throwaway210222 (u/throwaway210222)

throwaway210222 commented on Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading latimes.com/california/st... · Posted by u/lxm

yuliyp · 4 years ago

> Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.

I don't think that it follows from this that it's unfair for Y/Z to have a lower grade. They did worse. The grade can reflect that. That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student. It means they demonstrated worse performance in the class. How you interpret that later on is a different question, and interpreting Y's lower performance in the context of the environment that caused it is fair.

Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless, and worse, can lead to bringing back biases that were tried to be balanced for: in evaluating a student for a job who looked like Y and another who looked like X and got the same GPA, which one is the better student? If you believe that the grades were more lenient toward Y, picking applicant X as an employer just makes sense.

In another context: we report the times of runners running the 100m dash in seconds and hundredths of seconds, regardless of if they're in the 100M final of the Olympics or at a local high school track meet. Is 10.8 seconds a good time? In the Olympic 100m mens final? no. In the US collegiate championships for women? definitely.

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

> put others in a low income country shantytown with no access to any facilities, coaches, with poor nutrition …

When we actually do do that, we seem to get world-beating Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes.

Not so many affluent, well-fed Swiss ones though.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

foldr · 4 years ago

Some citations can be found in the 'support for apartheid' section here: http://www.brandonhamber.com/publications/Journal%20A%20Stat...

Also note the striking statistic in the abstract: "...over 40% of those surveyed think apartheid was a good idea, badly executed." And this was a survey conducted in 1996.

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

Genuine question: why as a HN reader - so probably quite scientific - why is it "striking" to you that after learning on this very forum of referendum where you found out that 30% voted to maintain Apartheid, a mere FOUR years later a poll finds 40% holding a similar position?

a) surely you are familiar with error bars?

b) where did you think that 30% went?

I would be astonished if the poll said otherwise.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

foldr · 4 years ago

As you’ve noted yourself, the government had a large amount of control over the media and the political system as a whole. It would be disingenuous to identify this as the primary factor in the maintenance of the apartheid system (as you have in several of your posts) and yet deny that it had any meaningful influence on the referendum result. The striking fact is that even with the party that introduced apartheid campaigning to repeal it, almost a third of whites voted to keep the system. And as others have pointed out, this was at a point in time where SA had become a pariah state and it was abundantly clear that apartheid could not continue – even to many dyed-in-the-wool racists who had no objection to it in principle.

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

I never know what the next step in these conversations is meant to be: a nation of people did a really bad thing. They - or their children their grandchildren clearly changed their mind when first given a real, unrigged vote.

Now it only happened because the evil party told them to and the world was forcing them to? So what ? They haven't really changed deep down? And the proof is somehow the absolute strangers in the minority who didn't change their mind?

I am going to have to call a halt to my participation here as: to quote teachrdan - is absurd.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

foldr · 4 years ago

That's all fine, I just don't think it really refutes the point that "It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it [Apartheid]."

>An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!

Well, sort of, except the National Party was campaigning for a 'Yes' [to end apartheid] vote.

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

> Well, sort of, except the National Party was campaigning for a 'Yes' [to end apartheid] vote.

I'm not sure how that minimised anyone who then voted "yes, I'm glad you are finally proposing that - its what I want"? Odd line to take.

But the Apartheid National Party did a lot stranger things than that - after a quick rebrand - they decided to merge with the ANC!

As I said - a complicated place.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

teachrdan · 4 years ago

You are obviously invested in the false narrative that most white South Africans always secretly opposed Apartheid, and it was just the work a few bad men who somehow kept millions of Black South Africans oppressed for decades -- conveniently, to the material benefit of the white minority.

It's your choice to believe something so stupid. But to propagate this racist myth of Hacker News is a profound act of intellectual dishonesty at best.

Your proof that most white South Africans opposed apartheid is that the 1990 referendum came out in favor of ending it? This vote took place after it was clear that apartheid had no future. The ANC (main black freedom party) was increasingly organized and powerful, while years of economic sanctions had taken their toll on the economy.

You claim that a majority of whites opposed apartheid the entire time. Then how could the system have persisted for decades?

> to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics...

This is a cheap trick performed by the right. They denounce an unjust system while minimizing anyone's participation in it. It's oppression without any oppressors. This is how the United States lionizes Martin Luther King while downplaying the white politicians and bureaucrats (like head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover) who persecuted him every step of the way.

You may not be defending apartheid per se. But you are certainly defending millions of white South Africans who supported, enforced, and benefited from apartheid for decades, all at the expense of the overwhelming non-white majority. The fact that being reminded of their misconduct bothers you so much should tell you something.

---

Land ownership under apartheid limited Black ownership to just 7% of the country: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/africa/south-africa-land-refo...

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

Hi techrdan - can you lighten up on the insults. I'm really trying to discuss a topic with a teeny, tiny Overton window and I don't deserve you continued efforts to caricature me as a racist.

> Then how could the system have persisted for decades?

- surely I have explained at least one mechanism - in your words - "in distracting long detail";

- another one was to make sure no white kid ever learnt a black language. Most kids in the areas I spoke about above learnt French as a third language - not Zulu or even Hindi. This was deliberate;

- they went to enormous lengths to destroy any common knowledge of Sofiatown and it was a rejection of that the races could never live together. To show you what it meant: they renamed it "Triuph";

- they high-jacked the dominant protestant religion (ask Reverend Beyers Naude)

- in the mid 1980s the imposed a state of emergency that controlled all TV and news.

- any yes, like many places in the early mid 20th century - there were indeed a lot of racists.

But I suspect form the tone of your comments you aren't really asking in some good faith pursuit of knowledge of a complex place. I suspect you are rather employing a common rhetorical device to actually assert there "there other is no possible explanation - other than simple pure evil bigotry - for how it could continue for so long. And anyone who I feel doesn't agree with this is a bigot".

Its not cool and its not consistent with the site guidelines.

So let's discuss briefly the other Apartheid state - Northern Rhodesia. Here the whites-only voting was first-past-the-post as per the UK mother ship.

In all of the elections about 40% of the white population regularly voted against Ian Smith in just about all the districts. They won exactly ZERO seats in parliament.

40% is not "a few" people.

Voting structures matter and they get high-jacked. Look after yours.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

foldr · 4 years ago

>the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.

This stat seems to support teacherdan's point. Even at a time where it had become clear that the apartheid system could not continue (regardless of whether or not people supported it in principle), almost a third of whites votes to maintain it. In other words, a whole lot of white people supported apartheid right up to the bitter end, and that is one of the reasons that it was possible for it to continue for so long.

Also, the referendum appears to have been in 1992, not 1990.

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

s/1990/1992/ - thanks.

Of course a hell of a lot of people supported it - most of them now long dead. [This mandatory prelude is so tedious]

However, as I have shown, clearly not enough that the ruling National Party were prepared to trust their own people with continuing to vote for it. An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!

Hence the outrageous - from the start - manipulation.

If you think banal voting manipulation isn't as big a deal as the evil that lurks in mens' hearts then ask yourself - now that Iran has an Islamic democracy (they do hold elections) how does the current/next generation ever return to a secular democracy via the ballot - if that is what they want?

As as in Apartheid South Africa, enormous effort has been made by the initial true believers to prevent it from ever happening.

I could be wrong.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

yardie · 4 years ago

In the TAs defense the National Party ran on a platform of apartheid in the 1940s did lose the popular vote but won the parliament through gerrymandering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_South_African_general_ele...

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

Not only that, but the National Party were so rabid that in 1948 D.F Malan - their new prime minister - proposed in an actual parliament speech to deprive white English-speaking citizens of the vote.

God alone knows how they were going to enforce that in a completely multi-lingual society.

Strange times. A warning to us all.

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

teachrdan · 4 years ago

I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

So the question is, did "a whole lot" of white people uphold a system of white supremacy in South Africa? Literally the only honest answer is, "Of course they did."

"Although the majority of whites supported apartheid, some 20 percent did not." That's from Wikipedia as cited below. If you have an actual source to support your absurd claim that the majority of white South Africans opposed Apartheid, I'd love to see it. The gerrymandering you mention at great (distracting?) length could have been real, and would have had nothing to do with upholding apartheid, which had the support of about 80% of voters.

Literally the entire state apparatus was dedicated to supporting apartheid, particularly the police (which kept non-whites from moving freely in their own country without passes), the courts (which punished non-whites for transgressions against the white state), and the military (which violently attacked and killed non-whites who could not be controlled by the police and courts). And all this in a country that was never more than 20% white in modern times.

> I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to.

In the case of apartheid, good vs evil is exactly what it is. The white apartheid government, which had the support of 80% of white voters, was evil. And all the specious detail about gerrymandering won't make that go away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

At the risk of exposing myself to some more sanctimonious insults, let me complete the half-told story here by showing - with the requested sources [1] that when white South Africans were actually offered a truly level-field, one-man-one-vote referendum as to whether to end Apartheid in 1990…

the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.

Thus supporting my original explanation that a cynically engineered voting system is incredibly advantageous to the incumbent and needs far fewer supporters than is often believed to maintain the status quo over a long period.

Sadly, some people just stopped thinking after the Spitting Image jingle.

And since its a mandatory part of the weird I-never-thought-I'd-see kubuki theatre on HN: to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics, was a completely evil idea, and only a fucking moron would defend it. Sigh

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

teachrdan · 4 years ago

I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

So the question is, did "a whole lot" of white people uphold a system of white supremacy in South Africa? Literally the only honest answer is, "Of course they did."

"Although the majority of whites supported apartheid, some 20 percent did not." That's from Wikipedia as cited below. If you have an actual source to support your absurd claim that the majority of white South Africans opposed Apartheid, I'd love to see it. The gerrymandering you mention at great (distracting?) length could have been real, and would have had nothing to do with upholding apartheid, which had the support of about 80% of voters.

Literally the entire state apparatus was dedicated to supporting apartheid, particularly the police (which kept non-whites from moving freely in their own country without passes), the courts (which punished non-whites for transgressions against the white state), and the military (which violently attacked and killed non-whites who could not be controlled by the police and courts). And all this in a country that was never more than 20% white in modern times.

> I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to.

In the case of apartheid, good vs evil is exactly what it is. The white apartheid government, which had the support of 80% of white voters, was evil. And all the specious detail about gerrymandering won't make that go away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

> I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

Good news mate - you still haven't.

But nice try

throwaway210222 commented on The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry nationalinterest.org/blog... · Posted by u/1cvmask

yardie · 4 years ago

Could this be a generational issue?

I've met many pre-Apartheid white, South Africans who immigrated to London. And, wow, the racist shit they would say about black South Africans. Many found their racist attitude simply wouldn't fly in cosmopolitan London so they fled back to South Africa or Australia.

Of the younger generation many were too young to fully comprehend apartheid or denounce it entirely.

> Each country has its good and bad men (and women for that matter), and if you could do a census I can almost guarantee the distribution would follow the usual Bell curve.

South African apartheid was a giant state apparatus. It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it. While no one likes to think they were in the bad guy group I'm thinking the bell curve is going to look like a slope given the testimony from T&R records.

throwaway210222 · 4 years ago

> It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it [Apartheid].

Actually it really, really didn't.

Students of history will know that National Party (which assembled Grand Apartheid and ruled from 1948 to 1994) merrily gerrymandered the entire country on a scale seldom seem.

1. liberal (more English) areas like those near Durban were magically made part of conservative (more Afrikaans) farming areas hundreds of kilometres away. A good example is the affluent enclaves of Kloof and Hillcrest in Durban were somehow part of the [at the time] extremely conservative Voortrekker town of Greytown a mere 150km away;

2. a further law deemed that the rural votes in each such Frankenstein voting district counted 100%, the distant urban votes a mere 75%

3. this happened everywhere and ensured a massive majority for the National Party in every province;

4. there was by design - and in the most literal sense - no way for the white population to vote themselves out of Apartheid. It was so successful that for many years their was only ONE liberal opposition member of parliament [Houghton, Johannesburg].

I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to. I guess one does get more dopamine from wild sweeping statements that reinforce and display your own ignorance and bigotry. I wouldn't use my real name either in posts like yours.

For the casual observer: let this be a cautionary tale when gerrymandering is attempted in your own democracy.

[PS. Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - had a different, but equally effective voting mechanism to suppress the growth of a liberal opposition. For another day ]