Yeah I can see how this leaves a bad taste. A few bullets I found interesting while looking into this:
1. It was repealed in (also the Biden admin's) IRA about a year later
2. The argument for special programs for racial minority farmers is that only 1% of COVID aid for farmers went to minority farmers, largely because such aid was dolled out based on existing holdings/historical output. Minority farmers have been excluded from USDA development programs for generations now, so their holdings/output left them unable to benefit from from the COVID aid
Altogether seems like a reasonable problem to try to solve, but not a good way to solve it, and it's good that it got repealed ~14 months later for a race-blind version of the same program.
There is always nuance, but that never matters because the headline is all people see and that makes them angry. “Help for 1% of minority farmers” isn’t as juicy and doesn’t further an agenda.
1. Seattle: The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
2. Pennsylvania: There are all sorts of programs designed to combat specific problems -- in this case the program was designed to counteract the fact that certain racial groups have been excluded from financial services for a long time. Would you characterize an aid program that only serves veterans to be discriminatory against non-veterans?
3. FAA: You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source, let me know if you'd like to provide another
> The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
Crazy or not, if someone starts giving training on how you, specifically can try to be less of a monster, it's reasonable to assume that someone doesn't like you very much.
> You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source
Oh, this doesn't count as "combating a specific problem"? Diversity is so great it must be mandatory?
Anyway sure you can keep trying to explain this obvious trend away with sophistry, but don't be surprised when others don't stick their heads in the sand with the same enthusiasm as you.
You don't know what an op-ed is, do you? Look it up! Here, you can type this into your favorite LLM:
"what's the difference between an article published by Wall Street Journal and an op-ed published by Wall Street Journal in terms of their expected journalistic quality?"
Re the training: did it have anything to do with being a monster, or was it about identifying and counteracting subconscious biases?
Do you think subconscious biases don't exist? Do you think having them intrinsically makes you a monster?
Re the white-only towns: nobody said diversity is mandatory. Where are you getting that idea?
Don't worry, despite the political climate today, people bummed out about the difficulty of creating whites-only towns are few and far between. In a few years you'll be ashamed of your views just like you were a few years ago, and as you should be.
I'm sure I don't have to explain that racial discrimination in housing is illegal under civil rights law. So it's "not mandatory", just doing anything to directly avoid it is illegal. Anyway this is all the tactical ignorance I'm willing to suffer - goodbye.
"Of course salt water isn't mandatory! You're just not allowed to stop the salt trucks when they come to salt your fresh water. If no trucks come on their own, the government will hire some [1]."
He chose what to cite, and there's a reason he chose the figure that can most easily be massaged by picking and choosing what counts as terrorism and what doesn't, vs. something objective, like homicide rates.
Probably because homicide rates have been going down for decades (with a slight COVID bump which has since diminished) while domestic terrorism rates have been going up for the last several years.
I think it's clear based on your advocacy for a whites-only town what you're trying to get at here, but the data doesn't bear it out. Homicide isn't a growing emergency. Domestic terrorism is. That's why the FBI focused on it.
@g0rk why is terrorism considered so bad even though in absolute terms the number of deaths is far below accepted things like homicides, car crashes, or even falling down stairwells?
Oh they could probably swallow one specific program. The problem is that entire side of the political spectrum (not just the Democratic party itself) considers them somewhere between second-class citizen or outright enemy. Another example:
As a straight, white, male I don't really feel that I'm a second-class citizen nor the enemy. Have you considered getting off Twitter for a while?
It's not clear to me the federal judiciary should match the composition of the population of lawyers as opposed to the composition of the people whom they judge.
In fact as you can see here, Obama appointed people largely similar to what you'd expect to see in the population (without bothering to look into specific geographies). It was Trump who was wildly aberrational. In fact even more aberrational than Biden, who at least has the believable rationale of trying to rebalance the courts after Trump took such a pro-male (76%!!) and pro-white (85%!!) approach.
For context, the US is <50% male, and about 60% white.
The Biden Administration Is Still Banning White Farmers From Federal Aid - https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/20/the-biden-administratio...