Without citing specific examples, it sounds like you just don’t like affirmative action programs, which is an opinion I’d be embarrassed to say out loud. When one group of people has all the money and all the connections, it’s not fair to say “just treat everyone equally!” because it maintains the unequal status quo—poorer minority groups continue getting into schools at lower rates since they live in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools and poorer access to the funds needed for higher education, women continue getting passed up for management positions, leading to more male dominated companies hiring more men for more management positions, et cetera
Not the guy you replied to, but I’ll give you one: if you are male, it is (or at least was last federal election) impossible to be at the highest spot of any candidate list of the german green party. There was a hard rule that spot 1 had to be a woman and then it alternates. The alternation rule seems pretty alright, but blanket excluding someone from the #1 spot because of gender is pretty blatant sexism. It doesn’t matter that women were in that position and worse in the pretty recent past, 2 wrongs don’t make a right (also ironically this kind of ignores other gender identities entirely but they’d probably be given the woman treatment as they’re clearly generally disadvantaged, which seems alright). Something like having at least 45% at #1 of both men and women and then keeping the alternating rule seems a lot more sensible, or even flat out forcing 50% and flipping the genders each election.
I can also spend a very long time talking about how affirmative action in general feels more like the lazy route to achieve a somewhat better state since socioeconomic factors play a huge role in education and those heavily correlate with ethnicity, but it’s unfair to exclude people based on their skin color (almost like that’s racism by definition), but whatever. I haven’t seen any cases of it being actually abused, and overall just fast tracking more representation of all sorts of people into all kinds of jobs and social groups will likely help a lot against racism in the long run. It just feels like the inferior means to that end.
Germany has things like giving disabled people preference in job applications given otherwise equal qualifications which I think is great as they most likely have much fewer options overall, and I believe that might be considered affirmative action too? I’m not super familiar given that that’s not a term here.
To your last point, yes, affirmative action is the term the U.S. has decided on for programs such as that one. There may be newer phrases in use, I don’t know for certain.
I would agree on the ‘lazy’ argument. It certainly feels like we could do better. But that always seems to be true!
I have on a personal level had to learn to avoid letting perfection get in the way of improvement. Whether that is broadly applicable to policy is debatable—I would welcome much more radical change, but I also feel as though radical action in one direction spurs more radical opposition. For instance, Biden tried to forgive $430 billion in student debt in the U.S. and it was in the news, argued over, eventually stopped due to some absurd court cases—yet he and his administration have successfully gotten about $132 billion forgiven in other avenues, step by step, with much less fanfare and thus (in my mind) much less opposition as well.
In regards to the German Green Party, and to for the moment ignore the question of additional genders, I thought that there were currently two co-leaders, one man one woman? If that is not the case, and even if it is, I assume the argument would be along the lines of ‘women have been underrepresented for so long that it is reasonable to give them a stretch of overrepresentation in order to bring a semblance of balance around.’ Or ‘other parties are mostly led by men so we will be led by women for some semblance of balance.’ Neither concept seems crazy to me.
And on the question of alternative gender presentations I think the issue is one of how to enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. The rights and representation of trans, non-binary, etc. peoples matter very much to me, knowing several such people personally! But collectively they do at the moment make up a small portion of the population. I think they should be encouraged to do whatever it is they want with their lives. If that is to pursue office with the Green Party, so be it. Such a thing seems like it may take a change in language to ‘allow’. But it does not mean the rules are bad conceptually or that they need to be thrown out—more inclusive language seems like a small change that does not require a change in the direction of progress.
That’s the ‘affirmative’ side of affirmative action—taking an action like encouraging trans people to run for office. Temporarily banning men from holding office wouldn’t really fall under the umbrella in spirit I suppose, but isn’t the outcome the same, and thus whether or not you take offense at the concept a personal choice, or at least worthy of a philosophical debate?
Visiting again the concept of laziness: just appointing women to leadership positions does not make everything fair. For instance, the disabled may suffer more social exclusion under female leadership, because women tend to see disabled children in terms of the additional child raising work they represent (of course, mostly men’s fault for pigeonholing women as homemakers). But this is a reason to improve the course we are on. It is okay to critique, to point out the ways that things are not going the right way. For instance, feel free to complain about how the focus on social justice overshadows the larger issues of economic injustice that hold everybody down! Feel free to point out groups that are being forgotten. Individuals who benefit from affirmative action and then turn around and preach self sufficiency. Personally, I think men’s mental health will need to be a bigger focus! It’s clearly an issue, and since they’re still mostly in charge it’ll probably benefit us all if they get some help. Whatever your critique, it should be in the spirit of fostering a world where your genitals or skin color or the neighborhood you’re born in does not determine your life’s course.
But it should not critique the concept. We should not reverse course and say “we were wrong, put men back in charge of everything and don’t let brown people live here.” And that is what I think being against affirmative action means. It means “no thanks, I am okay with the deal as it stands.” The deal as it stands, where in the United States you can accurately predict someone’s income just by knowing what ZIP code they were born in; where despite Hillary Clinton’s career women are underrepresented lucrative fields like the sciences because they’re still expected to put their future on hold to raise a couple’s children; where despite Barack Obama’s success black men are more than four times as likely to have felony convictions than white, taking the community’s right to vote away. That means, whether the person saying it is part of the in-group or a well-off member of a minority group, that they have enough, and aren’t interested in helping others get enough. I’d be embarrassed to say something like that.
Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)
Just some extra detail that I think you might have been missing about the German electoral system. #1 spot doesn’t refer to the leader of the party as this comment sort of seems to imply.
Germany uses a voting system called Mixed-Member Proportional. In it, you vote for your local candidate exactly the same as you would in America or the UK—using first past the post. But then you also vote for your favourite party. And there are additional seats in the Bundestag (congress) that are not tied to a particular region, but are instead used to “top up” the total of the Bundestag so that its party representation is proportional to the wishes of the voters. So if 10% of voters want the Greens and 20% want SPD, then 20% of the seats will be SPD and 10% will be Greens. If a party wins more seats in local elections than it is owed proportionally, it gets no additional people. If it wins fewer local elections than its national party vote percentage, it gets topped up using its party list. The #1 spot on that list will be the first person elected under this system, unless they also won their local race, in which case it goes to #2 instead, etc.
MMP is a really good electoral system, and honestly it’s probably the one I would advocate for and would encourage Americans and Brits to advocate for in their respective countries. Though I would replace the party lists entirely with a “nearest loser” to eliminate the problem @[email protected] describes. I’d also prefer IRV be used for the local part of the election, though that might be overly complicating it for some. Having those proportional top-ups means third parties not just can earn a place (which is what IRV by itself does), it actually guarantees that they will earn a place, if any sizeable number of people want them to. No more Nader ruining it for Gore; instead, Nader’s party will actually have representatives elected.
So looking back at the example they described about Germany, if we ignore local seats for the sake of simplicity, if the Greens are owed 1 seat, that seat will always be a woman. If they’re owed 2 seats, they’ll have a woman and a man. Owed 3 seats and they’ll have two women and a man. Etc.
Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)
Totally didn’t do the same thing…
Anyway, I mostly agree with you, just fyi regarding the german green party: Annalena Baerbock was their chancellor candidate, Habeck was effectively what in the US would be a president’s running mate. A duo, but Baerbock was iirc always going to be chancellor if the greens got a majority. And yes, they have joint leadership of the party.
That policy has to do with the german voting system, where each party has to provide a list of candidates for each state. Then according to how many votes the party gets, proportionally many people from that list get into the Bundestag, the list is in order. And that’s the one that had to alternate.
The greens as of last federal election are big enough to where this effectively isn’t going to single out anyone, they will get a few candidates from every state into the Bundestag. However the principle of forcing the gender of slot 1 just left a bit of a bad taste. Still voted for them and will most likely do that again.
When one group of people has all the money and all the connections, it’s not fair to say “just treat everyone equally!” because it maintains the unequal status quo
Then targeting socioeconomic status makes more sense. Any system that categorizes people and puts poor white folks in the same “has all the money and connections” bucket as the Clintons and the Obamas in the same “has no money or connections” bucket as poor black folks is not, in any way, actually about having money or connections.
Well unfortunately, the overlap is close enough to a circle that it makes plenty of sense, especially since the issue is not purely economic, but social, as you accidentally point out by using the phrase socioeconomic. Obama has wealth that is unfathomable to the everyday person, as does Clinton—both deal with a society that belittles them because of who they are in a way that white men don’t face, rich or poor.
Surely you’ve noticed that Obama is the only black president so far, despite black people making up 10 to 20% of the population over the last few centuries.
You are also aware that Clinton would have been the first female U.S. President. She won the popular vote by a significant margin, which is a great sign for public opinion on women, but the reality is still that women, who are more than half the country, are not more than half in charge of it.
The fact these two got as far as they did is in no small part thanks to the concept of affirmative action, where we try to right past wrongs and level the playing field. Encourage women to go into nontraditional fields, encourage black students to apply for Ivy League schools and ensure there are spots for them—these things only “hurt” white men because resources are so artificially limited already, disproportionately held by the tiny percentage of [rich white men] who control the US’s giant conglomerates and obedient politicians, and regular old white men aren’t used to feeling the squeeze.
Did Obama pull the ladder up behind him somewhat by applying the same neoliberal bullshit that has destroyed the concept of compassionate social safety nets in favor of a more competitive marketplace? Can you be mad at him? Yeah. That’s beside the point. White people have been allowed to fuck over other white people for ages.
Without citing specific examples, it sounds like you just don’t like affirmative action programs, which is an opinion I’d be embarrassed to say out loud. When one group of people has all the money and all the connections, it’s not fair to say “just treat everyone equally!” because it maintains the unequal status quo—poorer minority groups continue getting into schools at lower rates since they live in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools and poorer access to the funds needed for higher education, women continue getting passed up for management positions, leading to more male dominated companies hiring more men for more management positions, et cetera
Not the guy you replied to, but I’ll give you one: if you are male, it is (or at least was last federal election) impossible to be at the highest spot of any candidate list of the german green party. There was a hard rule that spot 1 had to be a woman and then it alternates. The alternation rule seems pretty alright, but blanket excluding someone from the #1 spot because of gender is pretty blatant sexism. It doesn’t matter that women were in that position and worse in the pretty recent past, 2 wrongs don’t make a right (also ironically this kind of ignores other gender identities entirely but they’d probably be given the woman treatment as they’re clearly generally disadvantaged, which seems alright). Something like having at least 45% at #1 of both men and women and then keeping the alternating rule seems a lot more sensible, or even flat out forcing 50% and flipping the genders each election.
I can also spend a very long time talking about how affirmative action in general feels more like the lazy route to achieve a somewhat better state since socioeconomic factors play a huge role in education and those heavily correlate with ethnicity, but it’s unfair to exclude people based on their skin color (almost like that’s racism by definition), but whatever. I haven’t seen any cases of it being actually abused, and overall just fast tracking more representation of all sorts of people into all kinds of jobs and social groups will likely help a lot against racism in the long run. It just feels like the inferior means to that end.
Germany has things like giving disabled people preference in job applications given otherwise equal qualifications which I think is great as they most likely have much fewer options overall, and I believe that might be considered affirmative action too? I’m not super familiar given that that’s not a term here.
To your last point, yes, affirmative action is the term the U.S. has decided on for programs such as that one. There may be newer phrases in use, I don’t know for certain.
I would agree on the ‘lazy’ argument. It certainly feels like we could do better. But that always seems to be true!
I have on a personal level had to learn to avoid letting perfection get in the way of improvement. Whether that is broadly applicable to policy is debatable—I would welcome much more radical change, but I also feel as though radical action in one direction spurs more radical opposition. For instance, Biden tried to forgive $430 billion in student debt in the U.S. and it was in the news, argued over, eventually stopped due to some absurd court cases—yet he and his administration have successfully gotten about $132 billion forgiven in other avenues, step by step, with much less fanfare and thus (in my mind) much less opposition as well.
In regards to the German Green Party, and to for the moment ignore the question of additional genders, I thought that there were currently two co-leaders, one man one woman? If that is not the case, and even if it is, I assume the argument would be along the lines of ‘women have been underrepresented for so long that it is reasonable to give them a stretch of overrepresentation in order to bring a semblance of balance around.’ Or ‘other parties are mostly led by men so we will be led by women for some semblance of balance.’ Neither concept seems crazy to me.
And on the question of alternative gender presentations I think the issue is one of how to enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. The rights and representation of trans, non-binary, etc. peoples matter very much to me, knowing several such people personally! But collectively they do at the moment make up a small portion of the population. I think they should be encouraged to do whatever it is they want with their lives. If that is to pursue office with the Green Party, so be it. Such a thing seems like it may take a change in language to ‘allow’. But it does not mean the rules are bad conceptually or that they need to be thrown out—more inclusive language seems like a small change that does not require a change in the direction of progress.
That’s the ‘affirmative’ side of affirmative action—taking an action like encouraging trans people to run for office. Temporarily banning men from holding office wouldn’t really fall under the umbrella in spirit I suppose, but isn’t the outcome the same, and thus whether or not you take offense at the concept a personal choice, or at least worthy of a philosophical debate?
Visiting again the concept of laziness: just appointing women to leadership positions does not make everything fair. For instance, the disabled may suffer more social exclusion under female leadership, because women tend to see disabled children in terms of the additional child raising work they represent (of course, mostly men’s fault for pigeonholing women as homemakers). But this is a reason to improve the course we are on. It is okay to critique, to point out the ways that things are not going the right way. For instance, feel free to complain about how the focus on social justice overshadows the larger issues of economic injustice that hold everybody down! Feel free to point out groups that are being forgotten. Individuals who benefit from affirmative action and then turn around and preach self sufficiency. Personally, I think men’s mental health will need to be a bigger focus! It’s clearly an issue, and since they’re still mostly in charge it’ll probably benefit us all if they get some help. Whatever your critique, it should be in the spirit of fostering a world where your genitals or skin color or the neighborhood you’re born in does not determine your life’s course.
But it should not critique the concept. We should not reverse course and say “we were wrong, put men back in charge of everything and don’t let brown people live here.” And that is what I think being against affirmative action means. It means “no thanks, I am okay with the deal as it stands.” The deal as it stands, where in the United States you can accurately predict someone’s income just by knowing what ZIP code they were born in; where despite Hillary Clinton’s career women are underrepresented lucrative fields like the sciences because they’re still expected to put their future on hold to raise a couple’s children; where despite Barack Obama’s success black men are more than four times as likely to have felony convictions than white, taking the community’s right to vote away. That means, whether the person saying it is part of the in-group or a well-off member of a minority group, that they have enough, and aren’t interested in helping others get enough. I’d be embarrassed to say something like that.
Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)
Just some extra detail that I think you might have been missing about the German electoral system. #1 spot doesn’t refer to the leader of the party as this comment sort of seems to imply.
Germany uses a voting system called Mixed-Member Proportional. In it, you vote for your local candidate exactly the same as you would in America or the UK—using first past the post. But then you also vote for your favourite party. And there are additional seats in the Bundestag (congress) that are not tied to a particular region, but are instead used to “top up” the total of the Bundestag so that its party representation is proportional to the wishes of the voters. So if 10% of voters want the Greens and 20% want SPD, then 20% of the seats will be SPD and 10% will be Greens. If a party wins more seats in local elections than it is owed proportionally, it gets no additional people. If it wins fewer local elections than its national party vote percentage, it gets topped up using its party list. The #1 spot on that list will be the first person elected under this system, unless they also won their local race, in which case it goes to #2 instead, etc.
MMP is a really good electoral system, and honestly it’s probably the one I would advocate for and would encourage Americans and Brits to advocate for in their respective countries. Though I would replace the party lists entirely with a “nearest loser” to eliminate the problem @[email protected] describes. I’d also prefer IRV be used for the local part of the election, though that might be overly complicating it for some. Having those proportional top-ups means third parties not just can earn a place (which is what IRV by itself does), it actually guarantees that they will earn a place, if any sizeable number of people want them to. No more Nader ruining it for Gore; instead, Nader’s party will actually have representatives elected.
So looking back at the example they described about Germany, if we ignore local seats for the sake of simplicity, if the Greens are owed 1 seat, that seat will always be a woman. If they’re owed 2 seats, they’ll have a woman and a man. Owed 3 seats and they’ll have two women and a man. Etc.
Hope that helps.
Totally didn’t do the same thing…
Anyway, I mostly agree with you, just fyi regarding the german green party: Annalena Baerbock was their chancellor candidate, Habeck was effectively what in the US would be a president’s running mate. A duo, but Baerbock was iirc always going to be chancellor if the greens got a majority. And yes, they have joint leadership of the party.
That policy has to do with the german voting system, where each party has to provide a list of candidates for each state. Then according to how many votes the party gets, proportionally many people from that list get into the Bundestag, the list is in order. And that’s the one that had to alternate.
The greens as of last federal election are big enough to where this effectively isn’t going to single out anyone, they will get a few candidates from every state into the Bundestag. However the principle of forcing the gender of slot 1 just left a bit of a bad taste. Still voted for them and will most likely do that again.
Then targeting socioeconomic status makes more sense. Any system that categorizes people and puts poor white folks in the same “has all the money and connections” bucket as the Clintons and the Obamas in the same “has no money or connections” bucket as poor black folks is not, in any way, actually about having money or connections.
Well unfortunately, the overlap is close enough to a circle that it makes plenty of sense, especially since the issue is not purely economic, but social, as you accidentally point out by using the phrase socioeconomic. Obama has wealth that is unfathomable to the everyday person, as does Clinton—both deal with a society that belittles them because of who they are in a way that white men don’t face, rich or poor.
Surely you’ve noticed that Obama is the only black president so far, despite black people making up 10 to 20% of the population over the last few centuries.
You are also aware that Clinton would have been the first female U.S. President. She won the popular vote by a significant margin, which is a great sign for public opinion on women, but the reality is still that women, who are more than half the country, are not more than half in charge of it.
The fact these two got as far as they did is in no small part thanks to the concept of affirmative action, where we try to right past wrongs and level the playing field. Encourage women to go into nontraditional fields, encourage black students to apply for Ivy League schools and ensure there are spots for them—these things only “hurt” white men because resources are so artificially limited already, disproportionately held by the tiny percentage of [rich white men] who control the US’s giant conglomerates and obedient politicians, and regular old white men aren’t used to feeling the squeeze.
Did Obama pull the ladder up behind him somewhat by applying the same neoliberal bullshit that has destroyed the concept of compassionate social safety nets in favor of a more competitive marketplace? Can you be mad at him? Yeah. That’s beside the point. White people have been allowed to fuck over other white people for ages.