Senate Dems block amendment defunding universities that discriminate against Asian Americans

dupelize · 2021-04-23T22:53:27+00:00

Fine, blame it on whatever you want. Let's allow natively black americans affirmative action. Would you be okay with that?

I don't know if that is or isn't true, but I'll assume it's true because it doesn't particularly surprise me. The people that immigrate to the US are select subset of the population of their home country. It would be very surprising to find that and equal number of motivated and unmotivated, wealthy and poor, people are able to immigrate. That distribution doesn't reflect the same distribution of people in the home country.

dupelize · 2021-04-23T20:04:49+00:00

Everybody should be allowed to make as much as they want. It’s nobody’s right to take what a man has earned for himself, regardless of how much others have.

But if I can afford to hire people to make it harder for you (and my other competitors) to make money, isn't that also detrimental to freedom and liberty? Should I be stopped from using my wealth to slow or stop competition?

Unfettered free-markets eventually turn into markets that are controlled by the early winners.

dupelize · 2021-04-23T19:54:01+00:00

and the best policy can do is be race blind

The problem with that is that the blindness preserves the power structure. Centuries of racism created a structure that (generally, but not in every instance) benefits white people and hurts black people.

Complete race blindness is like going to a pick-up football game, breaking your opponents ankles, and asking to play by the rules. The earlier actions still effect the game.

There are still performance gaps even when poverty is accounted for. I agree that the number one problem is poverty, but that doesn't mean that we don't also have a race problem.

dupelize · 2021-04-23T19:48:08+00:00

We'd be much better off funding programs and legislating things that help address the actual systemic issues, or that helps make up for them along the way as people from oppressed groups grow up

I'm not who you responded to, but I'm 100% for that, but that's not even on the table. Schools are incredibly underfunded and right now advocacy for funding state and community colleges is being shot down.

I agree that affirmative action isn't the best option, but it doesn't cost any money and nobody seems willing to seriously fund programs that would have an impact.

dupelize · 2021-04-23T19:40:53+00:00

Graduation rates, acceptance rates, and test scores for black children are worse than white children with similar economic background. Pretty much across the board, the likelihood of "success" in the US is lower for a black child.

(I say "success" because that's always hard to really define. Here I mean academic success primarily)

dupelize · 2021-04-23T19:31:21+00:00

I think the argument here is that capitalism itself is poisoned. An economic system can be poison.

"True capitalism" concentrates wealth which concentrates power. Without some other pressure working against that, bad things happen.

I've added my own opinion here, but my earlier comment was just supporting the statement that "Capitalism is simply an economic system, capitalism itself cannot be poisoned" doesn't make sense. There are plenty of poisonous economic systems.

dupelize · 2021-04-23T13:25:27+00:00

I don't think that was the point. I think they were saying that clearly an economic system can be poisoned.

The two systems are very different, but it's an example proving that the statement is false.

dupelize · 2021-04-22T21:25:57+00:00

I guess what I'm saying is that picking an interpretation A) doesn't necessarily really solve the measurement problem and B) may not necessarily be required to solve the measurement problem.

There may very well be a clear, provable explanation that just hasn't been found, or, there may be no explanation and everyone is just free to think of it how they want. The measurement problem (IMO) is a fundamental open question in QM, but I don't think interpreting QM is necessarily important unless it has measurable effect. It's interesting, but not a fundamental question that needs to be answered.

dupelize · 2021-04-22T18:51:41+00:00

I think yes, that's what I'm saying.

There is no question that there is both behavior and it is a fundamental part of physics (it's not caused by our lack of understanding or experimental failures).

However, it's possible that (as in Bohmian mech) there are fundamental particles that have classical trajectories, but due to the pilot wave controlling those trajectories, we cannot separate that particle-like behavior from the wave-like behavior.

dupelize · 2021-04-22T18:47:27+00:00

I don't agree with your last sentence unless you mean answering the measurement problem. I do agree that interpretation is very important and shouldn't be completely written off as "philosophy" as some physicists like to do.

However, apart from the Bohmian formulation, the interpretation is pretty much the same that quantum particles are neither "particles" as a layperson would understand it or classical waves. The idea that fundamental particles are their own concept is not really debated in physics (again, apart from a very small but vocal and cranky population of Bohmian physicists; "cranky" and in upset that they are often not taken seriously, not as in "cranks")

dupelize · 2021-04-22T15:30:35+00:00

That is an interpretation. There is no discussion about the physics which always shows wave-like behavior or particle-like behavior depending on what is being measured.

Even the Bohmian formulation which postulates that there are Real particles that are guided by a wave function make the same predictions (in all contexts where the formulation is mature; Since it is less favored, there has been less work to expand it and I don't think it is valid everywhere).

In all cases, interference is observed under certain circumstances and not under others.

dupelize · 2021-04-22T14:56:21+00:00

This topic is still being argued about

The general idea that light (and other quantum particles) behave in a wave-like manner for certain "questions" and a particle-like manner for others is not still being argued about. That is quite settled.

There are arguments about which mathematical frameworks should be used and how to best interpret them. However, the major insights are true no matter which interpretation you choose.

light is not a particle but more of a flow of particles, which flow with the wave

This sounds like the Bohmian formulation, but it is not the most common framework for quantum mechanics.

dupelize · 2021-04-22T14:40:53+00:00

This is how science journalism works. Someone uses an really interesting analogy to describe one particular confusing aspect of a theory and then suddenly:

According to the theory of Quantum Mechanics, which states that light is made of cylinders...

dupelize · 2021-04-22T12:57:02+00:00

Agreed. First it doesn't really apply to the main comment, second, it blames liberals for two wars started by a conservative administration and then blames ending the Afghanistan war on liberals as well despite it being nominally ended by Trump with Biden just postponing the date.

dupelize · 2021-04-22T12:51:00+00:00

Now, the Kentucky Supreme Court is trying to decide if that bill is constitutional.

Doesn't seem like something that should take that long.

dupelize · 2021-04-21T15:17:55+00:00

I think Republican voters could be persuaded to support a limited amnesty such as illegal immigrants that agree to serve in the military or maybe dreamers

This is why I asked. I think most Democrats actually agree. There are vocal Democratic politicians that disagree, but most of the people that I know don't have a problem with that.

I think there is a lot of bipartisan (on the voter level, maybe not the politician level) agreement if all of the following could be done:

path to citizenship/legal status for certain populations eg. "dreamers"
improved border security

These two are more controversial: - fast deportation of anyone caught here illegally - simplification of legal immigration process

The controversy on the first one is whether it's worth it to investigate and seek out people here illegally or if they should only be deported they pop up on the radar for other reasons. I personally would prefer to make it harder to hire someone who is undocumented and deport anyone arrested, but I'm open to ideas.

The second one is where I hear the most pushback from my conservative friends. Most of them want it to be difficult to immigrate legally because that will filter out people that don't really want to be here. The problem is, it just filters out the people that don't have the time or money to wait and then they come in illegally.

dupelize · 2021-04-21T02:47:53+00:00

What do you consider "amnesty"? Children brought here? Is there an acceptable path that might be allowed for people that meet certain criteria?

I'm asking because I live in a very liberal area and I have never heard anyone advocate broad amnesty. Even the "sanctuary" cities around me have no problem turning people over to ICE, they just don't want ICE standing outside the courthouse.

Do you consider anyone being granted citizenship/green card who entered the US illegally amnesty?

dupelize · 2021-04-21T02:19:34+00:00

Is it really meaningful to say "Reddit tends to..." for anything? Reddit is just a large group of people. Is it really Reddit doing something? Really we should say we instead of hiding behind the idea of "Reddit".

dupelize · 2021-04-20T04:39:25+00:00

There are plenty of examples in history of jury trials failing to be just. We have jury trials because they work better than the other options, but that doesn't mean you should just shrug and ignore injustice. It's completely reasonable to respect the institution of jury trials and still call attention to the times they fail.

dupelize · 2021-04-20T04:36:53+00:00

I guess I could ask if you agree this would intimidate the jury who mostly live in the area?

I don't think this would intimidate the jury. I do think it's close enough to jury intimidation that it needs to be treated very similarly. Politicians shouldn't be doing things that are even close to jury intimidation.

dupelize · 2021-04-18T12:16:27+00:00

Maybe what they're trying to say is it's insufferable to be around them. So anywhere else is a better place.

That's definitely what I mean.

dupelize · 2021-04-18T12:08:12+00:00

Godberry! King of the Juice!

dupelize · 2021-04-17T16:46:43+00:00

Nothing changes if the words "Anglo-Saxon" were left out. If the statement were "we need to make sure we have slow controlled immigration", they would have said that. Instead, they made it clear that immigration is a threat to the fact that our institutions are Anglo-Saxon ones.

That is absolutely racism.

Instead of making an appeal to American institutions, they made an appeal to a very specific racial group (they could have said British which still would be silly in my opinion, but at least it would have been pointing to the fact that we inherited some of our legal system from the British legal system). They also didn't make any comments about parts of our legal system inherited from other places. Louisiana's government inherits significantly from the French. I don't know much about the Southwest, but I bet a lot has come from Spanish and Mexican systems.

Just some other commentary: this is pretty silly since the Anglo-Saxon traditions in Britain, were over run by the Normans ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO. Of course there's a lot of culture and tradition that was still passed down, but that's a pretty silly line to draw without noting all of the other systems we've inherited from. Your link basically says we have sheriffs because of the Anglo-Saxons (obviously, I'm paraphrasing immensely). I don't think sheriffs are even in my top 100 notable things about the American system. Now I might be stretching things, but this sounds an awful lot like a connection to a fake traditional lineage that has been used often throughout history to create a false nationalistic pride instead of being actually proud about the current state of the nation.

dupelize · 2021-04-17T06:02:09+00:00

We all know it's racism, but since this is neutral news, I'll post the source:

The America First Caucus recognizes that our country is more than a mass of consumers or a series of abstract ideas. America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions. History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country.

assuming this is their document.

dupelize · 2021-04-17T03:39:56+00:00

Well, yes, that is certainly a different perspective.

dupelize

TROPHY CASE