Re: The just and the unjust ways to address modern racial inequality: affirmative act
Yeah, too many personal attacks going on here. Oh well.
Affirmative action necessarily hurts one group at the expense of another simply on the basis of race. Despite apparently supporting equality, Top Gun never acknowledges that by making one group (African-Americans) artificially privileged through AA, that the other group (Whites, others) is necessarily discriminated against due to no fault of their own. Framing the problem from your point of view doesn't make it any less of a problem. Since it seems that he is unwilling to state or even accept that rather obvious point, it appears that no progress can be made. I came here to learn a different perspective on AA, but I cannot be persuaded by one who cannot (or does not) even acknowledge the quite obvious downsides to AA.
Oh, and for the record, I think that putting together sports and education was a terrible idea in the first place. Sure, school athletes are cool, but universities should always keep in mind that education is the first priority. It's much more important for someone to be able to grasp basic logical argument, for instance, than to be able to kick or carry a piece of rubber around. So I completely agree with you; sports and athletes is not near deserving of the special treatment it receives from universities.
Suggesting that I am not deserving of my Eagle rank, a badge I worked hundreds of hours for (in which I helped my community significantly, in addition to much other personal effort) because we disagree on a minor political issue is rather presumptuous, I would think, in addition to perhaps being quite rude, however inadvertently. (Yes, this is a very minor issue)
Also, in this post, you seem to have assumed that I focus on the race issue and that I don't care about legacy admissions. Perhaps you didn't carefully read post#56, previously in this thread, in which I said that legacy admissions are even worse than affirmative action. The reasons I decided to rail against affirmative action here instead of legacy admission were:
(1) This is a political forum. AA is a politically charged topic; legacy admissions are not, or to a much lesser extent.
(2) I had a personal experience that proved to me that, in at least my own personal case, AA resulted in an unjust outcome. I had no personal experience with legacy admissions.
(3) Overall, AA is a much more discussed topic than legacy admissions, and people have much, much more diversely supported beliefs on AA than on legacy admissions. In short, AA is not a small and easy topic whose debate can be resolved in a couple of sentences; legacy enrollment is, for the most part.
I've basically responded to these before but you haven't actually come straight and addressed the issue at hand with them... see my Post#56 in this thread...
