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Right, so negative discrimination is not important at all, because it's possible to overcome it if you are sufficiently talented? Bullshit! Everyone has to prove themselves in life, but if you make it harder for one group of people to earn respect than another, then that isn't fair at all. If you've had to put up with an unfair life, that doesn't mean it's bad for other people to complain about unfairness. Anti-discrimination laws only demand fair treatment. Nothing more. Positive discrimination only happens if organisations choose to follow such a policy. Most organisations actually don't want horribly unqualified people, so it's not as big a deal as you make out. In political arenas having a percentage quota of women actually makes more sense, because political bodies are supposed to represent the people and 50% of people are women. This is predicated on the notion that everyone is more inclined and better able to represent their own gender's perspective. It doesn't seem too controversial to me, it just seems like an extension of the ideas of proportional representation. Where I've seen it, these quotas are on the list of candidates that political parties nominate, not on the list of elected politicians. It's not that people can't vote in who they like, it's about who the party puts up for election, which is something regular people never have a say in anyway. Cultural expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies. A hundred years ago, a lot of people had very low expectations about what women (or black people) were capable of. They were wrong, but it took a lot of time and effort to make that change. That is what political correctness is about. Political correctness demands superficial changes to how cultural expectation are expressed. It's a case of "fake it 'til you make it". Even if people deep down feel differently, they are asked to suppress it and treat individuals fairly. That way, the next generation of children grow up with a different view of the world than their parents. With each generation we take a step closer to fairness and equality. People like you know just enough to see that political correctness is superficial, but not quite enough to understand why. So you call it out as hypocritical bullshit, even though it has real, practical, achievable aims. Children pick up on the superficial values of the world around them, and that has a deep effect on them. Check out the Clark experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqvJp2gXJI0 |