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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Presumably they were prioritizing treatment for those 65 or older over treatment for younger people, who will almost all get better without treatment, rather than leaving those over 65 to die. Even on the far right I don't think mass killing of retirees is a popular policy. In that context, being categorized as "equivalent to being 65 years and older" would be an advantage, not a disadvantage.

I don't think affirmative action is a "far-left" policy in general, but rather a policy that enjoys broad popular support, at least when it comes to things like employment and education rather than immediate lifesaving treatment.

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Affirmative Action is systemic racial discrimination (by definition) and you think that has widespread support? Maybe in "progressive" circles, but I think most people see it for what it is.

I think most people rather support the idea of a needs based system, not one that requires a color chart to determine who gets what.

>not one that requires a color chart to determine who gets what.

Most of beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women.

Yes. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30147200.

I'm confused, your own data says a small minority supports racially discriminatory policies like affirmative action.

The four different polls we found in that thread found that, in the US, 24%, 27%, 45%, or 62% supports affirmative action. None of these is "a small minority", though some do fall short of being "broad popular support".

>24%, 27%, 45%, or 62%

Seems reliable lol

I prefer to ask people if they support racial discrimination. Very few say yes, outside of progressives of course.

As I said in that thread, "I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased." Progressives are the least likely to say yes if you ask it that way, so I think you're lying, just as you were lying about what my own data said. Please stop.

My experience (on Reddit) is that progressives are the only ones willing to admit they support racial discrimination. They don't like to call it that, but they absolutely support the policies that give preference based on skin color and will defend their reasons for supporting racial discrimination.

If by “affirmative action” you mean racial preferences, then no, it’s extremely unpopular both for employment and education: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...

A majority of every minority group opposes expressly considering race in hiring and education. The prevalence of these policies is the result of its popularity among the white social liberals who increasingly run the country’s businesses and institutions.

I'm not sure what other meaning of "affirmative action" there is.

Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....

I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.

I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".

I generally agree with your points above, especially that it’s not a far left idea. It’s a mainstream left idea.

But one quibble. “Affirmative action,” as used by Kennedy and Nixon, originally meant the government taking “affirmative action” to eliminate discrimination in government hiring: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/learn-origins-term-af...; see also https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu.... So it wasn’t sufficient not to have officially discriminatory hiring policies, but you had to take affirmative steps to root out discrimination in the hiring process. Even today, affirmative action can refer to measures like broadening the recruiting pipelines. Recruiting at HBCUs might be considered a sort of affirmative action policy.

What the polls consistently show is that minorities support “affirmative action” in the abstract, but don’t support using race as an express consideration with respect to individual decisions. I don’t think its fair to say they’re not “thinking deeply” about the question. I think that instead the questions are referring to somewhat different substantive policies, and you’re seeing the result of people who agree with the general ends of “affirmative action” drawing lines between specific means they support and ones they don’t.

You're probably right about that, and I appreciate the extra context.

Sure, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment on how it could be interpreted both ways.

I would say though that prioritising a 20 year old BIPOC person over a 64 year old would be quite a disadvantage to the older person...

Concur.

It has majority opposition in California.

Yes, but it's still not a far-left fringe idea there.

The US-based definition of "far left" is worth a discussion by itself.

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