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Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been ensla

Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.

bagacrap 3y ago
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
- j45 3y ago
  Learn like kings Grow like kings Dream like kings Give back like kings
  - noah_buddy 3y ago
    History is not my forte but it’s funny to use kings in this metaphor.
    - j45 3y ago
      It sure is. Not my choice of word. ;)
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Utopia has a really low bar if we get it from treating foster kids like middle-class kids.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    So lower class kids (through no fault of their own as well..) should not have access to higher education? That's was very weird of phrasing. What about making education accessible to all people regardless of their who their parents were instead of trying to make people jealous?
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    Wait, regular people are jealous of how middle class kids live?
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Status is relative. If everyone is a king, no one is a king.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate. Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does. If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  For me, state wards are one of the four metrics for judging the quality of a country. Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own. Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work. Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here. The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
  - shric 3y ago
    > Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      At the end of the day, and this will be controversial it does not matter. Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all. We see this today in the way of rampant shoplifting, and car thefts/breakins taking place in some communities. These are deemed "non-violent" so the offenders are just let go, however once these "non-violent" crimes reach an extreme level businesses close, people stop shopping in the area, insurance companies stop offering insurance, etc etc etc. That is all with out getting into the real psychological effects of having your property stolen and violated in that way. At the end of the day I am not concerned about their upbringing/situation, I am concerned about their criminality
throwawaysleep 3y ago
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  They should give their kids up if they don't want them.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    This makes me think that your original comment was some form of sarcasm. So your plan is to incentivize lower class parents to abandon their children because the state would be able to take better care of them? That does not sound dystopian at all..
themitigating 3y ago
It wasn't just about slavery but also racist laws that existed until the 70s~.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
- Glide 3y ago
  It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise. The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids. It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.
slashdev 3y ago
Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences. I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead. The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors. I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
- eli_gottlieb 3y ago
  > Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
    - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended. That's a good STARTING point. Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person. Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery. Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
nobody9999 3y ago
>The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Affirmative action came in response to Jim Crow. When slavery ended during the civil war, people had the idea that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t until reconstruction ended and southern states leaned heavily into racist policy making that it became popular.
whall6 3y ago
If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?
- XorNot 3y ago
  You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
  - simple-thoughts 3y ago
    Social constructs don’t determine what is real or not. Instead they function as processes within a wider ecosystem. Every political decision that’s made has adverse consequences since they require force, no matter the political structure. If something is valuable to people they will do it freely without requiring force; but if something is valuable to a select group at the expense of others, the result is always some degree of negative side effects. It may be possible to argue some social good outweighs those effects, but dismissing them because “we live in a democracy” reveals a totalitarian view of the state.
  - erickf1 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - XorNot 3y ago
      So tell me, how are state congressman chosen? Senators? Federal congressmen? Local school boards, state judges, county sherriffs. What happens before a new president takes power? What procedure is implemented to facilitate that?
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    The word “democracy” is never mentioned in the declaration if independence or the constitution. Very specifically because the founders recognized how dangerous democracies are. To prevent the runaway issues you’ve pointed out. Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nemo44x 3y ago
Disagree. It is not the states job to raise foster kids. It’s the states job to match them with families that want to take them in and care for them like their own. There’s a line a mine long of people that are desperate to adopt but have to job through endless hoops. Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of institutionalized bigotry. Unfortunately certain minorities get turned away from AA benefits because the narrative is focused on only one group despite historical slights affecting many more. As implemented, it wasn't even fair to the people it was claiming to assist.
tomcam 3y ago
One of the basic principles in Western law, stretching back 700 years or so, is that prosecuting people not involved in a crime is unacceptable. The slaves and the enslaved are long dead. No one has legally owned slaves for 150+ years. How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand? And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
- tyg13 3y ago
  You're missing the point. No one is being "punished" for their ancestors having owned slaves. The idea is to assist people whose ancestors were exploited, legally and systemically.
  - wrs 3y ago
    It may help to think of it as assistance for victims of a natural disaster, which seems pretty universally acceptable. The disaster being a very messed up society. Or as something like the Marshall Plan that helped restore Europe after, again, society’s global screwup.

bagacrap 3y ago

> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.

j45 3y ago
Learn like kings Grow like kings Dream like kings Give back like kings
- noah_buddy 3y ago
  History is not my forte but it’s funny to use kings in this metaphor.
  - j45 3y ago
    It sure is. Not my choice of word. ;)
pessimizer 3y ago
Utopia has a really low bar if we get it from treating foster kids like middle-class kids.
- qwytw 3y ago
  So lower class kids (through no fault of their own as well..) should not have access to higher education? That's was very weird of phrasing. What about making education accessible to all people regardless of their who their parents were instead of trying to make people jealous?
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Wait, regular people are jealous of how middle class kids live?
BurningFrog 3y ago
Status is relative. If everyone is a king, no one is a king.

steve_adams_86 3y ago

I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate. Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does. If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.

pessimizer 3y ago
For me, state wards are one of the four metrics for judging the quality of a country. Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own. Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work. Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here. The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
- shric 3y ago
  > Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    At the end of the day, and this will be controversial it does not matter. Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all. We see this today in the way of rampant shoplifting, and car thefts/breakins taking place in some communities. These are deemed "non-violent" so the offenders are just let go, however once these "non-violent" crimes reach an extreme level businesses close, people stop shopping in the area, insurance companies stop offering insurance, etc etc etc. That is all with out getting into the real psychological effects of having your property stolen and violated in that way. At the end of the day I am not concerned about their upbringing/situation, I am concerned about their criminality

throwawaysleep 3y ago

> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.

pessimizer 3y ago
They should give their kids up if they don't want them.
- qwytw 3y ago
  This makes me think that your original comment was some form of sarcasm. So your plan is to incentivize lower class parents to abandon their children because the state would be able to take better care of them? That does not sound dystopian at all..

themitigating 3y ago

It wasn't just about slavery but also racist laws that existed until the 70s~.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.

Glide 3y ago
It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise. The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids. It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.

slashdev 3y ago

Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences. I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead. The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors. I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?

eli_gottlieb 3y ago
> Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
- qwytw 3y ago
  I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended. That's a good STARTING point. Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person. Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery. Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.

nobody9999 3y ago

>The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Affirmative action came in response to Jim Crow. When slavery ended during the civil war, people had the idea that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t until reconstruction ended and southern states leaned heavily into racist policy making that it became popular.

whall6 3y ago

If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?

XorNot 3y ago
You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
- simple-thoughts 3y ago
  Social constructs don’t determine what is real or not. Instead they function as processes within a wider ecosystem. Every political decision that’s made has adverse consequences since they require force, no matter the political structure. If something is valuable to people they will do it freely without requiring force; but if something is valuable to a select group at the expense of others, the result is always some degree of negative side effects. It may be possible to argue some social good outweighs those effects, but dismissing them because “we live in a democracy” reveals a totalitarian view of the state.
- erickf1 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - XorNot 3y ago
    So tell me, how are state congressman chosen? Senators? Federal congressmen? Local school boards, state judges, county sherriffs. What happens before a new president takes power? What procedure is implemented to facilitate that?
- nemo44x 3y ago
  The word “democracy” is never mentioned in the declaration if independence or the constitution. Very specifically because the founders recognized how dangerous democracies are. To prevent the runaway issues you’ve pointed out. Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nemo44x 3y ago

Disagree. It is not the states job to raise foster kids. It’s the states job to match them with families that want to take them in and care for them like their own. There’s a line a mine long of people that are desperate to adopt but have to job through endless hoops. Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of institutionalized bigotry. Unfortunately certain minorities get turned away from AA benefits because the narrative is focused on only one group despite historical slights affecting many more. As implemented, it wasn't even fair to the people it was claiming to assist.

tomcam 3y ago

One of the basic principles in Western law, stretching back 700 years or so, is that prosecuting people not involved in a crime is unacceptable. The slaves and the enslaved are long dead. No one has legally owned slaves for 150+ years. How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand? And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?

tyg13 3y ago
You're missing the point. No one is being "punished" for their ancestors having owned slaves. The idea is to assist people whose ancestors were exploited, legally and systemically.
- wrs 3y ago
  It may help to think of it as assistance for victims of a natural disaster, which seems pretty universally acceptable. The disaster being a very messed up society. Or as something like the Marshall Plan that helped restore Europe after, again, society’s global screwup.