US Politics

Revan said:
Of course it was a good decision, but at this time of division, anything a conservative SCOTUS decides would make liberals bitch and moan.

Getting to Harvard, MIT etc should completely be a meritocratic decision, and not based on the skin of your color.
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Agreed - not everything needs to be viewed from a polarized political lens even if the SC actually is that.

Both the affirmative action and debt forgiveness were bad policies.

The right solution for the former is getting rid of legacy admits and helping kids coming from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds.

And the latter needs enforcing more caps on how much college education can cost especially in fields like film studies at Columbia which costs 200k with no job prospects.

The Colorado one is obviously a terrible decision from a pathetic SC.
 
WI_Red said:
Today in SCOTUS: It IS NOT constitutional for schools to use a protected class (race) as a component in college admissions (except service academies because its only ok for the military to foster representative populations....).
Also Today in SCOTUS: It IS constitutional for a business to discriminate against a protected class (sexual preference)
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That's too political.
 
SinNombre said:
Agreed - not everything needs to be viewed from a polarized political lens even if the SC actually is that.

Both the affirmative action and debt forgiveness were bad policies.

The right solution for the former is getting rid of legacy admits and helping kids coming from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds.

And the latter needs enforcing more caps on how much college education can cost especially in fields like film studies at Columbia which costs 200k with no job prospects.
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Cool, so everyone being screwed currently should just suck it up and hope for a fictional future solution that will likely never come that will help them not at all even if it miraculously comes to pass.
 
SinNombre said:
And the latter needs enforcing more caps on how much college education can cost especially in fields like film studies at Columbia which costs 200k with no job prospects.
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How about $84,000 to fill a critically understaffed medical field?

My wife should just suck it up, right?
 
WI_Red said:
Cool, so everyone being screwed currently should just suck it up and hope for a fictional future solution that will likely never come that will help them not at all even if it miraculously comes to pass.
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Let’s just add more bad policies to try and bandaid bleeding from the previous bad policies then.

The US is unfortunately too broken and too polarized where no one really cares about good policy making.

Carolina Red said:
How about $84,000 to fill a critically understaffed medical field?

My wife should just suck it up, right?
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Healthcare and essential services education and training should be free (or almost free) as it is in every other country in the world. Professional qualifications like MBAs or those with no prospects like film studies aren’t. Why should society as a whole pay for them?

My fiancé just finished her brutal residency and there are just too many things broken with the medical system here but that’s a separate conversation to blanket debt relief.
 
SinNombre said:
Let’s just add more bad policies to try and bandaid bleeding from the previous bad policies then.

The US is unfortunately too broken and too polarized where no one really cares about good policy making.



Healthcare and essential services education and training should be free (or almost free) as it is in every other country in the world.

My fiancé just finished her brutal residency and there are just too many things broken with the medical system here.
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This smacks of the gun control debate, the 'well, we can't fix it totally, so let's not even try to make it better incrementally' approach & tactic employed by the right. We will never get to the Xanadu you are discussing, but that shouldn't limit us from doing the best we can to assist the most people we should.
 
As an American leftist I'm pretty embarrassed by the state of our politics. Everything has moved so far to the right now that even the alleged progressive party is basically a center-right party, and the conservative party is on the cusp of fascism.

At this point it's hard to see any hope of America attaining the level of actual first-world nations in terms of being progressive, at least from an economic standpoint.
 
SinNombre said:
Let’s just add more bad policies to try and bandaid bleeding from the previous bad policies then.

The US is unfortunately too broken and too polarized where no one really cares about good policy making.
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Ok, so the solution to a broken system is to...do nothing? How do you fix systemic and entrenched racial bias and economic disenfranchisement if you don't leverage the very mechanisms (education, job, grants, loans, eyc.) of growth. That was what AA was designed to do.
 
This is what happens when you have a supreme court which views it as their business to get involved in policy, America. Most of the rest of us manage to have a supreme court without ever knowing the name of any of the members. Except that guy who claimed that his Ukrainian ex-wife was trying to poison him. Luckily we have more supreme court justices than we need, so he was on leave and then basically paid to retire.

He didn't make policy, though.
 
Todd said:
As an American leftist I'm pretty embarrassed by the state of our politics. Everything has moved so far to the right now that even the alleged progressive party is basically a center-right party, and the conservative party is on the cusp of fascism.

At this point it's hard to see any hope of America attaining the level of actual first-world nations in terms of being progressive, at least from an economic standpoint.
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Yeah, it just shows to me that the quintessential American value is no any of the usual patriotic bullshit that is spouted, no, it is cruelty. Nothing gets American's more aroused than the opportunity to inflict pain and suffering on others.
 
WI_Red said:
Yeah, it just shows to me that the quintessential American value is no any of the usual patriotic bullshit that is spouted, no, it is cruelty. Nothing gets American's more aroused than the opportunity to inflict pain and suffering on others.
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I think a big part of it has to do with these people wanting/needing to feel superior, and perceiving themselves as 'better' than others, especially as it pertains to socioeconomic status, whether that status was earned through labor or gifted through being born into better circumstances. They are often very ignorant and fragile people who would never even consider admitting that perhaps there are things beyond everyone's control that help some of us have a much better shot at a good life and put all kinds of obstacles in the path that others take.

The other big problem is that Trump ensured that America could once again be a place where racists, xenophobes, and homophobes felt completely comfortable voicing their filth out in the open. He paved the way for these folks to come out of the woodwork and not only feel safe, but feel vindicated.
 
Todd said:
I think a big part of it has to do with these people wanting/needing to feel superior, and perceiving themselves as 'better' than others, especially as it pertains to socioeconomic status, whether that status was earned through labor or gifted through being born into better circumstances. They are often very ignorant and fragile people who would never even consider admitting that perhaps there are things beyond everyone's control that help some of us have a much better shot at a good life and put all kinds of obstacles in the path that others take.

The other big problem is that Trump ensured that America could once again be a place where racists, xenophobes, and homophobes felt completely comfortable voicing their filth out in the open. He paved the way for these folks to come out of the woodwork and not only feel safe, but feel vindicated.
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Yep. Obama broke those people. It was extremely unfortunate that the next president was Trump who gave them a platform.
 
calodo2003 said:
Yep. Obama broke those people. It was extremely unfortunate that the next president was Trump who gave them a platform.
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oBaMa DiViDeD uS!!!

Well, yes, he divided normal people who don't give a shit about what ethnicity POTUS is from the goddamn racists.
 
Revan said:
Of course it was a good decision, but at this time of division, anything a conservative SCOTUS decides would make liberals bitch and moan.

Getting to Harvard, MIT etc should completely be a meritocratic decision, and not based on the skin of your color.
Click to expand...

100% - and Ivies should get rid of legacy admissions as well. A fair amount of idiots like Dubya on the Harvard and Yale campuses who just party hard and then and go on to run the company daddy built.
 
Biden just announced a 3 part response to the SCOTUS ruling on student loan relief

1) his admin is going to drop the minimum payment level for income based repayment plans from 10% of discretionary income to only 5% of discretionary income

2) he’s announcing the same debt forgiveness plan under a different law, the Higher Education Act of 1965

3) he announced a 12 month “payment on ramp” grace period - for 12 months beginning in October, if you make a payment, it counts, but if you cannot make a payment, no questions will be asked & it will not count against you for delinquency or your credit score
 
Carolina Red said:
Biden just announced a 3 part response to the SCOTUS ruling on student loan relief

1) his admin is going to drop the minimum payment level for income based repayment plans from 10% of discretionary income to only 5% of discretionary income

2) he’s announcing the same debt forgiveness plan under a different law, the Higher Education Act of 1965

3) he announced a 12 month “payment on ramp” grace period - for 12 months beginning in October, if you make a payment, it counts, but if you cannot make a payment, no questions will be asked & it will not count against you for delinquency or your credit score
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They had those chambered for just a ruling.

Real excitement is over / under how many hours it takes the right to get an appeal into the court system.
 


Had no idea. The party combined the last embers of the New Deal coalition mixed in with the 60s crowd, before the DLC took over, which meant a lot of possibility...unfortunately led by a southern Democrat who, as a bonus, appointed Volcker.
 
Revan said:
Of course it was a good decision, but at this time of division, anything a conservative SCOTUS decides would make liberals bitch and moan.

Getting to Harvard, MIT etc should completely be a meritocratic decision, and not based on the skin of your color.
Click to expand...
You do let it slip every now and again don’t you?
 
Side note - I wonder if months during this 12 month grace period will count towards PSLF the same way the Covid pause has counted.

Because if so, we only have to worry about my wife’s student loans now, as my forgiveness date is within 12 months
 
Revan said:
Of course it was a good decision, but at this time of division, anything a conservative SCOTUS decides would make liberals bitch and moan.

Getting to Harvard, MIT etc should completely be a meritocratic decision, and not based on the skin of your color.
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as objective meritocratic college admission. It's always going to be subjective. A rich white kid that attends some private prep academy that may or may not have grade inflation and receives private tutors every year is not necessarily more qualified to attend a top university than a poor minority kid who attended an underfunded public school even if that rich white kid got 0.2 higher GPA and an extra 150 points on their SAT. Modern affirmative action (without quotas) is not discriminatory at all. If a university choose the second poor minority kid over the rich white kid it's absolutely not discrimination.

The problem with this ruling as we all know, or should know, is that it has nothing to do with creating a "meritocratic" system, which is impossible anyway. It's simply going to be used to try to return to a more discriminatory era where whites and the wealthy have institutional advantages over everyone else.

SinNombre said:
Agreed - not everything needs to be viewed from a polarized political lens even if the SC actually is that.

Both the affirmative action and debt forgiveness were bad policies.

The right solution for the former is getting rid of legacy admits and helping kids coming from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds.

And the latter needs enforcing more caps on how much college education can cost especially in fields like film studies at Columbia which costs 200k with no job prospects.

The Colorado one is obviously a terrible decision from a pathetic SC.
Click to expand...

Please explain why you think affirmative action and debt forgiveness are "bad policies"
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
There is no such thing as objective meritocratic college admission. It's always going to be subjective. A rich white kid that attends some private prep academy that may or may not have grade inflation and receives private tutors every year is not necessarily more qualified to attend a top university than a poor minority kid who attended an underfunded public school even if that rich white kid got 0.2 higher GPA and an extra 150 points on their SAT. Modern affirmative action (without quotas) is not discriminatory at all. If a university choose the second poor minority kid over the rich white kid it's absolutely not discrimination.

The problem with this ruling as we all know, or should know, is that it has nothing to do with creating a "meritocratic" system, which is impossible anyway. It's simply going to be used to try to return to a more discriminatory era where whites and the wealthy have institutional advantages over everyone else.
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Why you, intentionally or not, skipped mentioning Asian Americans who are the biggest "winners" in SATs although most of them come from modest background? I love how the affirmative action supporters love ignoring second generation Asian Americans who mostly grew up in modest backgrounds but manage to outscore those "rich white kids".

Affirmative action is bad and actually RACIST since it assumes that certain races have inferior/superior ability to attain certain score in SAT, it is irrelevant to family economic background. A white kid can be poor and a black kid can be from a rich family, but the black kid is given advantage over the white kid regardless. It is simply unfair.

Give you a question: As a matter of fact, a first generation Chinese American migrating from China in his teen-age years with his parents being dish washers is being disadvantaged in university admission. Can you rationalize that?

Just being a leftist doesn't necessarily mean that you need to support whatever "leftist" policy on the table (same for rightists) - which I think unfortunately most people growing up in the age of social media are used to be doing.
 
JeffFromHK said:
Why you, intentionally or not, skipped mentioning Asian Americans who are the biggest "winners" in SATs although most of them come from modest background? I love how the affirmative action supporters love ignoring second generation Asian Americans who mostly grew up in modest backgrounds but manage to outscore those "rich white kids".

Affirmative action is bad and actually RACIST since it assumes that certain races have inferior/superior ability to attain certain score in SAT, it is irrelevant to family economic background. A white kid can be poor and a black kid can be from a rich family, but the black kid is given advantage over the white kid regardless. It is simply unfair.

Give you a question: As a matter of fact, a first generation Chinese American migrating from China in his teen-age years with his parents being dish washers is being disadvantaged in university admission. Can you rationalize that?

Just being a leftist doesn't necessarily mean that you need to support whatever "leftist" policy on the table (same for rightists) - which I think unfortunately most people growing up in the age of social media are used to be doing.
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Where to start… this is not only about addressing current conditions, it is about addressing systemic and deeply ingrained injustices and prejudices stretching back to slavery and reconstruction. It is about recogniZing that issues beyond economic conditions exist that add extra burdens to people of color in the US. It is not making a comment on the capabilities of any person or race, it is acknowledging that the hurdles some have to overcome are higher than a peer of another background and providing a means to even things out.
 
JeffFromHK said:
Why you, intentionally or not, skipped mentioning Asian Americans who are the biggest "winners" in SATs although most of them come from modest background? I love how the affirmative action supporters love ignoring second generation Asian Americans who mostly grew up in modest backgrounds but manage to outscore those "rich white kids".

Affirmative action is bad and actually RACIST since it assumes that certain races have inferior/superior ability to attain certain score in SAT, it is irrelevant to family economic background. A white kid can be poor and a black kid can be from a rich family, but the black kid is given advantage over the white kid regardless. It is simply unfair.

Give you a question: As a matter of fact, a first generation Chinese American migrating from China in his teen-age years with his parents being dish washers is being disadvantaged in university admission. Can you rationalize that?

Just being a leftist doesn't necessarily mean that you need to support whatever "leftist" policy on the table (same for rightists) - which I think unfortunately most people growing up in the age of social media are used to be doing.
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hey jeff, why are you ignoring the simple fact that most asian americans in the US overwhelmingly support affirmative action. congrats on posting a wall of utter nonsense btw.
 
calodo2003 said:
This smacks of the gun control debate, the 'well, we can't fix it totally, so let's not even try to make it better incrementally' approach & tactic employed by the right. We will never get to the Xanadu you are discussing, but that shouldn't limit us from doing the best we can to assist the most people we should.
Click to expand...

False equivalences are not going to take us far.

Almost all actions proposed on gun debate reduce gun violence.

Debt forgiveness only perpetuates a system where colleges keep charging more and for college degrees which society doesn’t value (as well as making people in essential services take on a lot of debt).

There are many simpler solutions which are not a “Xanadu” but are steps in the right direction including free education for essential service workers, capping how much publicly funded colleges can charge and so on.

If colleges knew that student debt will keeping getting paid by the government, what’s the incentive for them to not raise college costs another 5x in the next 20 years.
 
entropy said:
hey jeff, why are you ignoring the simple fact that most asian americans in the US overwhelmingly support affirmative action. congrats on posting a wall of utter nonsense btw.
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This stat that has been repeated here multiple times is a lot more nuanced. Most Asian Americans also don’t think race or ethnicity should play a role in college educations.

This is the survey all of you guys are quoting

On one hand, about half of Asian adults who have heard of affirmative action (53%) say it is a good thing, while 19% say it is a bad thing, and 27% say they don’t know whether affirmative action is good or bad. On the other hand, about three-quarters of all Asian adults (76%) say race or ethnicity should not factor into college admissions decisions.
 
SinNombre said:
False equivalences are not going to take us far.

Almost all actions proposed on gun debate reduce gun violence.

Debt forgiveness only perpetuates a system where colleges keep charging more and for college degrees which society doesn’t value (as well as making people in essential services take on a lot of debt).

There are many simpler solutions which are not a “Xanadu” but are steps in the right direction including free education for essential service workers, capping how much publicly funded colleges can charge and so on.

If colleges knew that student debt will keeping getting paid by the government, what’s the incentive for them to not raise college costs another 5x in the next 20 years.
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You have aspirational views, but they aren't founded in reality. Not sure if you live in the states, but Pollyanna-ish is an apt description of your post re: how change can be implemented.

We will never approach what you discuss in the short term, who knows if critical mass can be reached in the long term? So any assistance is a positive for those receiving it.

We will get to a better place through increments, that's the only way.
 
SinNombre said:
This stat that has been repeated here multiple times is a lot more nuanced. Most Asian Americans also don’t think race or ethnicity should play a role in college educations.

This is the survey all of you guys are quoting

On one hand, about half of Asian adults who have heard of affirmative action (53%) say it is a good thing, while 19% say it is a bad thing, and 27% say they don’t know whether affirmative action is good or bad. On the other hand, about three-quarters of all Asian adults (76%) say race or ethnicity should not factor into college admissions decisions.
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not really. concerning affirmative action, the results are pretty clear. and not only that but affirmative action has helped constantly increase the % of asian americans in universities over the last decade.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-...ive-action-here-s-why-misconceptions-n1247806
 
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WI_Red said:
Where to start… this is not only about addressing current conditions, it is about addressing systemic and deeply ingrained injustices and prejudices stretching back to slavery and reconstruction. It is about recogniZing that issues beyond economic conditions exist that add extra burdens to people of color in the US. It is not making a comment on the capabilities of any person or race, it is acknowledging that the hurdles some have to overcome are higher than a peer of another background and providing a means to even things out.
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tell me what socioeconomic privileges do asian americans have that require them a higher SAT score to get into the same university compared with their black and even WHITE counterparts?
 
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