Monday, July 28, 2008

Obama and quotas

Steve Sailer writes about Obama's support for affirmative action and asks if McCain has what it takes to use it to win the election.

5 comments:

Stopped Clock said...

Do you really think a majority of Americans are against affirmative action?

You might be surprised. Think about this way: there might still be a 66% majority of whites in America, but a lot of those families have nonwhite members and that will make the whole family think from a nonwhite PoV. Add them to the large number of white females who THINK that affirmative action benefits them, and the large number of white people in general who simply think theyre doing the world a good deed, and you've got a lot of AA supporters! I would be very surprised if AA supporters werent a majority by now.

Average Joe said...

Most white families don't have any non-white members. If you really think that most Americans support affirmative action then you must not know that many white people.

Average Joe said...

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/005393.html

Stopped Clock said...

I know that what I said may come off sounding a bit confrontational but I honestly do believe it. When I speak of families, I mean extended families ... one of my uncles is married to a woman from Thailand, and all of their children are considered Asians by the rest of us. If anyone in our family made a remark that could be perceived as anti-Asian, even in a very mild way such as being against immigration, it would provoke the rest of us to say "How can you say that! Would you rather your uncle Bob not have been allowed to marry his wife?" and the like. Support for affirmative action and pro-diversity policies in general tend to follow from that. I'm an exception of course; while I wouldnt go so far as to send uncle Bob's wife back to Thailand I am not a supporter of affirmative action either. I just don't think there's any reasonable chance of us ever getting rid of it.

Also, I think that the "clueless white female" contingent might be larger than the "white people with nonwhite friends and family" contingent anyway. You've probably met them. "I support affirmative action because there's discrimination against women in the workplace! Did you know that women only make 74 cents for every dollar that men make!" And so on. It's all or nothing for them, of course; if you support gender-based AA you automatically have to support race-based AA too. This same delusion is responsible for almost all the Asians who support affirmative action.

So really, I'll bet my life on it, even among whites alone: in a totally honest, no-intidimation poll, those opposed to affirmative action are probably at best a very slim majority, and among nonwhites they are nearly nonexistent.

Stopped Clock said...

Please don't think I'm a liberal, by the way. I know that most of the time when I post here it's to argue ... I just can't see the point in posting just to say I agree, except when you come up with something truly outrageous such as the HIV+ rapist in Poland. I have a very similar outlook to Steve Sailer; I'd say that in less than 1 in 100 of his posts does he express an idea I don't agree with.