Is Ron Desantis Racist?

wha?

 

At the end of the day, there is no meaningful human endeavor in existence where circumstances, experience, and natural ability play no factor in the outcome. Even things that are supposed to be entirely based on chance like gambling have an enormous layer of strategy to them.

That's why there comes a point where trying to level the playing field at the expense of actual performance or merit becomes detrimental and even more unfair than the alternative of letting the chips fall where they may.

The day that we have people born under identical circumstances and natural ability is the day that we have genetic designer babies and the day that we are no longer free.

 

In the abstract, this is a pretty banal sentiment that basically everyone believes

 

It's still an important reminder, however.

If fairness and justice are the end goals, when people treat equity as the preferred means to that end, they better have an end game in mind or equity will eventually be applied at the expense of justice and fairness.

 

yeah, take that shit over to TBGC

 

BRB, gonna read Harrison Bergeron again

 

Kathy Griffin, is that you? Didn't know you were a Gator fan.

 

Fair point. He didn't say that. He did refer to the Williams' quote about baseball giving "every American boy a chance to succeed" in response to a question about baseball being a "thinking game." I really doubt an average boy (much less every boy) can reach the highest level of baseball if he just works hard enough. He then noted the different skills needed for a baseball team, but I'm not sure we couldn't say that about basketball. Guards and centers have quite different roles and skill sets. The players having different skill sets might be even more pronounced in football.

As far as the athletic barrier issue with basketball, I've assumed that to be true, but I don't know a lot about baseball to be fair. There may also be comparisons that aren't obvious to me. Like I don't know if Larry Bird was considered more athletically gifted than Derek Jeter.

 

I don't know if DeS is an actual racist. Blatant racism is near impossible for any serious politician these days. It may be that he's just anti-anyone-who-votes-against-me, which happens to include a lot of Black people.

 

Taking race out of the equation, I think when people talk about athleticism, its like ~98% aesthetic, if someone looks the part, they are regarded as such. If they look like Larry Bird or Babe Ruth, maybe not so much. Also, baseball and basketball are games, you could make the case that technical ability is more important in both of those games. If you can reliably hit a 3 or hit the curve, how fast you run a sprint in a drill or how much you can bench press means less.

 

He basically just has the same opinions as someone 40 years older than him, anything can sound racist when you do that

 

The problem with what you wrote is that you assume that leveling the playing field hurts the better performing and more deserving individual. There are many more deserving people who don’t get the opportunity based upon factors that shouldn’t be considered. If you look at the highest positions in a company, you see a trend in the demographics. Now, you could say it’s just coincidence… that most of the best and brightest disproportionately look a certain way by chance, or by merit. Given the history of our country, I’d say that is unlikely.

But in principle, I understand you. I just think you have a very one sided view of who is actually being hurt.

 

That's fine.

But the more you tip the scales, the more likely it is that you're actually being unfair. In other words, if you're consciously worried about being "anti-racist," I think you're more likely to do damage than if you're not even worried about race but may have subconscious bias making you lean one way over another.

And if the standard for fairness that you're using is "equity" or "equality of outcome," there is no free Western field that has achieved perfect proportional racial equity.

I'm not saying that there's no racism. I'm saying there will always be racism, prejudice, and favoratism in a free society, and the day that perfect equity is achieved is the day that we are no longer free.

The best thing you can do is learn to play by these rules and learn to make the rules work for you.

 

Well he sure goes out of his way to make Black people want to vote against him.

 

And no one has mentioned the valorized term “meritorious”?

 

The rules have been benefitting one side for most our history and now when we try to fix those unfair advantages we are no longer a free country?

 

For purposes of a good faith discussion on policy it would help if we started with agreeing on the premise that there comes a point where equity can only be achieved at the expense of fairness, justice, freedom or some combination of the three.

Then, the people pushing equity as a way of remedying past wrongs give us a point of "adequate equity" where the push for further equity stops.

The reason for the extent of the blowback for things like diversity programs to increase representation of marginalized groups isn't the programs in a vacuum it's the perception that there's no end to them. So I think asking for an end-game benchmark is both a fair question and a necessary question to justify such programs.

Because if the end goal is perfect equity, that is not only a suboptimal goal, but a counterproductive one in the interest of everything it was supposed to fix in the first place. It eventually runs against freedom, justice, and fairness.

 

That's kinda dumb. It takes a ridiculous amount of natural ability to make it to MLB. Maybe NBA players have more raw athletic ability, but it still takes god-given talent to reach either sport's top level.