For those dissapointed that this episode is not about Global Wamring as I promised to some of you: I could not decide if to direct the discussion more at proving if global warming is man-made or just a natural occurance or if to concentrate on the possibility of reversing the effects, so I decided to go with this. There will be global warming soon I promise. On topic: This time I will make it short. I want to hear your ideas first. For those who may not know, positive discrimination is a discrimination in reverse. You discriminate a person, ethnic group, gender or group with different sexual orientation but in positive way, thus giving him advantages over others. For this Serious Business I'd prefer to stick with ethnical positive discrimination. I have mixed feelings about positive discrimination. On one hand, I can see it as a wonderful tool, which helps minorities to catch up with the rest of the society and on the other hand I see it as discrimination of the rest of the population and fixing the problems wrong way around. If there were no racists or prejudices, things like positive discrimination wouldn't be needed, but the fact is that there are people like that and this tool provides efficient, cheat and easy way to reduce the impact of racism. However at certain cost. As an example: Whats your opinion on that? Is that correct thing to do or not? To give you my point of reference. I live in Czech Republic and our current "hot" ethnic minorities are the Gypsies. They are said to be mostly lazy people who cannot bother to work and are often thieves. And I have to agree that they are indeed very often stealing and unemployment. Sure it's partly because of their culture and style of life but I cannot state that it's all their fault. Recently, one city mayor got fed up with a group of gypsy families living in flats (which poorly equipped and in disastrous condition) and not paying the rent, that he finally deiced to throw them out on the street. Of course there was a big hassle in the media, but was it really an act of racism? I believe that even though the mayor might not like the gypsy community in general, he did not do anything illegal. The only thing he did, was removing the positive discrimination technique out of the equation - he decided to not give them special treatment anymore. Any thoughts on that too? Do you have your own experience? (I know that this topic has great potential to get overrun by a bunch of patriots and nationalists so please keep your radical ideas on a bearable level, if you have any.)
Yes, we have the same situation here in Quebec, Canada. In Quebec we rely heavily on Most of the work position in the government prioritizes women and ethnics people other than Caucasian. And even more, we have allot of religions fighting to get their religious rights acknowledge by our government and our society. (ex. having their own prayer room in our schools, having their own religious sign ''that happens to be a knife'' in our primary schools) So we had many debates on what we call here '' Accommodement raisonable'' or ''Reasonable Accommodation''. Should we change of way of livings to make make sure we do not offend other religions and other communities. My opinion concerning The Worker's, is that you need to hire the best, the best being subject for opinion, and opinion making place to judgement making place for racism. The easy way around for them was too choose 2 best. 80 of the best Polish and 20 of the ethnic races. Well you're lucky it's only 20% since over here it's 50% in best cases and 100% in some cases. I don't think we should be making all those sacrifice. Quebec is a province that welcomes immigration and tries to provide good lives to everyone, the only thing we get in return is a handfull of selfish people that are always looking for more than we offer and that deprives us of our culture to make places for theirs. There is always a good balance for everything, but people and government are all trying to make it tip on their side. I could be talking about that all day , they talked of that in the news all 2007 year long. But this is a Starcraft forum and I would like to stay happy the balance of the day
I think a lot of people are scared to talk about (positive) discrimination openly. Its this taboo from mass media that you have to put your head down and pretend everyone is the same and if you step out of the crowd youre not normal, in worse case, youre a racist. I feel like positive discrimination isnt solving the problem, its just making things complicated. Like you said - racists are to blame. If all bosses or school directors were liberal we wouldnt need any special spots for minorities. By positive discrimination we are separating them even more. Yes it helps but its not the solution. 2VodkaChill: I am not sure if the accommodation is a good example for positive discrimination. It is linked to it in some way but I think theres is more to it.
We have the same thing in The US. i am a freshman in college and i work in the sound booth of my school so i ahve to run sound for all this dumb weekend were high schoolers come and see the college and the big topic that is always discussed is that we have a highly diverse staff and students. I asked one of the administartion people if they reserve so many spots for ethnic people and they do. A bunch so they can say that we have a highly diverse school. Its dumb they should accept the best students and the students who are good first come first serve. It show how much they want it. As for jobs i havent really seen it to much but i am only in college. Most company base themselves on being a equal oportunity employer. Which means everyone has the same ability to get the job except in like ethnic restaurants i always see people of the ethnic group working there so i tryed getting a job there and they wouldnt let me because i wasnt chinese. it was really dumb but i guess that is how it goes. they try to have a certain look to them that they have to keep. As for positive discrimination. I dont know i think it is useful to make everyone on an equal plane but not at the same time cause a lot of people work to get on the same plane and positive disrimination just make it easy for them
I personally think that if somewhere you can find positive discrimination, you can also find negative too. For example if the government treats minorities, they enjoy positive discrimination. But this also means that the other groups of the society aren't that important, they don't "deserve" positive discrimination, just because they aren't part of the respected group. This leads to neglection of others, and those people can see this as a negative discrimination, even tough the goal wasn't to make their life worse, but to make others better. Every human is a bit selfish in this world, so unless they don't discriminate YOU positively, you don't really see the benefits, and you can even think that the other has unfair advantage, which is once again your own disadvantage. So you can see, my opinion is this: Discrimination is bad, positive or negative, it will have the same results. The best is, when they treat you just like others, and your actions and achievements decide how others look at you. This way you can't complain, if you are not respected than it is your fault. Sadly, these discriminations appear all over the world, I guess I don't have to tell about this in details, it is enough to open up a newspaper..
Youre agreeing with me too much! I thought there would be more controversy so I could show off my debating "skills". Lazy bastards! edit: Suggest me some topic in which you dont all agree okay? Or shall I declare a competition for that?
All I can say is that all people should be treated equally; This is not a good thing, its just as bad as normal discrimination. But nor should people say this is bad because the ethnic majority should be the one to get the best. But, with my first comment, people who do not know or are not the best qualified should still get the chance to learn and develop.
Godrey: http://www.starcraft2forum.org/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=47&topic=6808.0 Now back to the topic.
Racism is relative. Positive racism for some results in negative racism for others. It's bad, mmmkay?
I'm sad at how there is still racism and discrimination around the world. At my school, people are always being racist like saying asians can't drive or that white people think they are better than us. That is total bull*hit. I mean it's probably just a coincidence or because our the country is too poor to afford to get people a driver's ed.
Positive discrimination IMHO, is hurting rather than helping. By acknowledging that a person needs special treatment, you give that person the opportunity to abuse that special treatment. Let's take my school community as an example. The school I go to is a boarding school for young men with learning differences, mainly dyslexia. I see a number of students here who frequently use their dyslexia as an excuse for not doing their homework correctly/at all, when I know for a fact that they were watching some football game or playin ping-pong in the lounge. Now, for the most part, teachers don't believe them because these kids have a history of BSing, but a number of them still get away with it. It's an "If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile" situation that applies for positive discrimination. Frankly, if you use excuses like that to get ahead in life, then you deserve to get shot down in the process.
DT_L what your talking about is stereotypes and while they are a form of racism a lot are also based in some accurate or convoluted fact. I'm am going to guess your of African descent, by the 2 others races you listed and it sounds like you live in the US (if I'm wrong I apologize)? Anyways, every race (if you could call them that) every gender, every religion, every age group has some sort of stereotype, whether they are good or bad they all seem to based in some sort of fact (even if its convoluted). While stereotypes are bad I would say there worse problems as far as racism goes. As for the actual topic I am going to devil's advocate for a second. Why does positive discrimination exist if not for a reason? The answer is that there is a reason and that reason is the fact that positive discrimination is only a response to an original negative discrimination. Humans as a species are not inherently good people we place ourselves in various clicks and try and glorify anything that helps as much as possible. We try and give our buddies preference or other people, because they are our friends, and next of course is our race/gender/religious group next, other people we can associate with because we are the best and anyone like us are better than everyone else. The reason discrimination exists is because of the above belief and whether we like it or not everyone does it, the only difference is who we want to associate ourselves with. A few people who defy the rule (or prove it depending on your point of view) have seen how this favors the majority and that's why the idea of positive discrimination exists to remove the advantage the majority has.
Poll locked! Results: <img src="http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/9281/grafvideobd2.jpg"> (Excuse my 1% error) This time the voting was absolutely clear, the idea of Positive Discrimination is plain wrong and should be removed according to the poll. Thank you for taking part of Serious Business 2!
