Astral Codex Ten

affirmative action

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affirmative action

Article

affirmative action is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 14, 2021 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Congress tries to peel each of these groups off from the majority by promising them special rights and affirmative action”; “civil rights legislation, including affirmative action”. It most often appears alongside Germany, US, Adivasis.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 14, 2021
  • Last seen: May 07, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
But it's not just Muslims. In one incident, he has to defuse anger over Congress' plan to give extra seats at colleges to Adivasis, a group translated into English as "forest-dwellers"; in another, Congress courts the Kshatriyas, "a warrior caste which felt its historical glories were insufficiently supported by its status in modern society". At least US identity politics have the common courtesy to sort everyone by skin color. The Indian version combines all the fun of racial sensitivity training with all the simplicity of one of those D&D expansions that have a bunch of species with names like "Aarakocra" or "Tabaxi" for the special snowflakes too cool to be elves or halflings. As Modi tells it, Congress tries to peel each of these groups off from the majority by promising them special rights and affirmative action, with disastrous results:
Modi describes spending his years of campaign consultancy trying to figure out a way around this dynamic. You could support more and more affirmative action, stoke more and more community tensions, and get those delicious minority votes while making the majority hate you - or you could roll back affirmative action, doom backward castes and Muslims to irrelevancy, get tarred as a racist, and ruin your electoral chances.
The solution he finally settled on was free market capitalism. As he tells it, as long as the pie is a fixed size, everyone will always fight viciously over their share. If you can get the pie growing, people will calm down and focus on making money. Over the preceding fifty years of Congress-led socialism and the "License Raj", India's GDP had grown at a pathetic 3% / year, which snarky observers called "the Hindu rate of growth". If he could get the market moving again, maybe he could turn India into a genuinely secular state where people had aspirations beyond getting a few more of those sweet affirmative action slots for your own group.
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
» “Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.”
The discussion about federal civil service hiring (not clear from context whether this is Richard or Scott) is pretty accurate to my experience, though I would characterize it as a focus on minimizing risk vs maximizing the correct selection. The primary affirmative action is for veterans, which arguably has had a greater impact on shaping the composition of the federal workforce than anything else (7% of US pop are vets; federal workforce is 30% vet).
2. If too many candidates remain after step 1, HR defines a "Best Qualified" pool. While many means of doing this are available, typically only years of experience and education are evaluated (sometimes occupational certificates/licenses). Veterans' preference (veterans affirmative action) is applied here.