[jaltekruse]

There definitely is a line to be careful with, but I do think this is the vast majority of what is happening with most social justice movements today.

Black Lives Matter is not fighting for cops to shoot more white people to equalize the numbers, they are trying to show how it is possible in lots of similar situations to deescalate situations without killing anyone, even with violent offenders if training is good, and officers don't have a bias (explicit or subconscious) against the type of person. It is also very obvious to show that minorities are being over-policed and often harassed for just living their lives.

I think similarly with this issue of the leg up that attractive people have in the world, the only way we can fight it is by acknowledging it exists and trying to actively re-evaluate every decision we make about who we choose to interact with, and how much it is informed by these types of bias. This is not the same as giving the attractive people a -10 on whatever evaluation they are a part of. It is always going to be true that correcting for these types of bias will be inexact, welcome to life, but saying we just shouldn't give a shit about less attractive people is a worse outcome for all of society, and its not like author is asking for infinite effort from everyone to correct this. Talented people exist everywhere, if we don't push those of disadvantaged groups up, only some of them will "pull their bootstraps" hard enough to overcome things on their own. People need to be introspective to correct for their biases, there really isn't a way around that, we are imperfect beings quick to pass judgement.

I have a distinct memory of a part of the confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, she had written about her need to actively review her background when starting a case, to see if she might have prior experiences that would color her judgement. Republicans tried to spin this as, she acknowledged she is biased, obviously she can't be an objective judge. But she defended herself well and asserted it is effectively impossible, to just be objective without this kind of evaluation. Effectively the same argument that people correctly make about the virtual impossibility of just being "race-blind", we all have things we have experienced that color our perceptions of different people, ideas and places, we cannot ignore that fact and just go on asserting we are good objective decision makers with no special effort to account for these things.

[ls612]

In the specific example of police brutality you are right, however BLM organizations are also generally anti magnet school/charter school, which in many poor primarily black neighborhoods is the only good school option for children. Since these schools get to choose (for the most part) who they enroll they tend to take all the more gifted kids/kids with good family environment out of the normal public school. This obviously leads to greater inequality of outcome, which activists try to "correct" by forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.

Remember this when people go on and on about "equity". In the grave, all men are equal.

[sterlind]

The reason we have low-quality public schools is because education is criminally underfunded and poorly handled, especially in poor areas because of property tax funding.

I don't fully support removing magnet schools, but you can bet that if rich families had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor kids, they'd be lobbying all day for better funding. Apportioning funding per-head from state taxes rather than property taxes would be a good first step.

[jaltekruse]

I think the leftys, who I generally hang around and aggree with get a lot wrong about schools. We spend a lot on schools, other countries that spend a lot less get better outcomes. I mean FFS the richest country in the world with a 85% graduation rate, it's completely insane. Fixing the schools isn't a one-dimensional problem, and I think there are some charters that have good ideas. While they do generally under-serve students with differing abilities, I think that is talked about too much and is used to try to discredit everything they do. There are problems in the schools, absolutely, everyone agrees, and unfortunately aversion to change comes from every level, but unfortunately it's often on different issues/changes. Teachers, parents, students, admins and politicians all have things they balk at that prevents fixing the schools, we need to change a lot of minds or have a huge top down reworking of schools, but unfortunately that runs right into one of the issues people get all worked up about, local control.

[komali2]

> forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.

Seems obvious to me that the issue isn't that private or magnet schools are high quality, but rather that public schools are low quality. Basically, the goal is still, bring people up. The "bringing down" in this case is not only temporary, it's only actually "bringing to baseline."

A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.

[ls612]

>A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.

This sounds suspiciously close to "hold other peoples' children hostage until they give me what I want"

[komali2]

And the alternative sounds suspiciously like "extract resources from poor communities to feed my rich kid new lacrosse sticks."

Again, if going to a public school is so bad as to be considered "holding a child hostage," the issue isn't the making-rich-kids-go-to-public-schools, it's the public schools.