prottog

> The value of some places is the very fact that they're low density.

Exactly. Just look at a satellite image of Atherton, CA or Lexington MA; they're low-density residential places with plenty of greenery where each lot is sizable and crucially, near major economic centers with plenty of high-paying jobs. They're desirable precisely because they allow you more breathing room while being geographically close to the hustle and bustle of a big city.

Indeed, which is why these DEI initiatives and workplace indoctrination are dystopian.

Very dystopian, and reminiscent of countless other "social revolutions" that happened in the not-so-distant history, all with terrifying results.

Your society would be doomed to forever look back at historical grievances and never make progress.

As Ibram X. Kendi says: "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Under your and his vision, there will never come a day when people aren't discriminated for things they had no control over.

> Or weren't given access to the same loans (including federally subsidized loans)

I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.

> So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house

The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.

> where most research has been done for white ethnicities

The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.

Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.

> Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.

This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.

> if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion

It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.

This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.

Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.

Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.

So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?

> a more honest appraisal about what the real obstacles are for Black and Hispanic students

Different cultural and ethnic groups value different things. Virtually nobody who clamors for more black and Hispanic representation in Harvard's undergrad class, for example, also clamors for more Asian representation in the NFL, even though that disparity is much, much greater, with only a single-digit number of current players.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

> Elbonian Xtremesunshine Time

Ha, good one! One can only hope the Elbonian Parliament will have the sense to abolish this stupid Xtremesunshine time and observe one time zone year-round.

> government can spend money selflessly

"Selflessly" insofar as everyone involved has no incentives, internal or external, that direct their behavior one way or another; which is to say, not selflessly at all.

The government isn't a machine that takes action for the good of the citizens with no feeling. It's a messy organization composed of people who are all looking out for their salaries, what makes their boss look good or their rivals look bad, whether they win the next election, and maybe sometimes the stated mission of the organization or the good of the citizens. And moreover, it does all that with the might of the law, the monopoly on violence.

If it's a similar amount of money for a similar level of outcome, I'd much rather the people use the money to better society and not government, for those reasons.

> Thomas Sowell, he's basically the guy to victim blame minorities into saying that being poor is their fault

What a demeaning way to describe a human being with an incredible personal story and his life's work. And it's wrong, too: if you simplify into a sentence or two what he says about minorities (and his body of work extends far beyond that), it's that well-meaning government policies often incentivize minorities into entering cycles of poverty, and that minorities should depend on themselves first and foremost and not the government to improve their lot.