@ mapleleaf

The only difference between you and Senator McCarthy is your nationality and the subject of your lunacy.

Now there's the pot calling the kettle a lunatic.

Blam blam.....there goes another dead kid. U.S.A.!!! U.S.A.!!!

I like mapleleaf. He disproves the internationally-accepted maxim that Canadians are altogether nicer and more urbane than Americans.

^ Oh how delicious!

Keep telling yourselves that, you Yankee doodle child murderers.

@Maniac: "racial discrimination does not equal racism."

That's actually something I wasn't aware of.
What's the point of basing affirmative action on 'race', though? If you want to help those in trouble, help those in trouble. Why only help a number of 'races'? It seems to me that if there's a white and a black guy in the same situation in a ghetto and you only help the black guy while you could help both, you somehow think they are morally superior, and therefore more deserving of help. In such a case, calling that affirmative action racist seems fair to me.

Would you agree to that assessment?
Also, thanks for joining the discussion. It's nice having this discussion with a grown-up rather than maple now.

Steephie - all things being equal, one wouldn't assist a black guy out of a ghetto in favour of a white guy. But things aren't necessary equal to begin with. If you had a finite resource of say 1000 houses and you spent 50 years only allocating them to white families you would start with 1000 white families in 1000 houses. If you wanted to readdress this balance how should you go about it?

You could throw everyone out of the houses and then reallocate them without any reference to race, say by holding a lottery. You would end up with houses being allocated broadly along the % make-up of the population, if whites account for 60%, around 600 houses will be allocated to white families.

You could start allocating the houses that become available on a equal basis (60% to white rest to non-white), but if houses don't become available as tenancies are passed down generations, then you haven't done anything to address the previous unfair system.

You could decide that non-white people are 'favoured' when allocating those houses that become available. This can be properly described as racial discrimination.

What tends to happen is that people criticise the last method calling it racist, but would never support the first method, which is probably the least racist.

I would favour those most in need. Because I don't care about 'race', I don't care how many white and how many non-white people have a house, I care about how many people need a house, and how much each of them needs it. I don't see why 'race' needs to be taken into the equation.

So for the record, in your example, most houses would go to non-white people because those people need a house more on average.

steephie, your a naieve idiot - the world is racist and we need to counter that, blacks go to jail for longer for the same crime, are more likely to be convicted, get the death penalty etc. the system has racism, and whilst we ideally ignore race, we can't when racism occurs, and needs to be fought.

@SD: This is probably more of an issue in the USA (I'm guessing that's where you're from), but I don't see how a black guy getting a harsher treatment somewhere justifies leaving a white guy in need to his faith, in favour of someone less in need who happens to be black, somewhere else.
Those people would deserve support because they were mistreated, not because they are black. That's what I'm saying.

SD appears to believe that the way to combat anti-black bias in the American justice system is to introduce pro-black bias in the American housing system.

Or perhaps (and I know I'm a crazy fool for thinking such things) a better option is working to eliminate the bias in all systems?

i don't think we should just leave white guys to themselves, but there is systematic racism, and it needs countering.

octavious and bs straw man, it was an example, blacks are disadvantaged in so many ways in the states, and i don't like (white?) europeans coming on their high horse with their views that aid racism.

all bias should be eliminated, but if racism is a systematic problem it needs countering in a helpful way, but these argument will obviously be a waste of time.

You're obviously missing SD's point, Octavious. That would be ideal, and ideal is for naive idiots like you and me...

Luckily we're doing quite well with our naive ways in Europe, so if naive means effective, I'll be naive.

But it's too ideal for SD, we get it.

In Europe we're so naive to fight fire with water, while every good American knows you fight fire with fire...

i live in europe, and racism is an issue here too, but i'm sure you guys don't see how it exists. your fire with water and fire with fire point may sound nice, but it's conceptually meaningless.

Okay, didn't know that. Where in Europe? Basically you're not presenting me enough of a concept to actually argue against, forcing me to shut up or fill in the blanks... Meaning I end up saying conceptually useless stuff.

So tell me what you want to talk about, because you're seemingly talking about specific cases but you're not telling me which ones, so I can't argue back.

Do you agree or disagree with what I said about compensating legal bias with bias in the house market?

Really pisses me off when Americans start talking about Muslims and Europe. You don't have a clue what you're talking about and race is not an issue in Europe in the same extent as it is in America. Yeah, there are mosques around and areas full of Muslim people and shops. So fucking what, I don't like xenophobic single-culture state.

Really, you need to understand that like America we have media that blows everything out of proportion and that the opinions on internet usually express the angry minority. But I've travelled around Europe and witnessed very little race-related issues, even when visiting former Yugoslavia and Albania/Kosovo. Europe however does have huge nationalism problems which you don't have as part of a federation.

Are you talking to anyone in specific, SYnapse?

Also, you know American nationalists just call themselves patriots, right?

I'm asking the first question because in this thread, the only thing about muslims said involved mapleleaf, a Canadian as I understand it, talking about tortured muslims in USA, which happens to not be European.

@SYnapse - until my post now, everyone who has posted since my last post has been European. Now don't you feel like an ass calling your fellow Europeans "American"?

And for what it's worth, Maniac, Merriam Webster has the following definition for racism.

: racial prejudice or discrimination

— rac·ist noun or adjective

No I wasn't talking to anyone in particular, just discussing racism across USA/European boundaries. It's a completely different concept

And what I meant steephie is that Americans don't have any nationalist border tensions except with Mexico. Imagine being surrounded by a bunch of Mexicos and you have sort of feeling of what its like to be a European country.

So you are saying Germany has racial tension with England across the channel and France and Switzerland and Austria? Why are their borders all open then?

And if Maple is a form of evidence, I's say we have it with Canada too.

Since when is there border tension in Europe? There's no such thing as illegal immigration for European nations because all countries have open borders.

Sure there will always be some locals complaining an immigrant took their jobs, but how the Brits treat Polish immigrants is very different from how the Americans treat Mexican immigrants.

Draugnar - I don't want to get too bogged down in the language and I think it's fair to say that there is no settled definition. If we look at another example of say women's toilets that exclude male entrants. Would you say that is sexist? Maybe so, but if we then have to use the same word "sexism" for say denying a woman a job as we do for separating out toilets. There are obviously gradations and I think using racial discrimination rather than rascism better describes AA. If you differ on that, that's fine, but we shouldn't get bogged down in language IMHO.

What bothers me about the opponents of AA is that they tend to flag up AA as being racist whilst doing nothing to offer alternative solutions.

Let me put a hypothetical problem to you and ask you for a solution.

In a class of 100 children 60 wear red and 40 wear blue. A teacher walks in a randomly throws out 50 footballs. As chance would have it 30 balls end up being caught by blue wearing kids and 20 are caught by red wearing kids. The teacher walks out and the blue wearing kids gang up on the red wearing kids and take their footballs from them. When the teacher walks back in with another 20 footballs, 50 blue wearing kids have footballs 10 blue wearing kids and all the red wearing kids have none. How would you fairly distribute the footballs?

The answer is, of course, you can't. If you collect all the balls up and reassign them randomly, you may penalise a child in blue who originally caught a ball and had nothing to do with taking balls from the reds.

If you leave the original balls where they were and randomly allocate the new balls, you are being unfair on the reds who had their balls snatched.

If you allocate the new balls only to the reds then the blue wearing kids without a ball have a right to feel agreived. How unfair is it to allocate resources based on the colour of your coat.

I think you have to accept that everything you do will result in unfairness to some and pick the option that is the least unfair. I would suggest collecting all the balls up and reallocating them via a lottery system. If I thought that would end in bloodshed, then I'd probably favour issueing the new balls only to red wearing pupils in an attempt to even up the injustice even though only half reds will end up with a ball and 5/6ths of blues end up with a ball.

I don't think allocating the new balls by lottery to either the whole class or to the ones without a ball would be the fairest system.

I'd be genuinely interested how others would allocate the footballs. Note - you can't just magic up another 30 or so footballs.

@Steephie - "I would favour those most in need. Because I don't care about 'race', I don't care how many white and how many non-white people have a house, I care about how many people need a house, and how much each of them needs it. I don't see why 'race' needs to be taken into the equation."

I agree completely - so you kick all the of the white families out and then reallocate the housing based on need? As they are all now homeless how are you going to judge need? Are the elderly more needy? Children more needy? Women? Large families? Perhaps rather than deciding on needs a lottery would be better?