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It used to be that the privileged were those from wealthy families—those who had greater opportunities for education, better connections for jobs, and so on. One reason to work hard to succeed was to attempt to make your children members of the privileged class. The way to success was through success.
Now the privileged are "the oppressed." The way to get greater opportunities for education, better connections for jobs, and so on, is by demonstrating one's victimhood. Affirmative action and DEI have converted perceived oppression into real advantages. Now, the way to success is through failure.
The first model had its problems. But at least people were competing to be more successful. Now, people are competing at being bigger victims than others, which has created a race to the bottom and has contributed to social degeneration. Of course. If successful people are evil, and unsuccessful people are admirable, and oppressed people are privileged, then what will people do? And what will society look like in one generation? Two generations?
Affirmative action creates lots of problems for individuals, obviously. Putting students into schools that they can't handle, creating resentment among classmates and coworkers, moving people out of things that they're good at and moving them toward things they're not good at, etc.
But affirmative action's destructive impact on society should be a bigger point of emphasis.
We're destroying the greatest civilization the world has ever seen so that we can feel superior to others and feel better about ourselves.
Creating misery through vanity. Humans are good at this.
Discussion (25)
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Tall poppy gets cut down first.
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I don't know. Productive? Maybe with a lobotomy.
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A friend who worked for the IRS for 2 decades and has done independent CPA work on taxes for another 15 years was discussing how well off foreigners are.
Pull a muscle on the job, find a doctor of your ethnicity who has been friendly to such a life threatening ailment in the past, and within months, a Soc Security disability check is yours for the asking.
If you were born here, it often takes years to overcome the bureaucratic resistance to being approved.
He saw this quite often.
One household of people who had all been here less than ten years had an income of over 6,600 bucks each month. Remember, these are tax-free monies. There was only one person in the household who worked, and that individual bragged about how happy he was to know that should he get tired of his job, he had an easy out.
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Idiocracy !
However, the true elites will still be pulling the strings . Only with a lot more manipulable underlings .
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Definitely true. It's how the left reconciled its abandonment of workers in favor of racial minorities and then, when they began to be too successful, sexual minorities.
And you have the peculiar phenomenon of very, very privileged people claiming to be oppressed because they're "non-binary." It's essentially meaningless, but it gives a white male or white female from a fabulously wealthy household, with an ivy-league education, a toehold in the all-important victimhood Olympics.
It also allows institutions to pretend to "diversity" by admitting or hiring such people. A UU church of my acquaintance agonized over the dreadful but ineluctable fact that the last three "settled" ministers had been white men. Despite this, given the chance, the search committee interviewed a number of women, but hired another white man...who had decided, the previous year, that he was "non-binary." Ta-dah!
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