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[Bauglir]

Well, yes and no. There was a case brought to the Supreme Court (Fischer v. UT Austin). It was sent back to a Federal Court fo rreview, and the court ruled that the quotas were legal (although with much legalese about "holistic approach" that flew over my head.

I just want to clarify, the admissions process in question didn't involve quotas. That is, there was no target number of minority students. What they did was incorporate race into a numerical score, and apparently the process for doing so was ill-defined and nebulous (a clear system where "Being black" got you 20 points had been previously deemed unconstitutional, which is probably why). To my knowledge, quotas remain flatly unconstitutional.

EDIT: No problem with euthanasia from me. The only thing that upsets me about the way the doctors handled that was dismissing the complaints as being from psychiatric patients. It's a lie, and I can't see how it would matter, anyway, unless they're trying to play on the "Oh you can't take crazy people seriously" bullshit; which they really don't want to do, since it undermines the entire rationale for permitting euthanasia for mental conditions.

[Dutchling]

Very interesting article.

[Helgoland]

Whether it works or not is another matter, I haven't seen any data on that myself, but the idea is simply "person wants to do job, but gets walled out because of gender/race/identity/etc. Force employer (public sector only, by the way, unless it's in-house regulations by the company doing the hiring!) to have a certain number of said race/gender/identity workers."

I read somewhere recently that the point at which the suffragette movement really took off was when they stopped arguing purely morally and started pointing out the benefits for the nation as a whole. Maybe this is a way to combat racism in the US: Convince companies that it's the economically rational choice to combat discrimination!

@Sheb: Could you upload that paper somewhere, or send it to me in private? It's behind a paywall, and it may help me combat the occasional MRA outbreaks my girlfriend gets

[Sheb]

Oh, I was on my uni network, I didn't realize it was paywalled. Other organizations have it uploaded, this one should work.

[hops]

All humans are so similar I'm still kind of confused why they care so much about gender and shit. I can hardly tell myself apart from the couch.

[Arx]

I agree with affirmative action as a concept, but I've kind of been put off it by implementation.

That's three thousand four hundred skilled workers who'll be laid off entirely because they're white. It kind of rankles.

[Helgoland]

Isn't your government kinda crazy like that? IIRC there are some guys in the ruling party who think Mugabe has all the right ideas...

[Arx]

Many of them are idiots, but they're not actually incompetent or (excessively) racist. There isn't really a way to implement affirmative action that isn't screwing over white people to give their piece to black people, because as far as my experience goes that's exactly what the term means. It's just a case of pulling it off with subtlety and restraint, so as not to directly fuck the privileged classes (like in the article) or indirectly fuck the country (like is going to happen if those white people have to be replaced by unskilled black people (because we still haven't untangled the education system and I'm concerned that those particular skills aren't easy to acquire for a black South African)). I don't know if I trust most governments to do that right.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, this is just an example of how it can go wrong when implemented by a government that is otherwise not an oppressive segregationist regime (although they do tend further that way than others).

It's difficult, because as I said I support the concept. It's just... the idea that I'll probably never get a job at certain places because I'm white is remniscent of certain policies none of us want back.

[Truean]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/20/russell-moore-gay-marriage_n_7623824.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

http://news.yahoo.com/hundreds-thousands-rally-rome-against-gay-unions-202458032.html

You know, I just get the impression there's nothing I could ever say or do that would make some people not hate gays (or admit they actually do hate gays). And those are just the latest in a long line. Seems the Uber conservative portions of America (and elsewhere) are losing some ground, finally, and they are pissed.

Same goes for the anti women crowd:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/15/north_carolina_abortion_ultrasound_case_supreme_court_won_t_hear_it.html

and then of course there's the radical blowback trying to victim blame in a horrid way:
http://news.yahoo.com/nra-executive-suggests-slain-charleston-pastor-blame-gun-043458974.html;_ylt=AwrBT821.IVV2ksAW5JXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEyb2JlYWRiBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMzBHZ0aWQDQjAxMjJfMQRzZWMDc3I-#

Dude is dead. Leave him alone. Just cause he supported gun control and died via gunshot doesn't mean it's cool to blame him for his own death and the deaths of others who died with him.... I mean even if you try and give this NRA guy the benefits of some very serious doubts, it's still messed up. Let's say for the sake of argument that this NRA guy was trying to use this as an example and say something like, O I dunno, "See, if some of the people in that church would've had guns, they could've shot the crazy racist white kid murderer and saved some people." Even that wouldn't have been the best argument to make but it would've been better than blaming the dead pastor. I mean really, that's, nevermind bad taste; it's bad PR too.

[i2amroy]

I think I already brought up in the election megathread about the NRA's solution to gun violence being more guns. "People won't shoot other people if the other people would shoot back!" Because having bullets flying everywhere whenever something bad happens is a good thing. Incidentally, it is for the NRA- bullet sales would go through the roof.

Yeah, but short of having no guns at all (which while it works great in Japan, I think pretty much any attempt to do so is gonna fail in the US, going that it's against the constitution and all), having a well armed populace is one of the better defenses. I mean if you have at least a portion of the population that has guns, as we do in the US, then it's kinda a fact of life that the criminals and other bad guys are going to be able to get them. At that point your choices in a scenario are "they have guns and you don't" or "we both have guns", and honestly I'd probably say that the second one is better.

(Of course both would be worse than "neither us nor them have guns", but as I mentioned doing that is kinda against the constitution right now).

[Helgoland]

Look at Europe: It's fairly clear that you're wrong, at least in general. American cultural peculiarities have an impact, of course, but that's a whole different order of magnitude effect-wise.

[Angle]

Another point of note, is that organized criminals having guns is actually not that big of a deal - they try pretty hard to not end up in confrontations that could be violent. The ones that are real trouble are the random dumb-asses - life that idiot in charleston. They DO get into violent confrontations where people get shot, and they WOULD be dissuaded by decent gun control laws.

[i2amroy]

Honestly, double checking the data on murders and gun related murders I'm seeing some funny relationships here. From the looks of it the states with less guns were actually significantly more murderous, with the lowest 10 states for gun ownership percentage having almost 30% more murders than the highest 10 on gun ownership (ignoring Washington DC as an obvious outlier). On the other hand the overall percentage of gun related murders compared to total murders held approximately equal in the top and the bottom, only varying by less than 5%.

Looking at some of the world data on "civilized" countries I'm seeing pretty similar correspondences. While Americans are much more likely to turn to a gun to kill someone, the overall murder rate per population between here and Europe isn't that different. America has slightly higher rates than western Europe (about 3 deaths per 100k people instead of 1), it also shares a border with Mexico, which is one of the absolute worst countries on the map, and therefore appears to be at least partly following the trend of countries only doing gradual changes; there are very few high up against low boundaries on the map, and most of those involve countries that make me question their reporting methods, such as in Egypt, China, or Saudi Arabia. I'm honestly not seeing any significant differences in murder rates for civilized countries here, gun control or not.

Of course this isn't a comprehensive study, so we can also draw other funny conclusions as well. For example if we look at the "civilized" world we find that murder rates are almost a direct correlation with country size, with smaller countries having less murders per pop and larger ones having more. (Excluding the dang Canadians, the curve breakers. ).

[Frumple]

At that point your choices in a scenario are "they have guns and you don't" or "we both have guns", and honestly I'd probably say that the second one is better.

Oddly enough, from what I recall of gun violence, by the numbers (i.e. people shot and shot & killed), insofar as the victim in the encounter walking away that's largely untrue. You encounter someone armed and try to pull on them, and you're fairly significantly more likely to die because of it than otherwise. Carrying actually increases your risk of harm and death in the case of a violent encounter.

As... well, as anyone that is actually familiar with firearm usage, especially in criminal encounters, would be able to tell you, when it comes to gun on gun violence the person that wins is almost always the person that shoots first -- and someone intending to commit violence with a firearm is going to have it pulled and be significantly more likely to pull the trigger if pressed than, y'know, your average civilian (even -- especially, to a degree, because arms carrying is known to induce a false sense of security -- someone that is trained and carrying.). You may be carrying, but that doesn't mean you're even remotely as capable of drawing and pulling in a manner that's actually going to help you. It's notably more likely to just flat get you killed.

Firearm carrying is just... it's not a matter of actual safety, largely. Psychological safety, maybe, but physically... no. Unfortunately.

... in other news, eyetwo, a 3x increase is, uh. Not "slight". Though yeah, murder rate in particular, even gun-related murder, is significantly more complicated than just which area has the most gun owners. Violence in general is multivariate as hell.

---

And yeah, true, there's going to be some people you just can't dissuade from being bigoted fuckwits. Some folks are just screwed up in the head, and there's not really any degree of persuasion that can do anything about it. Ideal is to get that percentage of the population as small as possible. Getting rid of it may never happen, but if we can get it small enough to be well contained that'd be a fairly significant victory.

In other other news, if that's the same NRA critter I'm thinking of, what's amusing is that the NRA itself pretty immediately broke association with the comment in question. The backpedal involved was worth a chuckle.

[Sheb]

While I think that America's gun obsession is dangerous, I don't think that outliers like this attack should be what guide gun control policies. They account for a tiny percentage of all death after all.

I'm more concerned that this terrorist attack, despite certainly being politically motivated and killing three times as many people as the Boston marathon bombing, doesn't seem to be considered a terrorist attacks by the mainstream media? Where is the outrage at policy failure? The anguish about the way some in the white community self-radicalize through the internet? The questioning about what should have been done?

Maybe Black lives don't really matters...