Some groups are making hard stands for calling for equity, and others are calling for equality. I'm refraining on making a judgement call on which one is better, given I'm a tall white male. And the groups demanding this are African Americans who have been wronged by various state policies. I'll refrain from interpreting their meaning, and repeat verbatim.
I also think it's disingenuous to claim what "equity" is. This is a common tactic to define a word, and then destroy the stated definition, thus demeaning the original word. And bringing Marxism is guaranteed for a shitstorm..
> I also think it's disingenuous to claim what "equity" is.
The definition I gave is the one widely used in academic disciplines such as "black studies", "gender studies", "women studies" and "whiteness studies". I did not invent it. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_equity_(Canada)
> Some groups are making hard stands for calling for equity
I'm not sure which groups are calling for what, but the 20th century experience is clear: Marxism doesn't work. So identity politics should be resisted as much as possible, irrespective of who's calling for it.
> And bringing Marxism is guaranteed for a shitstorm..
As to causing a shitstorm - I believe that's inevitable when you have an honest discussion on such an important and divisive topic. That doesn't mean such a discussion should be avoided, on the contrary - the more difficult and divisive the topic is, the more important it is to discuss it openly, so that each side may argue their positions as best as they can and hopefully advance towards solution that works for everyone involved.
> Because that's a Marxist way of taking care of problems
This is so ill-defined as to be useless. If by Marxist we are speaking of what mark (and Engels) wrote, then it must be pointed out Marx was against equality as a metric or measure. And that, contrary to popular belief, he did not originate collectivism and egalitarianism, but heavily critiqued the proponents and thinkers of such that existed in his time.
Interestingly enough, this is another way of saying no equality at all. That is, the outcome of the competition is, by and large, predetermined. Children born into affluent homes will be sent to better schools, have better tutors, have parents who understand such social systems, and even posses such (seemingly minor, unless we of course want to talk about brain development) advantages as being fed enough nutritious food as to not be hungry. The athlete with access to experts and money and training (and time to spend otherwise not having to earn a living while they train) will outperform the runner who gets in a couple miles after work. (This, of course, extends to everything aspect of business and life. I'm sure there are many people who, if they're parents had had a few extra hundred thousand or million dollars to invest in their child't first few failed businesses, there are a lot of people who could be "successful".) So if we want "equality of opportunity" the first thing we have to do is divorce parents and children in something like Plato's creche. Otherwise we must admit that the system is built not on allowing the meritorious to rise (with whatever definition of meritorious we employ) but instituted by a power class to maintain that same power class.
> plays the game
When survival is on the line, how is it rational to 'play by the rules'. If someone existed in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, would it be rational to to hand over their family's stock of food on the outcome of a chess game?
Actually, the poverty level doesn't continue to rise, it's been stable around 13.5% for the last 30 years. The reason why it stays that way instead of shrinking is probably related to the Pareto distribution problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEWRykSgwE
There's an anecdote from Philip K. Dick that goes something like: You turn off the outside light and you go to bed, then you get up and look out the window to make sure the light's off, this is when you know you're crazy, when you know what you've done, but you can no longer trust your own mind.
We live in an age of numbers. My own state managed to drastically reduce unemployment. They did it by limiting unemployment benefits to six months. And only those who get unemployment are counted as unemployed. And I know a lot those people who are no longer unemployed. Some of them have already died, some from medical reasons compounded by lack of insurance, others suicide, overdoses, etc. Some of them are working on it. Couples work each two jobs, struggle to payback loans, to pay for the car they need to get to work, always seemingly one payment away from disaster. Children go home from school on the weekend and won't eat anything until they come back to school on Monday and get a free breakfast that there is talk of being cut. Certain of them are dying, not for any technological or medical reason, but because they have no insurance and can't pay any other way and couldn't take off from work even if they did, and it's not that they want to die, it's just that that is the only option on the table. Those with their homes lost, those living in motels. Those who make too much to qualify for food stamps, and those who make too little to qualify for insurance assistance.
This is not some abstraction. I can touch it. I can point: over there is an old couple who don't have enough money to heat their house through the winter, over there is a guy who needs a tooth pulled, but he can't afford it.
Perhaps we've made an error in calculation. Yes, we have stuff. Even the homeless have cellphones now. And yet the society we inhabit, that which was ostensibly supposedly had been constructed to buffer us from the brutal savagery of nature, now mirrors that savagery, so many always one step, one mistake away from maiming and/or death. Yet, yes, many do live in many ways better than kings of yore. But a phone doesn't cure cancer or an abscess or kidney stones or dull pain. But we have stuff. And we wouldn't trade it for anything, not to have medical care, not to feel less lonely, nothing. In one sense, however, at least the jungle, the real jungle, was honest about itself, it would eventually chew you up and compost you. And what use is it to live like a king without the power of one? A kind of Schrodinger's paradox: to live as a king and as a peasant, one in the same, at the same time. A postmodern version of the Prince and Pauper, perhaps?
But, then again, maybe I am crazy, maybe I can't trust my own mind, maybe all of these things I've been seeing around me for a long time aren't real. I don't know anymore. I'm not sure it matters.
I think the world has two futures. In the first, the world simply becomes Dubai. I think that's already happening. Compare what is said there to here[1]. Are the justifications really that different? In the second (the utopia one?), there's a swath of people, how many I can't say, maybe a few hundred thousand, maybe a million, maybe even a billion, it's just a number (to quote Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."), but it is this number of people, this swath of the human population that needs to die so that the remainder can live as millionaires.
Unfortunately, I really cannot begin to understand what you're talking about. What country is it in? What city? What kind of people are involved? What kind of jobs are that low-paying that two jobs are not enough to live? Why don't they move to a better place? So many questions. In any case, it's all anecdotal evidence, so is there a solid, unbiased study that describes this?
The article you linked provides some quotes from Marx and Engels which argue that full equality along all dimensions can never be achieved. But this didn't stop all the implementations of Marxism in real life to still push the equity thing hard. So your argument is actually immaterial.
> That is, the outcome of the competition is, by and large, predetermined.
I disagree. The Western states have social lifts that are designed to allow people from low-income families to still be able to achieve high positions in society, given talent and hard work. Public schools, state-sponsored higher education, public health care, children services are examples of such lifts. If these systems do not work very well, then we should improve them as opposed to favoring a Black kid at the entry exam of university at the expense of an Asian kid who is just as smart. Because once we start discriminating and making preferences, it's very hard to stop.
Especially when the problem we're trying to solve by throwing resources at is not the real problem. E.g. some Black communities have a very particular set of problems absent in other communities, for example MUCH higher rate of single-parenthood than in any other community with similar income in the USA. 73% children in Black families are born out of marriage. Clearly, it's a cultural thing. You can't solve these problems by throwing money at them, money actually can make it worse. So we need to have an honest conversation about the real problems our communities are facing instead of following a blanket "all the people are exactly equal, so every group at the bottom of the hierarchy must be discriminated against" approach.
Saying Marxism is like saying Christian or intellectual property: they're only ever mashed together to profit someone. It's all one convenient blob, until it isn't.
> to still be able to achieve high positions in society, given talent and hard work.
This reminds me of the time Pat Robertson told a mother her child died because she hadn't prayed hard enough. It's a fundamentally tautological position.
