Nonsense. Americans today are trained from a young age to have a sense of entitlement. People who are promoted above their ability are quite capable of blaming their inability to perform on prejudice or conspiracy on the part of peers or subordinates.

The reason she got through it is because she was smart. I didn't help her with her exams and I didn't help her land her job at Amazon. That was all her.

Cheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook gave a talk at the Grace Hopper conference about how she felt like a fraud. She wasn't as technical as the engineers so she didn't feel like she deserved her position. Turns out she's really good at her job.

Lots of women feel this way.

That seems to be what you're writing. And it doesn't look good.

Aggregate performance was either unaffected or improved in the presence of affirmative action. This fits with history: until 1972 almost no women were admitted to MIT, but it didn't make the men perform less well for all the affirmative action they received nor cheapen their accomplishments.

This is exactly what I'm saying - whichever group gets bonus points/preferences/etc will have lower quality. In the past, that group was women. Now it's usually men, though not always (some nursing schools give preference to men [1], some liberal arts colleges do also).

[1] Defining quality here is slightly trickier since nurses of both genders are needed for specific tasks (mostly related to bathing).

Jesus. Do we live in the same reality?

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_divers...

TL;DR: The Espenshade study found that African chromosomes (by the "one-drop rule") equaled 450 SAT points over Asian chromosomes as a college admissions factor.

(Not that actual genetic testing was used. It probably should be, though. Why encourage race fraud?)

Your link is to a study in which "affirmative action" is used in the sense it was originally implied, not the sense in which it is actually used:

Note that none of these constitute "reverse discrimination," an accusation affirmative action plans often face. In no case was a top-performing man denied a reward if he outperformed everyone else. The main effect the researchers found was an increase in the number of able women willing to participate.

Granted before some, perhaps most, would be below their level but it seems rather impossible to assume that nobody has now been moved artificially higher than they should have.

At what "level" are people with good connections, powerful parents etc.? Is affirmative action more effective in advancing people than pulling strings and calling in favours? Isn't this mechanism - the social status quo - what affirmative action is designed to change?

Why would one expect more incompetence from one than the other?

Could you, as an engineer, design a better system to make sure that all Eskimos are "likely" incompetent at their jobs, than promoting Eskimos over Tamils just because they are Eskimos and not Tamils?

Another cross-cultural comparison might be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumiputera_(Malaysia)

Witch, no. Racist, maybe.

I'll give you my standard deal - I'll admit to being a fascist, if you'll admit to being a communist. I haven't gotten any takers yet but I'm looking forward to the first.

You know what - if someone, anyone, can tell me why it's absolutely necessary to persecute racists and fascists, yet utterly and completely wrong to persecute communists, I'll go whole hog and buy the R-word. Operators are standing by...

I can even anticipate your response:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I don't need to do that.. I just need to point out that by picking an example of what one or more communists did or said doesn't make their actions a part of communism.

The only logical fallacy here is yours - I could equally point at some American murderers and say "capitalism is terrible, look at those capitalists murdering people for money".

So good job anticipating my response... the response of pointing out that your argument is basically bullshit, because sadly for you it isn't easy to back up racism.

Priceless! Where's my MasterCard?

For the record, Paul Graham kills hundreds of thousands of persons of color every year. All these capitalists are the same. Fred Wilson is walking down the street, sees some poor black homeless person he doesn't like... blam! He needs an extended magazine just to walk to work. And sells the organs, too - where do you think all this money comes from? But you never hear about it - our capitalist society is just so callous, you know, to the plight of the underprivileged.

I know there are communists out there who can spell "fascist." I just wish one of them would take my bait...

Folk in white coats with reassuring expressions maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_i...

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4345/is_9_32/ai_n291...

No word on treatment options.

As for implying that he is right in general because you have read an article that says that some people would like to be able, in the future, to look at classifying some racist behaviour among a very narrow class of people who already are displaying symptoms of schizophrenia, as being a part of their symptoms. Well, you seem as bonkers as he is.

From your referenced article:

"At present, the state of research is inadequate to suggest one course or another"

It could be that everyone is crazy. You and I together, comrades! If the 20th century doesn't prove the possibility of universal political insanity, what does it prove? Why is the English-speaking world somehow magically exempt from this general condition - appearing in all other places east of the Channel and west of the Pacific?

Nonsense. And spreads the idea that all black people shouldn't be where they are in the company and are all tricksters who are rubbish at their job.

But here, this might help you with your weeping problem:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117695/Brutal-home-...

Reported only overseas (with a helpful sidebar of tits) and in the local press. Nobody needs to weep for the kulak, the Jew, the enemy of the workers and peasants. But whoa - if some rapacious Jew defends himself against a good Aryan worker who's only trying to grind his head into the pavement, my gosh, well, that's an interplanetary sensation.

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'"

Quoted in http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/09/republicans-to-the-man...

And the famous example is that... white men network. As do black lesbians, Papuan pearl divers, and for all I know the Turkish blue-ringed octopus (our only social octopus).

The leap from "vast majority" to "famous example" is great, too. I never cease to be fascinated by the bizarre pseudosequiturs that pass for logic in the orthodox mind. It's like tumor pathology - every case its own disease.

What's wonderful is how similar this general strain of disparate impact theory is to the classic logic of German anti-Semitism. Did you know that 80% of the lawyers in 1932 Berlin were Jews, even though only 1% of the population was Jewish? Ineluctable mathematical proof the Jews are conspiring against the Aryans - scratching each other's backs, while stabbing their good German competitors under the table.

Too bad Streicher and company never got a chance to read Cochran and Harpending 2005:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

But to paraphrase Goethe, against stupidity even the Jews contend in vain...

If you wanted to confirm or deny this "old trope," how would you do so? What evidence would prove or disprove it? If you wanted to identify such privileges, what would they look like? What about counter-privileges which offset them?

A fun thought-experiment, for instance, is imagining that "women, blacks etc." could sell whatever privileges they have to groups that I consider underprivileged, such as Asians. With some money changing hands, the Asian would become legally black and the black legally Asian, for all official purposes (educational, legal, etc).

What do you think the price of this transaction would be? And who would be paying whom?

And spreads the idea that all black people shouldn't be where they are in the company and are all tricksters who are rubbish at their job.

This is certainly the case for some black people, as it's certainly the case for some whites, Asians, Eskimos, etc. Perhaps we just differ in our estimated percentages.

People have done this already, this is what they look like:

White Privilege Checklist: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

Male Privilege Checklist: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/

Heterosexual Privilege Checklist: http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/...

Cis gender privilege checklist: http://takesupspace.wordpress.com/cis-privilege-checklist/

As compared to really concrete, obvious privileges like: 450 free points on your SAT. Could that be the first entry on our 'Black Privilege Checklist?' What would be the second?

Now, let's imagine you design a sociological experiment in which randomly selected individuals of each race can exchange their privileges (and/or handicaps) - along with a payment to equalize the exchange.

Once again: who would pay whom? Or if we look at just one side of the comparison - what would be the market value of being legally black? What would parents pay, for instance, to purchase this privilege for their children?

Let's say we could restrict it only to college admissions. What would American parents pay to change their sons' and daughters' acceptance letters from Chico State, to Harvard? Then you'll have a fairly good price floor on the value of "black privilege" - this is obviously not the only benefit.

I welcome any thoughts on how one might perform the opposite experiment - that is, assessing the market value of "white privilege." Do tell, critical race theorists.

Abstract?! They aren't abstract, some are very very concrete. If you're straight, you can get married in just about every country in the world, and, in nearly every country. If you're a straight married man, you don't have to worry about saying "my wife" in a new place.

People don't sit men down in secondary school and tell them how to avoid being raped, men don't worry about their drink being spiked.

etc.

But let's pretend we're talking about my son. And let's find a racial handicap from the '50s which doesn't exist anymore.

"Young man," I say, "here's a deal for you. On the downside, you can't marry anyone not the same race as you."

"That's kind of uncool, Dad," he says. "What's the upside?"

"450 free points on your SAT. Also, you basically can't be fired from a job, ever. Also..." and I run through my Black Privilege Checklist.

What do you think he's going to say? What would you say?

That's exactly right! Moreover, there's a very important reason your N-rays are so hard to detect...

Look at it another way. You step into a time machine and emerge in 1938 Berlin - speaking German. Your task: to explain and convince, by pure reason alone, that there is actually no such thing as the international Jewish conspiracy. Expect some downvotes!

Or we could go all science-fiction. The Federation selects you as the first Federation Ambassador to the ice planet of Goth. The people of Goth come in two categories - Ostrogoth and Visigoth. Conventional wisdom among the Ostrogoths is that they are generally oppressed by the Visigoths - and vice versa.

They can't be right. It's your first task, as Federation Ambassador, to construct objective tests that accurately measure whether the Visigoths are sticking it to the Ostrogoths or vice versa.

For instance, you might ask: how many Visigoths are killed extralegally by Ostrogoths? And vice versa? Are young Visigoths, or young Ostrogoths, subjected to the numerus clausus? Etc, etc, etc.

You could build up a spreadsheet of these types of human-rights violations - which would greatly assist you in deciding, as a mere neutral observer, which faction of Goths is holding the whip and which taking it in the tail.

Of course, you're not the Federation Ambassador and neither am I. But even if you're a Goth yourself, why not think this way? Isn't it, at the very least, refreshingly different?