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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Why anti-discrimination laws make quotas inevitable"

18 Comments -

1 – 18 of 18
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lets not talk about it. "Go along to get along." Did you see the game last night... Fantastic stuff.

1/22/07, 2:48 PM

Anonymous Obama Bin Laden said...

I've been watching Trump's "The Apprentice" show, and it gives pause to my usually libertarian/conservative leanings. The show is set up to replicate the "fair" competition of corporate America, with a caste of smart, accomplished Type A Alex P. Keatons who are just dying to impress the Big Boss Mister Trump.

As it turns out, what they really engage in is clique politics, where the focus is not work but maneuvering to isolate whomever the Group least likes. As it turns out, the first two elimination rounds take out the only two Black male contestants ("You just don't fit in with the team," "I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about his personality I don't like"). And neither of these guys were gangstas or slackers: one was kind of Southern in a nerdily pompous way, and the other was inoffensively gay (big mistake for a well-built Black men to show his body in front of insecure white men in a swimsuit fashion show competition).

Third round, The Team swarmed around one woman from the start. The focus of the round was slacking off to make her look bad.

All that American libertarian jargon is just a cover for what happens everywhere else in the world: "Us Helping Us." Pretty disgusting in this land of high falutin platitudes, but maybe it imbeds some kind of folksy practical wisdom.

1/22/07, 3:34 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The architects of civil rights laws never cared for "colorblindness" themselves. It was never more than a tactical stance, much like Martin Luther King's "tactical non-violence" (his words). The idea of colorblindness is that it's somehow beneath us that we don't judge people in the same way afterworld gods are said to, numinously evaluating the character of whomever stands before us, but unless we have supernatural powers, we can't. We are stuck with the biologically-driven fact that we can trust people of our own ethnic group moreso than others, and the other inconventient fact that any ethnic group that actually succumbs to PC dementia will simply be supplanted by ethnic groups that don't. The gods make mad whom they first destroy.

1/22/07, 4:16 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is no real solution to this problem.

La Griffe du Lion talked about it when he mentioned the concept of "conservation of resentment".

In a meritocratic society, lower performing groups(such as blacks) grow very unhappy with society since the best jobs and spots at elite universities go to a group/s other than their own.

Conversely, in a quota-driven society, the higher performing groups grow very unhappy with society since the they have to give some of their jobs and slots at elite universities to lower performing groups.

In the end, there is never really a stable equilibrium of merit and quotas that will satisfy both groups at the same time.

The result is that civil strife becomes greater the more one group feel "cheated" by the other.

I think Steve magically assumes that blacks (and other lower performing groups) will just take the unfavorable conditions that would result from repealing the Civil Rights Act in stride and say "Oh, well, that is life."

Keep dreaming, Steve. The best the USA can do is limit diversity by limiting immigration of lower performing groups.

1/22/07, 4:19 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oops, i meant to write:
"The gods first make mad whom they destroy".

1/22/07, 4:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The FDNY is actually less "female friendly" than most large urban fire departments, with the female percentage being in the very low single digits. IIRC Minneapolis is the leader at ablut 20%.

1/22/07, 4:38 PM

Blogger Thursday said...

As always, you just make too much sense for your own good, Steve.

But if we followed your suggestions, how would lawyers and judges, who are basically all pretty much paperwork drudges, sex up their careers if they can't moonlight as crusaders for "social justice"?

1/22/07, 4:57 PM

Anonymous jody said...

mr quotas himself, dan rooney, has put his money where his mouth his, hiring completely unqualified black coach mike tomlin to head the pittsburgh steelers.

i grew up in pittsburgh. i consider his hiring an insult. tomlin was hired strictly because he is black. this satisfies rooney's obsession with the negro football league. his vision is a game that is 100% black, all players and coaches. no other races are welcome.

every other candidate they interviewed was more qualified, some were dramatically more qualified. ron rivera, the half puerto rican half mexican defensive coordinator for the chicago bears, was passed over for tomlin.

instead of having rivera, a guy who won the superbowl with the bears as a player in 1985 and the guy who took the bears to the superbowl this year as a coach, the steelers will now be coached by tomlin, a man who was a defensive coordinator for 1 single year, in which his team had the worst pass defense in the NFL and finished 6-10.

mike tomlin now becomes dick lebeau's boss. dick lebeau, the acting defensive coordinator for the steelers, has several decades of assistant and head coaching experience, and has also won a superbowl as a defensive coordinator.

this is insanity.

1/22/07, 5:01 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

And really how women want to be firefighters anyway?

Most women I know are some form of feminist-lite believers. They like the idea of female firefighters, oil rig workers etc but have absolutely no desire to do those jobs themselves. They just assume that 'out there' somewhere are all these other tough women yearning to take on these jobs.

1/22/07, 5:39 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anon 5:39 -
Most of the volunteer FD's in my area (Long Island) have a very tough time getting enough members, yet AFAIK women are strongly discouraged from joining. The FD's like to maintain a men's social club atmosphere.

Peter

1/22/07, 6:40 PM

Anonymous Mark Seecof said...

The other difficulty with your letter-writer's focus on properly identifying job requirements is that it provides no solution to the problem of choosing among applicants when you have more of them than you do job openings.

Ideally you would identify qualities that make for good workers, rank applicants by those qualities, then hire the highest-ranked ones first.

If you do that, though, various "protected" groups won't see the same proportion of their members at the top of the ranking as in the raw applicant pool.

For example, you might decide that strength and brains are both important qualifications for firefighters. When you measure strength, you'll end up with more men than women at the top of the list. When you measure brains, you'll end up with folks of different races unevenly distributed through the list.

Then when you hire the best applicants, all the rest will sue on the theory that you discriminate against whatever protected group they happen to belong to.

You can't fix the ranking problem by eliminating bogus criteria, because members of various protected groups don't all rank the same on perfectly valid criteria.

I invite anyone who suggests that just purifying hiring standards would solve society's problems to propose a solution to the ranking problem.

(If you try to set "minimum" criteria then hire by lottery, you will end up with at least three problems.

(One, you will not have as good a workforce. Hiring mediocre applicants instead of the best ones guarantees that.

(Two, you will have a workforce that performs poorly. Since you will not hire the better applicants except by chance, when the performance of some workers slips a bit (due to distractions, illness, whatever), it will slip below the minimum, instead of merely declining from "exceeds" down towards "minimum."

(Three, you may well get a force of workers who don't cooperate properly. Your lottery will select some really good workers and some poor ones. The good ones may resent the poor ones ("slackers, losers"). The poor ones may resent the good ones ("OT hogs, ass-kissers"). You could have avoided a lot of that by hiring people of roughly similar abilities.)

1/22/07, 7:51 PM

Anonymous JSBolton said...

The problem is that, once anti-discrimination is accepted as a value which officials may use aggression to push towards, there is no end to it short of warfare.
The main dishonesty is the equivocation between private and public realms, with a code of silence protecting the use of official aggression to enforce anti-discrimination.
Once the power for this aggression is won, the idea of not officially discriminating against the majority, is just an obstacle in the way of further power-grabs and conflict-exacerbation.
You can hope that it all won't turn out too badly, but the anti-discrimination system is on auto-pilot to generate increases in inter-group conflict every year, especially through immigration of affirmative action eligibles.
Remember, America is one of the countries most resistant to dictatorship. This explains why the conflict-enhancing policies have to be pursued ever further, when despotic power is the goal.

1/23/07, 12:45 AM

Anonymous meep said...

What about when you don't have many of said underrepresented groups wanting to go into the field? Forget about whether they're qualified or not.

Of course, there seems to be quite a bit of bias in which fields get the most attention. I see that "Engineering needs more women!" is a popular battlecry, but "Sanitation needs more women!" is not. And, of course, there's never a call for more men or white people for certain positions.

1/23/07, 4:25 AM

Anonymous albatross said...

Hairdresser needed. Good pay, benefits. We are a diverse workforce, and especially encourage applications from straight men.

1/23/07, 1:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i appreciate your blog comments, but i am mostly interested in your use of language. i am a student tracking a specific word in your essay, "mediacracy." the word is very new, and its use has exploded in the last year. i find this fascinating. please, if you have moment, would you provide a definition?
any reader with functional definition or insight is invited to respond.
thank you for time and thought.
-dgtobey@oakland.edu

1/23/07, 3:04 PM

Anonymous meep said...

And rereading the other comments,I'll second the observation that I'm sick of those women's studies groupies who whine about the lack of women in exec positions or in math & science, and yet never seem to actually run a business or take real math/science courses (much less get degrees in them).

1/24/07, 4:17 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve, I just looked at the photo's of the FDNY firemen who died~very sobering.

However I could not help but noticing that they were not only men but overwhelmingly white men, white Irish & Italian men judging by names. I saw only 10 or 12 black faces in that list.

Any thoughts?

Kevin

1/24/07, 10:32 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

And among these black firemen that died at 9/11, names like Mychal or Lemaricus or Tyrone were not popular...Interesting.

9/30/08, 10:01 AM

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