind (social species) and even dissimilar others (parasites, saphrophytes, symbiots, etc.), reason has permitted man to use various cooperative forms to greatly reduce "riskiness" of existence in general and especially scarcity of material neccessities. Though we may presume arrangements for cooperation occur primarily to the more intelligent and are structured and implemented by them, the very great imitative ability of even those of far lesser capability insure that any such innovation soon becomes general. And, as the history of the species and expanding spheres of civilization make clear, it is this model--the cooperative--that has dominated (and continues to dominate) human thought.

But, as with all other matters of thought and endeavor, there's a "fly in the ointment" of cooperation which the species has never (generally) understood and which can never be entirely eliminated as a cause of disaster, both to civilization and even to continued existence of the species itself.

I'll explain in continuation.

RKU said...

Bob said...

Svigor you are too cryptic for me. I suppose I am a gentile, but I identify more with high IQ people of whatever race than with any particular ethnic group.


Well, I can’t rightly say whether or not "Bob" is actually a gentile. Perhaps he is indeed actually "Scots-Irish."

But given the nature of his postings, I can't possibly imagine why he claims to "identify more with high IQ people"...

Ha, ha, ha. Poor "Dim Bob"...

Gene Berman said...

B. Tillman (continued):

The "fly in the ointment" to which I previously referred is the prevalent idea that cooperation is essentially merely a shifting of conflict to a different setting, in which parties (whether individuals or groups) vie to structure the forms of such cooperation in ways deemed advantageous (when viewed as elements of conflicting, "zero-sum" goal-oriented "strategy.") This is a mistake but, sadly, one that is not confined to the ranks of the stupid--nor, even to those of the uneducated. Indeed, it might be said to be an error which has, in the past, and continues, in the present, to have thoroughly suffused even the "best and brightest" that may be found almost anywhere, including those presently or on offer as opinion and cultural leaders of the rest, including (most especially) those of the most advanced populations.

There are reasons for prevalence of such error but there is one that is more important than the rest and the only that I wish to explain at this time. But, before getting to that, I'd simply state that, nearly everywhere, people have appointed elite groups they call "government" to perform the functions they, themselves, have eschewed, in exerting violence against unacceptble behavior (generally violent or fraudulent behavior arising dometically or from foreign source). And, although not always so, majorities in most advanced civilations are committed, generally, to the idea that people everywhere are more or less "free" to the extent that government restricts itself (or is restricted) to the prevention of the aforementioned activities. Even socialists do not deny this reality but content themselves in describing such an arrangement as a "spurious" sort of freedom.

The source of the confusion between conflict and cooperation lies in the fact that the form of cooperation between individuals in almost any grouping much larger than that of the family is called "competition," a peculiar but extraordinarily effective and practical (that's actually a redundancy--the terms are virtually interchangeable) method for achieving the greatest satisfaction of the wants of all without conflict. The superiority of competition as method rests squarely on a characteristic of humans observable at all times, in all places, and never denied by anyone with any committment to reason (or even to sanity!): men are (most probably from birth and certainly at any time afterward) UNEQUAL in many different ways; and the essential inequalities between them fit some for some purposes and others for others, both as the result of indwelling characteristics, specialized life experience, and individual inclination.

The method generally chosen thru much of history and presently for the selection of individuals for each "slot" is "the market" in which each is driven toward the best (for himself) result by that which is most highly valued by his fellows. No one is forced to obey such dictates (but must himself pay for such departure). What is called "the price structure of the market" makes these opinions of everyone else, not only of his own occupation, but of almost everyone else about anything economic, continuously visible and in almost continuously up-dated fashion. To interfere with that continuously-underlying process (in any way) by means of law is to decree less rather than more in total, to assign unearned reward to some, and too penalize (and discourage) those most closely aligned with the needs of their fellow men.

Bad--maybe so; but then you'd have to put all of us in the bad category even for "going along" with our leaders' various programs, all of which are more or less "bad." And, when it comes to choices between different amounts of "bad," it's especially difficult to distinguish, especially as various future uncertainties must be considered.

"Bad," is, at best, a "maybe" and must include many like-minded or politically allied. "Stupid," is for sure.

Anonymous said...

So I am a bad person because I think society should help out talented individuals who happen to be disadvantaged economically?

The question is whether individuals who are disadvantaged intellectually will be [artificially] elevated into positions they have no business occupying.

Anonymous said...

For individuals with a global IQ score that is based on the summation of IQ subtest scores that are not unduly
"spiked" but rather are generally pretty much in the same "zone"--
the careful eye can usually detect
global IQ differences among people when those differences are overall no more than seven points or so. Thus, for years the "compensatory" placement of Black kids in public education gifted programs gave rise to social-educational interactions that were daily reminders to all involved that the test score differences were
r e a l and not a product of mythical b i a s. The more emotionally robust kids are pretty immune to damage. For others, it's an inculcation of "Prufrock syndome" And there is no reason to suppose the syndrome has not been inculcated in medical students subject to such leftist "make believe". It is a truism that many students flocking to helping programs in psychology and psychiatry, know more at enrollment about mental disorder than their professors would wish them to know. It's the last domain in society that should be into such damaging "make believe"
Yet there are few professions that profile as left-liberal and anti-conservative this helping profession.

David Davenport said...

No, the only bad person here is you for not wanting minorities to excel in any capacity.

But many of us have witnessed minority persons -- you really mean nonwhites -- who got a position because of affirmative action, and who did not excel.


America was not built on tribalism ...

Oh yes it was.

America was made by white Anglo tribalism. America wasn't built by a policy of inclusiveness for Native Americans and Mexicans, or French or Spanish rivals in North America.

Immigrants have made it great ....

Which immigrants? Non-European immigrants are dragging the USA down....

You guys love to blame African Americans and Latinos for America's woes..

African Americans and Latinos deserve some blame.

.... but they aren't running things, white people are.

Who is President of the USA currently?

Vain Saints said...

"You are being dramatic. So I am a bad person because I think society should help out talented individuals who happen to be disadvantaged economically?"

No.

I think you are a bad person because:

A: You are a liar. Affirmative Action is most beneficial to the more prosperous blacks. In black ghettos, where drop-out rates of various schools often reach 80% and where real actions (that do not deny reality) are seriously needed, the prospect of being booted into UCLA instead of having to settle for North Texas State is irrelevant, as is the prospect for being employed into a nice, cushy Affirmative Action dump in HR. Furthermore, if you have a brain, Anonymous, you KNOW that AA is ENTIRELY based on race/sex/sexuality/ethnic and other identities and real issues of privilege are irrelevant, and that those who are TRULY privileged will never suffer from programs like AA.

2.) You are indifferent to the harm of lots of people. For every well-off minority who gets bumped into a position for which he is unqualified there is someone (often less well-off economically) who is denied a position which he DOES merit through no fault of his own, as a penalty for racism of which he is almost certainly innocent.

3.) You are a coward. Give us a screen name instead of hiding behind an "anonymous" handle like a little bitch.

4.) You are a resentful bigot. It is obvious that AA has nothing to do with actual privilege and everything to do with artificial legal privileges afforded to minorities at the expense of whites, and all you can say is that this country wasn't built "just for WASPS" attributing to those who oppose Affirmative Action the motives of racial resentment which in reality apply to you. Your hatred for "WASPs" is so intense that it blinds you to this reality, despite the fact that WASPs have seriously made an effort to make up for a very real racism (and slavery) in a display of contrition that is unprecedented in history. Your resentful attitude and knee-jerk support of AA lead me to believe that you are not a pretentious status-seeking white liberal, but a bitter minority, whether you are black, Jewish, Hispanic, or any other group. If you are black, your hate may come from a similar source as Michelle Obama's, who goes through absurd psychological contortions to keep from facing the fact that her entire life, from her education to her political career, to her marriage itself, was political, and had nothing to do with her merits. Or perhaps you are Jewish and still obsessively resent the mistreatment of your grandparents in the Lower-East Side Ghettos by Catholic Bobbysoxers. Or perhaps you're a Hispanic who is livid that Americans are unwilling to completely overhaul their country, economy and culture to accomadate you, rather than merely alter it massively.

4.) You are a troll. Go to one of your Anti-White Hate sites like the $PLC and leave this place alone. Go buy little white dolls and stick pins through their necks. (Just be careful, you might just accidently come to like those little white dolls more than those dolls resembling your ethnicity.)

Svigor said...

You are being dramatic. [...] It must suck going through life full of so much hate.

Please stick around. We can't buy publicity like this. You're a walking gold mine of self-parody.

Truth said...

"Well if we didn't have affirmative action and set-asides that wouldn't be an issue, would it? Any black with a great job could look the white natural born "looser" in the eye and say "I earned it."

Well now, that was the case pre 1965 or so, and it was not the result. man black people studied hard, did well in school, but were shoehorned into being domestics...with no chance of advancement.

The truly unfair thing is that on April 15 and when he went to the supermarket, this black person still had to pay taxes to subsidize these institutions he could not utilize. That my friend, is why AA was created in the first place.

Did you think some sellout white man just arbitrarily pulled it out of his ass?

"No you don’t. You are not even trying to."

I don't profess to "get" everything Tino, but on this point I am fairly confident.

"It is not “any non-white person”

You're here fairly often Tino, and if you would like to check the archives, you will see that it is-- and particularly any black person; from Astronomers to Zookeepers (if we can find any black ones.

Among the people blindsided by the WLC (White Loser Cabal):

Tyson DeGrasse
Debi Thomas
Barack Obama
Michelle Obama
Henry Louis Gates
Thomas Sowell
Alan Keyes
Michael Steele
Hassan
Oprah Winfrey
Antonio Villaraigosa

And I could go on...and on...and on.

This all really reminds me of a great aphorism:

The girl who cannot dance
Says that the band cannot play
-Hungarian Proverb

PS: Gene you are absolutely right, strangely enough, I make that silly mistake practically every time I use the word 'loser' on this site; a Freudian thing I think.

Probably because when I read some of the posts, I want to spell it with three or four "o"'s instead of two. I am inclined to think "geez, what a "Looouuuuu-Zerrrrrr"

Anonymous said...

You're assuming that he can't have an IQ greater than 115 because he's half blacK, which is silly.

No, I am assuming that he doesn't have an IQ greater than about 115 because:

A) I have read the known non-Ayers works in his corpus, and they are littered with embarrassing grammatical errors and, in places, are simply unreadable, and because

B) I have watched him go off teleprompter time after time after time and consistently make a complete fool of himself when he doesn't have Axelrod around to feed the words into his mouth.

Lucius Vorenus said...

Truth: The truly unfair thing is that on April 15 and when he went to the supermarket, this black person still had to pay taxes to subsidize these institutions he could not utilize.

T, I'm actually in agreement with you here - the government should no more be in the business of subsidizing the lifestyles of high-IQ people than in the business of subsidizing the lifestyles of low-IQ people.

[And I have been on record as opposing it for a long, long time now.]

Truth said...

"B) I have watched him go off teleprompter time after time after time and consistently make a complete fool of himself when he doesn't have Axelrod around to feed the words into his mouth."

I thought Bush had an IQ >130.

Anonymous said...

The leftists trying to redefine affirmative action so it doesn't mean "patronizing efforts to reduce standards for people of non-European descent" are utterly typical and utterly worthless. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.

Hasan got and benefitted from lower standards, and they were created for him because he is not Euro. Period.

(And ... please don't feed the Trullth.)

Anonymous said...

I think that at least some of the Ft Hood inattention to flashing red lights had more to do with typical PC mind-set than AA per se. We saw the same thing in the VT/Cho killings.

Cho gave off very similar warnings, albeit not of a religious nature, and was similarly ignored until he murdered 32 people, then shot himself. He harassed female students, taking surreptitious photos of their legs and sending them email. He behaved so oddly and presented such pointlessly violent writings that his fellow students were afraid of him. His professor (Nikki Gionanni), no stranger to violent writing herself, refused to continue teaching him. Department Head Lucinda Roy, who finally taught him one-on-one, devised a "code word" with her administrative assistant: If she ever used that word while in an office session with Cho, the AA was to call security immediately.

I have said from the beginning that if Cho had been Robert H Johnson III, 5th generation white American, from Centreville instead of Cho Seung-Hui, LPR originally from South Korea but now from Centreville, he would have long before been sent home. I don't claim to be a judge of Cho's mental state; but sane or not, Cho clearly presented a threat to himself and others, one that students too young to buy a beer picked up on. This I don't hesitate to say: Political correctness killed 32 people at VT on April 16, 2007 and 13 at Ft Hood last week. And it didn't do Cho or Hasan any good.

I seriously doubt that VT has AA for South Korean students - they don't need it - but fear of being called racist or xenophobe blinded people to a real danger.

Tino said...

1. First Ad-hominom and now a non sequitur. We are discussing Hassan. If you think he was a competent man with demonstrated value for the military, argue for it.

Just because some other person at some other point argued that someone else may or may not have been a beneficiary to AA, this in your mind proves that Hassan was not protected because of his religion? That is simply lazy thinking.

2. To the larger point a lot of people do get benefits from AA, (including Barack, by his own admission) so there is nothing surprising about you having many names on your list. In a society where minorities receive affirmative action it is simply logical that all minorities get some benefits, even the competent ones.

3. That you include Michele Obama as an example of how unfair it is that people get accused of receiving AA is simply hilarious. You honestly don’t think Michele Obama received affirmative action in her life? The fact the *even* Michele Obama was accused of receiving AA *proves* that Hassan could not possibly have received AA?

4. Do you honestly believe that African Americans, in 1965 or now, overall paid in more in taxes than received in public spending? If so you are truly delusional.

5. Again (and again, and again) repeating your obsession with the status of the people who point out AA does not refute my point. Hassan should have been fired, but was protected because he was a Muslim. This is true if the person that points it out is a white unemployed “looser” or if he is a millionaire investor banker. The truth of the statements has nothing to do with the social status of the person who points this out. Of course, the commentators on this site consist of both groups. I suppose in your mind the exact same factual statement about Hassan or Michele Obama is valid if made by the anonymous investor banker both invalid if made by the anonymous unemployed guy?

Anonymous said...

Try to be more childish in your use of ad hominems, RKU.

Truth said...

"I have said from the beginning that if Cho had been Robert H Johnson III, 5th generation white American, from Centreville instead of Cho Seung-Hui, LPR originally from South Korea but now from Centreville, he would have long before been sent home."

"You have said;" great. A guy named "anonymous" says something it must be true right?

And for exactly how many years were you on the faculty at Virginia Tech?

1) I do not think Hassan was a competent man, I do not think anyone who goes on a mass shooting spree is "competent." Once again, you miss the entire point: The title of this esteemed post is "Affirmative Action Strikes Again".

Note the word "again":

Function: adverb
Etymology: Middle English, opposite, again, from Old English ongēan opposite, back, from on + gēn, gēan still, again; akin to Old English gēan- against, Old High German gegin against, toward
Date: 13th century

1 : in return : back
2 : another time : once more : anew

Now since we did not hear of Hassan until last week Sailer must have been talking about other people, right? And since the term "affirmative action" was brought up, on can safely assume that these were not "white people." Do you get it now?

2)"In a society where minorities receive affirmative action it is simply logical that all minorities get some benefits, even the competent ones."

No Tino, it is not. Be rest assured, old boy, I received my BS degree from the esteemed Eastern New Mexico University all on my own...I've bought my 1 bedroom house on my own, I paid for my Toyota Camry on my own. That is as ridiculous as for me to assume that you all got everything that you earned from being white (although a few of you did.)

3) "You honestly don’t think Michele Obama received affirmative action in her life?"

What I "honestly think" is that I don't know. I was not a classmate of M.O., don't know her and did not read the theses of any of her classmates. I have read an ex employer say that she was the most ambitious employee he ever had; call me crazy, I consider that a good thing.

I also know that her brother attended the same school she did, maybe she's basically a legacy admit, like soooooooooo many white guys who run the world. Do I criticize them for that? No. In life you use the advantages you have.

4. "Do you honestly believe that African Americans, in 1965 or now, overall paid in more in taxes than received in public spending? If so you are truly delusional."

Do you have numbers or are you simply arguing out of emotion? You know Tino, generally speaking, there is a term for people who argue strictly out of emotion: They're called "women."

5) "Hassan should have been fired, but was protected because he was a Muslim."

Again, I don't know that his being a Muslim had anything to do with it. Were the two pilots who were looking at youtube and overshot their destination by 150 miles Muslim? Was the guy in Florida who amputated the wrong leg of one of his patients Muslim? Was our previous president Muslim? No they were not, I'll give you three guesses as to what ethnicity those four fools were. Now, do you think that they were allowed to stay in their jobs because of their ethnicity?

Anonymous said...

"And for exactly how many years were you on the faculty at Virginia Tech?" Truth

My spouse was on the VT faculty for over 20 years. And FWIW, Dr Roy, the quite talented BLACK head of the department, made a similar point indirectly in her book on the VT killings: Basically, did VT hesitate to move on Cho's obvious problems because it was fearful of making "cultural" judgments?

How is "Truth" any better than anonymous???

Truth said...

"Basically, did VT hesitate to move on Cho's obvious problems because it was fearful of making "cultural" judgments? "

So they feared the Korean community was going to demonstrate with bullhorns en masse outside of the university president's house?

I could post my name here, but what purpose would that serve? Someone would simply find out who I was, and I'd have to spend my time deleting a bunch of useless KKK email spam.

What is important is that you can trace my thoughts, all of them, to the same source: If I went by anonymous that would not be possible.

Tino said...

Truth:

1. So unless I can prove with documentation that someone received AA in your world they cannot be accused of it, regardless of the probability. We know from test scores that about 6/7 admission to top law-schools are AA, but deducting that one of those people is probably AA is somehow evil according to you. Not very convincing.

2. “emotions” huh? Nope. I make the claim based on my informed opinion, based on what I know about Black incomes in the mid 1960s (the average was around the second quintile of total) and about the tax structure at the time (a hint: people with below average incomes generally do not pay more in taxes than those with higher income). In 1960 the average tax rate of those in the second quintile was 14%.

You however are dripping with emotional denial. I would't call you a "woman" though, I respect women.

Anonymous said...

"So they feared the Korean community was going to demonstrate with bullhorns en masse outside of the university president's house?"

Well, no, I doubt that that would have been a big worry. As you know, in the US anybody can sue anybody or anything for whatever reason, not even hire a lawyer or hire an very "cheap" one and tie up another person or entity for months if not years. An entity such as VT could find itself sued by a family who invested a small amount of resources itself and discover that it had dropped a 6-figure amount into legal defense. It could win hands-down and still be out of the 6-figure amount because in the US we don't have "loser pays". I doubt that this encourages a good legal battle.

I'd guess that this, rather than South Koreans with bull-horns, likely affected VT's decision and FWIW as a taxpayer in Virginia, I understand it.

"What is important is that you can trace my thoughts, all of them, to the same source: If I went by anonymous that would not be possible."

We still know no more about you and how you come to yuor conclusions than you know about me and how I come to mine, do we? And that was, I think, your point? I also think you grossly over-estimate the number of active KKK operatives that there are left in the US.

Truth said...

"An entity such as VT could find itself sued by a family who invested a small amount of resources itself and discover that it had dropped a 6-figure amount into legal defense."

And white families never sue?

"We still know no more about you and how you come to yuor conclusions than you know about me and how I come to mine, do we? "

Yes we do, I have a two year body of work that points to precedence, all one has to do is look at the archive. On the other hand, there are a lot of guys named "anonymous" here.

BTW: I did not say anything about KKK operatives I said KKK spam, one does not even need to buy a hood to send email nonsense.

Anonymous said...

"And white families never sue?"

They certainly do. Several of them have sued VT for not taking Cho's warning signals seriously enough.

Anonymous said...

"Truth said...

Yes we do, I have a two year body of work that points to precedence, all one has to do is look at the archive. On the other hand, there are a lot of guys named "anonymous" here."

In fairness to them however, there is at least some truth in their adopted moniker. They are indeed "anonymous". Whereas you "Truth" never say anything truthful.

Anonymous said...

> So I am a bad person because I think society should help out talented individuals who happen to be disadvantaged economically? <

If affirmative action were put to a vote in a clear-cut binding national referendum, "society" would kill it.