I’m not sure, but an argument obviously can be made. This post by PowerLine’s Deacon reminded me of that possibility, although I make an effort to link to women and people of color when I think about it. But unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I don’t think about it much. I’m almost always focused on the interest of the post itself, its subject matter, viewpoint and style. But then when I discover it is by a woman or a minority I think good. It’s an ex post facto thing, except where foreign blogs are concerned, because I deliberately seek out and link foreign blogs for their unique access to information. Is that affirmative action? I guess, of a sort.
Apropos: Gerard Van Der Leun linked to Mark Bowen aka “Cobb” yesterday and for the first time I discovered that Cobb was black. My reaction: shrug. My reaction to his writing: not bad – I’ll be back.
Affirmative action in the racial sphere became reactionary a long time ago. Today it favors almost exclusively the bourgeois children of the african-american professional class while doing nothing, nothing whatsoever, to help poor inner-city kids who desperately need the help.
In the days when Condi Rice and Colin Powell were coming of age, one could make the case that favoring middle-class black or latino kids was a fitting recompense for past wrongs, insofar as they and their parents clearly suffered from segregation and discrimination.
But on what grounds should someone like Michael Powell receive preference? What justifies giving preference to the upper middle-class child of a preference recipient, especially when each spot taken by Michael Powell is one less spot available to a kid whose parents never attended college?
Time to get back to the idea of “content of one’s character” trumping skin color.
I was going to comment on this, but then I noticed that all of the keyboards on my computers were made by Chinese women! Since race and gender determine everything, and since there cannot possibly be a thought or process which transcends race and gender, which rises, that is to say, to the human level, I found myself completely flummoxed.
ìI’m one of the people that happens to think that Juan Cole is a brilliant idiot on the level of William Shockley.î
Hey, I like this Cobb guy already. I will have to bookmark his blog.
I support affirmative action, but with one major distinction which enrages the liberals: the prized position should go to the minority candidate only when everything else is equal. Regrettably, we have an overwhelming number of instances when the minority individual is vastly less qualified than the majority candidate. Liberal judges essentially ruled that qualifications did not matter. This silliness resulted in a lot of unnecessary bitterness.
I am going to second Thibaud on this. AA has always been reactionary because it causes discrimination against unfavored minorities. AA has resulted in discrimination against Asians and Indians [Remember Indians are Indo-European not ìAsianî] as well as Jews. You can bet that in the current anti-Semitic environment on Campus that AA minded admissions committees are doing their best to weed out undesirable “Zionists” from the University.
Roger:
The fake lack of diversity claim is just another example of the left bringing up another old chestnut to diminish the blogs. This isn’t Kinsley vs. Estrich. The MSM is limited by space and thus only so many writers have access to write for it. The blogs are not limited by space or economics. The costs of blogging are small enough to open it up to virtually anyone, especially when compared to TV or newspapers. The left is trying to pass off the myth that the blogs are a zero sum atmosphere. In reality the blogosphere is limitless and the only barrier is talent.
I don’t run a blog.But even my scribblings have reached an audience far greater then I ever could have imagined. I posted on your blog about North Korea. Hugh Hewitt ran my post on his blog. Then he used it in a Weekly Standard article.This would never happen in the MSM. Was it because I am a white male? Of course not.He doesn’t know my race and he only knows I am a male because I use my first name.he liked what I wrote so he used it. Bloggers can blow up to national fame on a single story and if they are good enough they will stay succesfull.When I read Terrye, Katherine,Catherine and all the other wise, talented female writers that post on your blog I have no doubt that if they chose to they could be blogosphere stars and there is nothing even the most sexist man could do to stop them.They don’t have the editorial power to do it.
Kevin P,
Is there anything the left does try to pass off as zero sum?
Yeeeeaaaaahhhhrrrrgggg! PIMF you fool, PIMF!
Let’s try again.
Is there anything the left does not try to pass off as zero sum?
Priveew is no ones friend, Knuck. Katherine and I are still hunting him and when we find him, it’s curtains.
The answer to your question is yes. By leftist ‘logic’, synergism is achieved through emotion. Especially anger. Anger + anger = righteousness. Add another anger and you get holiness.
Now, if your’re talking about something that can be measured or counted then the answer is no. The ‘math is hard’ crowd holds the center ground with the left, so the number after 20 is ‘many’. I tend to think of the left as not having moved beyond the hunter/gatherer stage – or perhaps just gatherer. If you’ve never actually reached the agricultural stage then it’s conceptually difficult to get beyond zero sum. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like had someone taught Marx to garden.
Looking at my blogroll I noticed that the blogs I read daily are written by 15 men and 5 women. That’s 33% female bloggers – a bit better than the L.A. Times 20%.
Looking closer I see that these bloggers include a Filipino-American, Mormon-American (recovering), an Amphibian-American, a homosexual, a few white guys and others of undefined origin. Seems fairly diverse to me.
ìI’m one of the people that happens to think that Juan Cole is a brilliant idiot on the level of William Shockley.î
Not me. Shockley ushered in the transitor; can’t think of anything useful from Juan Cole.
How many mortally-challenged bloggers do you link to? Something like half of all humans are now mortally-challenged. Now, Mayor Daley, there’s a man who took their rights seriously and made a sincere effort to get their votes. It’s terrible, terrible, I tell you.
(/sarcasm off)
Regarding zero-sum…
That seems to be a common thread. I’ve seen it elsewhere (eg. French diplomacy). I’d like to understand the origins of it.
I do firmly believe that it is proveably false.
knucklehead:
You are right about the zero sum addiction of the left. They use it as an excuse to give government control over our lives. The silly thing about trying to attach the diversity con on the blogs is their ignorance of how the blogs work. There is no mechanism to keep women and minorities out. Even if one thought they were being systamaticaly ignored they can go on any blog with a comment program and link their own blog. For free! Plus bloggers constantly seek out new bloggers not because of any sense of duty but because it makes sense. The more good writing they can put on their site the larger their readership will become. The blogsosphere doesn’t need government reform, it doesn’t need an outreach program, it doesn’t need a self appointed elite to set up rules.It is a pure market driven, talent rewarding self governing system. It would warm the hearts of our founding fathers and there is nothing that the whinning PC authoritarian dinosaurs of the MSM can do to stop it.
The best example ever of beneficial affirmative action, IMO, was Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball. An artificial barrier was keeping black athletes out of positions that they were qualified* for, and Jackie’s signing by the Dodgers knocked that barrier down and eventually made it clear that blacks could compete for major league jobs on more or less the same basis that whites did–with the result that the quality of athletes in the game and the level of play both improved greatly. These days, when someone sees a major league baseball player, no one thinks “he’s only got that job because he’s white/black/whatever.” Affirmative action–the lowering of artificial barriers to let qualified workers in–did its job.
*–using “qualified” to mean “there were many black baseball players who were better than many of their white counterparts playing major league baseball.”
In re Juan Cole, the man is a poseur. When he appeared on Al Jazeera recently with Fouad Ajami, Cole begged to be allowed to speak English, as his arabic isn’t good enough to communicate with arabs. (Fouad Ajami also got in several priceless digs– in arabic, of course– at Cole, such as “I think Mr Cole should actually visit Iraq, because he has not been to Iraq….”)
How can someone who’s not even fluent in the language develop any real expertise in primary source materials?
Is there another leading area studies scholar who cannot even speak the area’s language fluently?
Can anyone imagine the head of the Slavic Studies Association not being able to speak a slavic language?
I’m kinda like Roger. I don’t notice who it is I’m reading. Even if it’s obvious by name or photo, it doesn’t usually register.
And it’s not a blogosphere thing (I think the blogosphere’s head has gotten a bit too large lately) it’s an internet thing. No, not even an internet thing. It’s a literally blind communication thing that we got with modems even before the internet.
Sheesh. I’ve been doing this blind thing for almost 20 years now.
The problem with diversity and AA is that it forces you to NOTICE whether someone is black, white, female, or male, or gay or whatever. In the ideal world that liberals purport to want, you should be blind to the differences but their tactics create the exact opposite environment.
Speaking of zero-sum you’ve got to, really, understand that most liberals have NO idea what it means or that that is what they’re doing.
I’m serious. I came from there. I thought the same way. The first time I ever ran into the concept was when I started reading righty blogs. Or at least little-l libertarian ones.
So if we counter their arguments and use the term, most haven’t a clue what we mean. Not that they’d admit it, even to themselves.
That pie thing, you know. Whereby if the rich’s piece gets larger, the poorer’s piece gets smaller. That’s what they see and the ‘creation of wealth’ is something they simply do not understand. So the whole narrative IS a zero-sum game to them and just telling them so means nothing.
One thing that’s been bothering me lately is that I find it harder and harder to keep a liberal’s attention. I realize it’s because I’ve been using more ‘right-speak’ shorthand instead of laying out the concepts in longer sentences and phrases that actually might mean something.
I have a hard enough time articulating (and a lot of that depends on my thyroid levels believe it or not) and shorthand makes it easier for ME. But it means a total inability to communicate to THEM. Not that there’s a guaranty they’d listen, but I think you know what I mean?
On the other hand, being a closet Coulter fan (I mean she IS rough but makes me laugh hysterically sometimes) maybe it’s best to follow her advice…as soon as I figure out what it is.
Thomas Sowell wrote a great book about affirmative action in various countries around the world. It’s been in place for 150 years in India, f’rinstance.
The long and short of it is that these programs tend to favor people who need it less than others and tend to create/add to intergroup strife, as everyone jockeys for position in whatever group gets the best goodies.
There’s a reason that the Bill of Rights is written in terms of individuals rather than groups.
Syl, as an ex-liberal, I consider that I deprogrammed myself.
I see the gap between me and many friends, and I know that it takes far more than words to bridge it.
Back when I was still thinking about being an academic, I was looking around for potential academic positions, my Mother (who was a stockbroker then) contacted the chair of a local computer science department. She talked with him a fair bit, trying to cold-call sell him some stuff; in the course of the conversation, it came out that we’re Choctaw.
Up to that point, his reaction to hearing that her son was about to get a PhD was “yeah, sure, he can get in line with the other 400 applications.” All of a sudden, I was being courted. Recruited. “Please call me.” “Would you like to come give a talk.”
Actually kind of pissed me off. he was no more interested in my research and my publications than he’d been before — but, because I had the proverbial Indian grandmother, all of a sudden I was really interesting.
I have to agree in particular with Kevin P. and Syl but everyone’s comments are great. Kevin’s comment that the blogosphere is a pure market-driven, talent-rewarding, self-governing system is absolutely true and the key reason why the Lefties hate it. The whole concept of meritocracy and rewards to the talented just totally screws with their egalitarian schemes. The blogosphere is proof that this is the marketplace of ideas (instead of the marketplace of spin and dogma as in the MSM) and they can’t compete.
And as for being aware of the gender/ethnicity of the blogger I’m reading, I do like to know where the person I’m reading is coming from but it’s not all-important. I’m pretty riled at the problems Susan Estrich is stirring up for female columnists who want to be taken seriously. All we need is a quota system for op-ed pages (or law reviews) – it immediately devalues the result. It all puts me in mind of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The Left is pitifully bigoted and racist these days. Gender- and race-neutral is the last thing they want. They also detest truths, which the Power Law Distributions Steven Den Beste refers to in the comments on Jeff Jarvis’ post about the Blogging White Male. Humans being humans, the best will always rise to the top, leaving the rest behind. At least here in the blogosphere, those who rise to the top deserve it.
Ironically, the one place the Left refuses to believe is zero-sum is the arena of security, especially international security.
There the argument goes that security is not, in fact zero-sum. That, by cooperating with other countries (especially our “enemies,” by which we merely mean the misunderstood), we can make everyone’s security situation better. Conversely, if we act as though it’s zero-sum (aka, improve our own security), then we’re going to make everyone worse off.
Thus, for the Left, the essence of international security is to rely on institutions (e.g., the UN) and negotiations and multilateralism, and avoid doing things unilaterally, in which case we revert to a zero-sum situation (which doesn’t have to be that way). The job of the American President and foreign policy establishment is to think about what would be good for everyone; avoid that silly ol’ nationalism.
Ivo Daalder has a piece making pretty much that precise argument.
Nothing lasts for ever and I think affirmative action may do more harm than good today. It creates bitterness and it is an insult to highly qualified minority applicants who find themselves being treated like the son in law who got the job so the daughter would not starve.
Things are different today but it seems the left is stuck in a time warp. I don’t care what the subject is they never change.
M. Scott:
Your example of Jackie Robinson proves my point. Baseball excluded blacks openly. For a long time women were shut out of the work force by tradition or sexist attitudes. None of these factors excist in the blogosphere. The reason Powerline blew up was because of their content and the very nature of the blogosphere, not their sex. The left is trying to use the beancounter method of proving racism or sexism without pointing out the laws or traditions that exclude the people they are trying to save.
Peg:
Did you notice that Estrich showed her true colors when she ripped Kinsley for allowing the wrong kind of women, ie women who don’t share her political worldview, onto the pages of the LA Times. And she went after the hiring of Max Boot and other male conservitives. She wants more women voices as long as they are liberal and the male writers she wants removed are conservitive. She didn’t suggest that Kinsley get rid of Robert Scheer, that old marxist Black Panther hack who has been recycling different versions of the same column for twenty years.
You’re right, Terrye. As the nature of the problem changes, so does the mature of the solution. Everything has to be re-evaluated periodically.
“I sometimes wonder what the world would be like had someone taught Marx to garden.”
I don’t know if that was intended as a joke, but Balolard!
Seriously though, the reason the left doesn’t understand non-zero-sum thinking is that they are continually replaying the narrative of the French revolution, i.e. the overthrow of the class whose wealth was largely rooted in tight-fisted control of the agricultural surplus: a granary and an army. The left sees agrarian societies as stagnant hierarchies, which testifies to their inability to see how even agrarian-age inequality went in hand with greater freedoms for the societies as a whole, compared to their highly ritual-bound forebears. (It is the military strength and victories that tend to go to freer societies that really messes with the left’s mind…)
Nonetheless, the left had a point, compared to industrial societies, agrarian ones were much closer to zero sum. So why did the lefties also hate indutrial capitalism so? Because there is a zero sum aspect to it: the winner take all contests for celebrity and high positions. Because institutions like the academy work on winner take all logics, their propensity for AA is understandable. The fact that this undermines the market mechanisms within a world dearly in need of them, making would-be gardeners into angry rabble rousers, suggests we will need to find ways to finance a lot more horticultural projects and pesticides in future.
Or, in other words, the reason there may be more conservative bloggers is that conservatives are much more patient gardeners. They don’t believe in zero sum thinking and they’re more willing to work as amateurs. Go figure.
Maybe there are more conservative bloggers because there is a demand for them.
Liberals are all over the media, they run it however much they deny it. The internet offers conservatives a place to be.
The usual argument for Affirmative Action in academea is that it will bring diversity of viewpoint. Fact of the matter is that Bobby Lee Gump would bring more of that to an Ivy League institution than would Tiger Woods.
truepeers,
Not really a joke. I tend to see the birth of the left as the result of a contest between a degenerate nobility and a group of intellectuals completely unmoored from reality. Few on either side had ever engaged in productive labor and neither side had a clue as to how to generate a surplus.
The lefts disdain for industrial capitalism may stem as much from working conditions in factories between 1800 and 1840 as the items you mention. The conditions were truly deplorable and the first couple of generations of factory owners after the start of the industrial revolution showed a particular lack of basic human goodness.
The left has never come to grip with the fact that the lowest quintile will always have to be driven because it lacks the intellectual capacity to be led. That is a fact that was as true in 4000 BC and 1791 as it is today. People are equal before God and should be equal before the law but true equality ends there. To think that equality of outcome can be obtained through education ignores the fact that the best educated individual with an IQ of 80 still has an IQ of 80.
I do not consider AA to have been a failure at all. There are undoubtedly many people doing excellent work in jobs that they would never have had except for AA. It may not have been the most efficient method of achieving the results that it has achieved and there are severe societal drawbacks concerning the factors that Terrye mentioned but I believe it to have been worth the effort. We have reached the point of diminishing returns, however, and it is time to declare victory and move on. And that’s where the left (and the Democratic party) fall apart. Race has nothing to do with it, they just refuse to acknowledge that not everyone is going to be average, let alone above average.
Rick:
You are right. Just as there is a case sometimes for certain agricultural and buisness subsidies in times of emergencies they mutate from wise policy into sacred dogma and if you try to alter them or phase them out you are branded as the destroyer of family farms, even though the bulk of these subsidies go to mega corporations, or a racist when it comes to AA. Government welfare, for the rich or the poor, is a hard addiction to crack.
Rick,
i think you hit the nail on AA. The idea of applying it to the blogosphere is a perfect example of over-dependence on a once good idea whose time has largely past (in America), at least I hope so.
My explanation of the left’s hatred of industrial capitalism was rather limited. However, I would take issue with the argument that all early factory owners were inhumane. Some were idealists of various stripes who built what were to their minds model towns and factories. It’s been a while since I read the historical debates, but I don’t think we ever had a strong consensus on the degree to which peasants were pushed or pulled into factories. (Precisely because the question was politicized by intellectuals generally resentful of, and hence blinkered to, reality.) Some were obviously pushed off their land, but many saw urban factory life as having advantages over the hard work, social inequities and limited freedoms of the countryside – single women, for example. And of course, all over the world today people are still moving to the cities.
I remind you just in order to ask about your (once briefly mentioned) experiences in Chinese factories: do you think the workers are there because they can make more money than on the farm, or because they have little choice?
Professor Bronowski addressed the very issue of early industrial conditions in “Ascent of Man”. According to him, working in factories was an improvement over a horrific farm labor that was lot of a typical European peasant in early 19th century in most cases. I think that way too many people today, especially on the left, view the life of a peasant just about the same way as did the French aristocracy before revolution: studly, picturesque shepherds chasing beribboned shepherdesses, making love on a fragrant meadow next to a pristine brook. Things like hoe, manure or backbreaking labor would spoil the picture.
And of course there is Mr. Dickens who immortalized the worst cases existing in 19th century England. He was literally writing about the worst cases, ( and making stuff up) but today again we view his novels as nothing less than literary reportage and believe that they describe typical living conditions at the time. But Dickens, for all practical purposes, created not a window on but a caricature of a society.
Whenever we talk about human lot at some point in history it is wise to consider all the circumstances. That of course does not mean that we should ever stop striving for better lives for all of us.
I’ve been to three types of factories in China, differentiated by type of ownership and all around Xiamen. The one owned by the military could be called a forced labor factory. Surrounded by 3-4 meter tall broken glass topped wall with heavy gate, watchtower and barracks within the walls. The workers were being fed on a subsistence level (easy to count ribs) and I don’t think that they volunteered for the job. No visible employment office. Run down and poorly maintained.
The second type was owned by a consortium of local party officials and actually had an employment office with a line. The manager told me that they turned over low skill employees at a rate of about 25% per month because the wages were so “good” (a little over $30 per month) that workers would leave after 4 to 6 months because they could afford to set up some sort of business at “home”. I suppose that’s possible but I think that they really just liked to turn over the workforce at the unskilled level. Fewer ribs showing. I’d say that these fellows might have been peasants coming in for higher wages. Maintenance was poor with a lot of decent machinery not running for “lack of parts” – actually I believe that it may have been lack of labor skilled enough to run the machines.
The third type was owned by “overseas Chinese” and was world class in operation. The manager told me that they only used local labor, paid them around $45 per month and had close to 0 turnover. Workers were well fed and much better dressed than in the other two plants.
All three plants were within an hour of Xiamen and were technically “competing” with each other but they actually shared work. There’s no question that peasants have been drawn to Xiamen in the hopes of higher pay. I’m betting China has a civil war within ten years. Those fellows taking their money back home to set up their own shops are going to create a lot of pressure. The Chinese can’t keep capitalism pinned to the coast.
What kind of work does a Burkean WASP do that takes him to the factories of Communist China? A wonderful and hopeful analysis, Rick Ballard. If the mainland Chinese fracture along economic and political lines for enfranchisement, the Sino region becomes more responsive to its populations and less threatening to the rest of us.
About the blogosphere and diversity, aren’t bloggers and their commenters more gender-progressive than the MSM, since they tend to use uni-sex bathroom facilities at “work”? Girls and boys, women and men are all allowed in my bathrooms. Also, if women are inherently more verbal and more stereotyped as typist-secretaries, isn’t it a blow for affirmative action that men might be more blog prolific? Good on them for expressing themselves, I say! Empathy/ sympathy is next for men to master.
Roger, you’re about ten years late to this party.
There’s no need to keep calling racial preferences “affirmative action” either.
Thanks Rick, it looks like I will be getting into a business selling the wares of a Chinese factory, so I’m curious about what I’m getting into. It seems this factory doesn’t quite fit your typology since it is run by a local capitalist who, I am told, is not a party official though he must have some kind of relationship. It’s in Guangzhou province where the capitalist spirit perhaps runs a little stronger. And then there are, of course, all the factories run as partnerships with foreign firms.
Anyway, I agree that China will have a lot of problems integrating as a national market economy. Civil war in ten years is a bold guess. But with all the posturing over Taiwan, I suppose they are having problems keeping everyone together. It is very hard to find writing on China that is attentive to all the regional divides. I’d love to see more if anyone can help.
Rick,
Clearly capitalism won’t remain pinned to the coast. It has long hence started to move inland. How things will play out among the Red Army’s vast holdings, the holdings of the corrupt party officials, and the individual capitalists is far from clear. No one there believes in “communism” but I believe a great many do believe in keeping the peace. I’m very skeptical about the civil war scenario. I was just reading a new book on the Roman Republic. There isn’t all that much difference between a Marius and a Chavez. Plus ca change. But China is different, it’s not a place that has produced civil wars, historically, and I see no particular reason why it should start now. The big danger comes as the result of the one-child policy, namely, the buildup of way too many young males for whom there cannot be any brides. Bad news all around. Far more likely that the rulers will steer all that unsatisfied male energy into war with Taiwan. They will bide their time until the US and Japan are sufficiently weak or distracted.
P.S. There wasn’t anything like the Red Army forcing the peasantry into factories in Nineteenth Century Europe. If you don’t understand why they left the farms in droves for the factories, ask Terrye about farm life. Factories good; information-age man, better.
Actually IIUC it was the decision in the 1980s to allow private ownership and capitalistic production in the countryside that allowed Chinese agriculture to surge forward. This created the national savings necessary for increased investment in industry, as well as stimulating a domestic market for manufactured goods.
The lesson– privatize the ag sector first, then industry– was lost on the ex-Soviets in Russia, who have yet to allow real land ownership in the countryside. As a result Russia continues to have about 70% of the population living in dire poverty, even as Moscow-Babylon incomes now average close to $10k per year (with 25+ FOrbes list billionaires as well, more than in any other city aside from NY).