Re: The just and the unjust ways to address modern racial inequality: affirmative act
A good progressive idea? How about The United States Postal Service? Just think, for less than half the cost of a tiny bag of peanuts you buy at the convenience store, you can have a dude come around your house, every single day (except Sundays), and have him take from you a piece of paper, and have it flown hundreds of miles across the US to some other person, in only a couple of days. And that doesn't even require any tax money; it's all nonprofit and altruistic! Before the internet, that was revolutionary. Or, take for example, public roads. No one would do it themselves (or maybe a couple super rich people might, on very limited area). That was certainly an altruistic or collectivistic idea, and we as a society have certainly benefited greatly from it, even though it required the government robbing private citizens of their hard-earned tax money (to use a fiscal libertarian's phrasing). Or think of money the government has given to scientific research. Some of that money was used well and has benefited us all much more than had the money been kept by citizens and put back into the economy via (likely mostly high end) consumerism. Perhaps the end of slavery, some of which was inspired by altruism, could be called an altruistic act. Many have said that the causes of the current economic crisis were greedy banks, which I think also were counting on getting bailouts were their bets to be off the mark. Were the banks slightly more "progressive," or altruistic, perhaps they wouldn't have made so many risky loans that risked (and made fall) our entire economy. Of course the idiots who agreed to the loans are at fault as well, in my opinion more so, but greedy banks are also at fault.
Whoever Tyler was, he must have made the quote, because De Tocqueville would most definitely not have made a statement so pessimistic and critical of democracy.
...
My qualifications that I listed in my original post:
(1) Graduated third in class
(2) 350 hours of community service (more like 346 but whatever)
(3) 2280 on SAT
(4) Eagle Scout
(5) Senior Patrol Leader
(6) Many extracurricular activities
(7) White (I'm kidding, I'm kidding....)
That's not "like 2." That's more like 6, and it's even more if you count the different extracurricular activities separately, which you should.
And, I listed my buddy's qualifications, as far as I knew them: he's in band (well, was) and had a GPA somewhere around 75-80th percentile.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that Stanford's (for instance) self-professed policy of affirmative action in undergraduate admission must have played a role if I was rejected and my African-American friend was accepted. And yes, I applied well in advance of the deadline, and my friend did too. If affirmative action DIDN'T play a role in the decisions at all, as you seem to think is a possibility, then what could possibly account for the huge reverse discrepancy in outcomes, given the huge positive discrepancy in qualifications?
It's true that there are some other factors that matter in admission, but they could not make up for the difference. No, my friend doesn't have any special connections to the school like alumni or relative professors or anything. And no, he never said he was remotely interested in being on a prominent sports team either.
