UKIP...

[SWP's back]

He was obviously talking about Japanese men, who it recently emerged were having their scores artificially increased by a few top Japanese medical universities in order to favour them over the women who were actually scoring higher on the entrance exams. ;)

Nothing worse that people without the courage of their convictions is there. He should have just said.

 

[Ghandi's Flip Flops]

You’ve presumably got to be a bit of a prick to think that people wanting social justice is a bad thing?

I don't think anyone has a problem with the idea/concept of Social Justice.
The issues are around the arguments of it's definition, metrics used to identifiy a social injustice and the solutions proposed etc.

If you take the issue of diversity; how do you judge if you have enough diversity or not? What metrics should be used?
For instance, if the breakdown of an engineering company's employees didn't match the breakdown of the society (in percentage terms of gender, race, ethnicity etc) could you consider this a social injustice?

A SJW type would probably consider it is, and have no problem proposing socially engineering a solution so the breakdowns match.

A liberal/libertarian type would probably look at the situation differently. They believe that everyone is an individual and if allowed to make free choices then it's very unlikely that the make-up of a company would reflect that of society.
(This is born out if you look to the Scandanavian countries; they are considered the most liberal, and where woman have the greatest choice & opportunity to choose their profession. The percentage of women in the STEM fields or areas of employment is less than other countries like the UK. Simply put, when given the choice women prefer not to work in the STEM professions and choose other areas).
Their view would be that if you try to engineer people into a pre-conceived outcome you would actually have to remove some people's freedom of choice.
Therefore their focus would be on ensuring that everyone who wants to has a fair chance of joining that company.

Many of the issues come down to if you believe in 'equality of outcome' over 'equality of opportunity', or should society be based on a meritocracy etc

And then you can complicate it even further by throwing the concepts of 'collectivism' vs 'individualism' into the mix with regards to solutions etc
Should the individual be subordinate to group, or should the rights & interests of the individual be prevalent?

Some issues of collectivism is that when you form groups you produce hierachies, and the SJW types have a concept that the place of group in the hierachy should be based on the perceived oppression a group receives.
The flip side is that people believe it should be the individual that has the rights, not a group.

A lot depends on where your views fall on the political spectrum/compass; libertarian/authoritarian & left/right etc

 

[BobKowalski]

To whom were you referring?

A class or group that enjoys an enhanced position within a society and to whom special privileges are available.

 

[BobKowalski]

Nothing worse that people without the courage of their convictions is there. He should have just said.

Oh I don’t know. There’s people for example who create a straw man then clamber aboard their donkey like some modern day Don Quixote and then ride off flushed and triumphant after giving that straw man a damn good thrashing. Still if it keeps them happy no harm done I guess.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

I don't think anyone has a problem with the idea/concept of Social Justice.
The issues are around the arguments of it's definition, metrics used to identifiy a social injustice and the solutions proposed etc.

If you take the issue of diversity; how do you judge if you have enough diversity or not? What metrics should be used?
For instance, if the breakdown of an engineering company's employees didn't match the breakdown of the society (in percentage terms of gender, race, ethnicity etc) could you consider this a social injustice?

A SJW type would probably consider it is, and have no problem proposing socially engineering a solution so the breakdowns match.

A liberal/libertarian type would probably look at the situation differently. They believe that everyone is an individual and if allowed to make free choices then it's very unlikely that the make-up of a company would reflect that of society.
(This is born out if you look to the Scandanavian countries; they are considered the most liberal, and where woman have the greatest choice & opportunity to choose their profession. The percentage of women in the STEM fields or areas of employment is less than other countries like the UK. Simply put, when given the choice women prefer not to work in the STEM professions and choose other areas).
Their view would be that if you try to engineer people into a pre-conceived outcome you would actually have to remove some people's freedom of choice.
Therefore their focus would be on ensuring that everyone who wants to has a fair chance of joining that company.

Many of the issues come down to if you believe in 'equality of outcome' over 'equality of opportunity', or should society be based on a meritocracy etc

The issue is that you characterise (what I assume is) your side of the debate as being in favour of a meritocracy and the other side as not being. This idea that 'the left' (by which I don't mean communists, of whom it might be true) are in favour of equality of outcome is a strawman. The argument is that the lack of equality of outcome is evidence of a lack of equality of opportunity. We can debate how much of people's success is because of individual talent and how much is because of institutionalized biases, of course, and almost certainly, the answer is somewhere between the two. But to take an estimate from someone who I hope is not a controversial source from your perspective, Jordan Peterson in his interview with Steven Pinker (about 27 minutes in if you want to watch it on Youtube) said that 50-60% of differences in outcome in Western countries are not attributable to individual differences (in IQ, personality, etc). That means that 50-60% of success is attributable to factors such as systematic biases, who your parents are, health and just blind luck. That would include things such as gender or racial differences. Ultimately, I think both sides (other than perhaps the extremes) are aiming for a meritocracy, but I'd suggest that the right wing are far too willing to believe that we already have one and therefore don't need to address the imbalances that remain. Absolutely, it's wrong to expect that in a fair system, you would have 50/50 men and women in every industry, but it would be right to expect that a CV sent out with a foreign-sounding name would get the same number of replies as an identical CV with a British-sounding name, and yet we know that that doesn't happen.

In terms of judging diversity, it's obviously complex, but the starting point would presumably be to compare the number of women (for example) in your company with the number of female applicants you get (obviously it'd have to be a pretty big company to be meaningful). If you're hiring far fewer (or more) women than are applying, then that might indicate some sort of bias. Similarly, if 50% of your employees are female, but only 5% of your senior manager are, then that might be a sign of some sort of institutional or unconscious bias in promotions. It might not be, but it's worth finding out, because if you're favouring men just because they're men, then you're inevitably not getting your most productive employees in the best jobs (i.e. not a meritocracy). Even within a job, you can find that people end up with different opportunities. If someone is given more responsibilities, training opportunities or mentoring because they're (correctly or incorrectly) perceived as being more competent or productive, it then doesn't become long until they legitimately have a better CV than people who started at the same time.

In terms of men and women, however, there are definitely broad differences in terms of confidence. I think it's pretty well-established that women are far less likely than men to apply for jobs that they don't meet all of the requirements for, and are also less likely to negotiate their salary. But again, addressing these issues is important exactly because it results in getting better people in your company. Would you rather hire the man who meets 50% of the job requirements, or the woman who meets 70%? Because the research suggests that in many cases the man would apply but the woman wouldn't. That's what's behind the drive to encourage women to apply for things that they might otherwise not.

Anyway, I've rambled on a bit too much there. What was the topic again? Ah yeah, UKIP. Nah, don't think they've got much of a future now.

 

[Vic]

I agree and ain't disputing social justice is a good thing as it is, and why you would use it as a put down baffles me and also the stupid tagging of comments by some for a silly put down.

It's like "do gooder" as a put down for people who want to do good. First riposte: are you a do badder?

 

[FantasyIreland]

It's like "do gooder" as a put down for people who want to do good. First riposte: are you a do badder?

You're quite correct,the label is very misleading given the busy fuckers often end up causing more harm.

In future i shall refer to them as misguided nuisances.

 

[Vic]

You're quite correct,the label is very misleading given the busy fuckers often end up causing more harm.

In future i shall refer to them as misguided nuisances.

I'm too much of a do-gooder to say what I think of that.

 

[FantasyIreland]

I'm too much of a do-gooder to say what I think of that.

There's always the like button.

 

[SWP's back]

Oh I don’t know. There’s people for example who create a straw man then clamber aboard their donkey like some modern day Don Quixote and then ride off flushed and triumphant after giving that straw man a damn good thrashing. Still if it keeps them happy no harm done I guess.

I think you need to look up the definition of straw man and explain how you think @Damocles built one.

You’ve also still not mentioned the group to which you were referring.