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arctotherium

Feb 11

Thread on affirmative action in Brazil. In 2012, Brazil began mandating that 50% of seats in all programs offered by federal universities should be distributed via affirmative action to the following three groups: public school grads, the poor, and blacks/Indians.

Affirmative action also applies to government jobs in Brazil. 20% were reserved for blacks until 2025 when this was increased to 30%. This applies to all government organizations as well as public companies and mixed-capital state-run companies.

One effect of this has been to make race much more salient in Brazil. For most of the 20th century, Brazil had a reputation for being a post-racial state with little racial conflict. Affirmative action changed this, as there are now concrete racial privileges to be won.

Read 6 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jan 17

Thread with excerpts from the 1976 essay "On Meritocracy and Equality." I want to clear up some misconceptions around the idea of "meritocracy." The word was initially coined as a *pejorative* in 1958 to describe presently-existing Anglo-American society.

What characterized WWII and postwar Anglo-American society that made the word "meritocracy" appropriate? That talent (as measured by heavily genetic IQ) and technical skill, rather than hereditary privilege or some other mechanism, led to status and wealth.

But by 1976, this had already been successfully attacked and overthrown by the New Left/Civil Rights state, which replaced talent with hereditary privilege (race, sex) as the ideal arbiter of status.

Read 15 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jan 16

The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 allows defendants (in practice, blacks and Hispanics) to claim racial discrimination and overturn convictions explicitly in the absence of intentional discrimination, off of disparate impact alone.

Supposed discrimination can be used to reverse a judgment even if said "racial bias" is harmless and did not actually impact the decision.

Successes of the racial justice act: getting murderous gang members lower sentences because they are black and blacks are more likely to be charged as gang members [because they are more likely to be gang members].

Read 4 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jan 14

In 2022, 45% of high schoolers polled say they were taught that "America is built on stolen land" in class at school, and another 22% heard it from an adult there.

Students taught all of the "critical social justice" (CSJ) concepts were in fact more likely to agree with them; among those taught "America is built on stolen land" 73% agreed.

Among those students taught 5 CSJ concepts, 75% believed whites are responsible for the inferior social position of black people and 44% support preferential hiring and promotion of blacks.

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arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jan 4

Thread with excerpts from Boris Sax's "Stealing Fire", a book of the author reckoning with his discovery (after his father's death) that his father, Saville Sax, had been a major Soviet atomic spy, stealing important info on the A-bomb and likely the H-bomb and going unpunished.

The author was initially devastated, but eventually relieved at this discovery as partly explaining his father's awful lifetime behavior (living in black slums, beating his wife and kids, torturing dogs, never getting a stable job, dropping out of Harvard twice).

Saville's mother (author's paternal grandmother) was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. According to the author, she, like many Jews, became a Communist as a way to partly recreate an idealized version of her Russian village without the Ukrainian pogromists in America.

Read 23 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jan 2

https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2007048622064701724

No it wasn't. We know exactly what the key decisionmakers (eg Bill Clinton) and intellectuals at the time were saying: China will become rich (benefitting everyone else in the process), and this will make them liberal, democratic, and peaceful.

https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2007048622064701724

"Globalist Americans are just trying to turn China into a cheap labor sweatshop" was a conspiracy theory promulgated by the last remnants of the Western laborist left (think anti-WTO riots) in the early 2000s, to reconcile "this is hurting Western workers and unions" with hating nationalism by arguing the REAL victims of outsourcing were workers around the world. Never based in reality.

Here is the full text of Bill Clinton's speech on opening trade to China. Read it.
iatp.org/sites/default/…

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