this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
130 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
1025 readers
1 users here now
@politics on kbin.social is a magazine to share and discuss current events news, opinion/analysis, videos, or other informative content related to politicians, politics, or policy-making at all levels of governance (federal, state, local), both domestic and international. Members of all political perspectives are welcome here, though we run a tight ship. Community guidelines and submission rules were co-created between the Mod Team and early members of @politics. Please read all community guidelines and submission rules carefully before engaging our magazine.
founded 1 year ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Clarence Thomas is one of the more startling examples of the "fuck you, I got mine" generation. How do you go from being in the black panthers to this?
Edit: Grammar
Money. The answer is money.
For sure, a lot of it is money, but he is also on a 30+ year revenge tour right now and will seemingly vote for anything horrible. This man was one of the pioneers when it comes to burning it all down to own the libs.
They get recommended pretty frequently, but the Behind the Bastards podcast did a pretty good review of who Clarence Thomas is and how he got to be that way.
Part 1/4 can be found here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-clarence-thomas-story-99759984/
"The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years."
~Clarence Thomas, 1993
Paywalled, but didn't folks "make him miserable" because he sexually assaulted someone?
They took his MoJo BaBy... yeaaaH
The Insider article isn't paywalled for me. Are you referring to the NYT article? I intentionally didn't link the Times article because it is paywalled.
Eye for an eye makes everyone go blind
There’s a recent Frontline documentary about his life. He (and Ginni) are the worst.
https://youtu.be/wJuRx1wARUk
He was never in it for his stated reasons. He was in it for himself. Anything he professed at the time was a strategy to gain support for more power. You can tell who is in it for themselves because they never risk their own power for a cause. The cause is the tool they use to gain power.
Must be comfortable living in a world of strawmen. Don't hurt yourself on that sharp wit of yours.
Just report him and move on, he's spewing at the mouth about reasonable takes
What the fuck... dudes a bad human ... plain and simple... has nothing to do with being black
No, he's a bad human for all the bribes he's taken to reach these decisions.
And all the other right-wing nonsense he's put out.
And the fact that he benefitted from these policies, and is pulling the ladder up behind him, because he mistakenly believed that because he got into law school via affirmative action, big law firms wouldn't hire him.
This was a black man looking for work at large, white run law firms in the early 70s. The reason they wouldn't hire him is because they were racist fucks.
Which is what affirmative action is meant to correct. Otherwise qualified applicants denied admission into universities because of their race.
Without affirmative action, you get state universities where the state population is something like 30% minority, and the population on campus is something like 1%, if that.
So your solution for racism to be racism yourselves and make these minorities the beneficiaries of it instead of getting rid of it, in order words, you replaced racism you didn't like, with racism you do like.
Hypocrite.
They just removed affirmative action which hurts underserved minorities. They didn't touch legacy admissions which benefits rich white people. What they're doing is transparently racist. If they wanted a meritocracy why not bar legacy admissions as well?
Did you know 2 things can be wrong at the same time, meaning both AA and legacy admissions can be both wrong at the same time? meaning that even if they didn't turn down LA it doesn't mean turning down AA wasn't the right thing to do?
Shocking right!? that 2 things can be bad at the same time.
Lol, if your best argument against this ruling is "oh they only did because they racist because they didn't also do the other thing" that's how you know the ruling is correct, you aren't attacking the argument against AA, you're attacking the judges because they took a decision you didn't like
I would be for removing AA of they removed LA as well. Because they didn't, their motivation is clear. If we agree that both are wrong then removing only one shows that they're ok with the other.
Sure, i agree that both are wrong, my other comments were geared towards the people who believe AA is justified somehow.
There's a non small number of people believe that in older to compensate minorities who suffered discrimination in the past, we should discriminate people today as a form of payment to these minorities, in other words, to apply racism but in favor of minorities, and the people who argue for this actually believe they have the moral high ground and that this is justifiable, when in reality they behave exactly as the racist of the past, just with a different motivation.
What you fail to understand is that the method for getting rid of racism in admissions decisions is to actually look at race.
Only willfully blind racists think that anything can ever be race blind. Because reality is not.
Another misconception that racists spread is that minorities who benefit from affirmative action are somehow not otherwise deserving. The reality is that you still need the grades (or money) to get in to the university. All that is different is that universities are rewarded (read as not sued) for having racist admissions. i.e. being an all white school in a state with a large minority population. Which was a real thing in the deep south into the late 1970s.
What racists also ignore is that having a mixed student population is actually good for the student body as a whole.
If that worked, then we really wouldn't need affirmative action.
Here's how the system actually works, because racists lie about it all the time.
Say you have two students, one gets straight "B"s in High School, one gets a mix of B and C. Their only main difference is that they're different races. One Black, one White.
Now, without affirmative action, the White student gets preference because school admissions is generally racist as fuck. Hall, look at Brandeis, that place has actually brought back "whites only" spaces.
Now, back to the two imaginary students, a racist would assume that the black student had the worse grades. But that's not how it goes down.
See, students are judged for admissions on a bunch of criteria. There are judgments on financial stability of the family, after school programs that the student is part of, previous family members that went to any college.
It mostly boils down to two factors, how likely is this student to graduate with a degree, and how likely is this student to pay off their tuition.
Now, thanks to a bunch of racist shit that happened at the end of the civil war and has continued in one form or another until today, black students score poorer on these random criteria than a comparable white student, even when the white student has slightly worse grades.
That's what affirmative action was trying to fix. Giving black students a chance to get an education, to fight for a higher paying job, to end the cycle of poverty that white people have knowingly inflicted on them since the end of the civil war.
The fact that affirmative action also helped other minorities was not an accident, because white people have fucked over every minority.
The final note here, the civil rights act didn't magically end racism. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan soared in the late 1960 and early 1970s.
Electing a black president didn't mean racism was over, The number of white nationalist and general hate groups in the US saw a rather large bump from the election of Barack Obama. That number died off a bit towards the end of his second term, but then soared again under Trump. They were pissed about Obama, but got a green light from Trump.
If you intentionally choose to completely misinterpret and misrepresent things then fuck off buddy, on the other hand if you truly can't see then I feel sorry for you friend...
You're spot on with noting that everyone should have a right to their own opinion, regardless of their race. This applies to everyone, including the hypothetical "black guy" you mentioned. No one should be discredited based on their ethnicity or for holding a viewpoint that deviates from any presumed norm.
Your other points, however, seems to conflate the objectives of affirmative action with racism. Affirmative action is not about advantaging certain races at the expense of others; instead, it's about leveling the playing field that has been historically skewed against certain minority groups. It's not "racism you do like," but rather an attempt to correct systemic disparities.
Let's look at your example about state universities with a 30% minority population in the state but only a 1% representation on campus. Affirmative action aims to bring that 1% closer to the 30% to better reflect the demographics of the society the university serves. It doesn't necessarily mean that admission standards are lower for these groups; instead, it recognizes that these individuals have likely faced systemic barriers that could disadvantage them in the admissions process.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need affirmative action. But we're not there yet. For now, it acts as a necessary tool to combat systemic issues that can't be fixed overnight. It’s not about promoting one race over another but promoting fairness and equal opportunity.