kimmy

"Now, wouldn't you say that having a university education would make someone more employable?" It sounds like such a reasonable assumption, doesn't it. But "more employable" than who? -More employable than a high school drop-out? Of course! -More employable than a high school grad? Sure! -More employable than a tech school grad? Not on average. -More employable than someone with a trades ticket? Not on average. -More employable than someone who has obtained certification in specialized skills? Probably not. So no, I wouldn't say that a university education would make someone "more employable" than someone else, unless that someone's education is limited to high-school or less. That's one of the major faults here: the way the question is presented invites the assumption that university grads are being compared to people with no education beyond highschool. In fact, it compares university grads to people without university degrees, and large numbers of those people possess skills that make them equally or more employable than university graduates. That's the first major flaw. The second is, she's inviting us to make assumptions about the least qualified members of both groups based on the amount of university degrees held by the most qualified members of both groups. I illustrated the problem earlier on with the Smith kids and Johnson kids. 2 of the 5 Smith kids have university degrees, while only 1 of the 5 Johnson kids does. What's the employment rate and income level of the Smith kids and the Johnson kids? I forgot to mention that 2 of the remaining 3 Smith kids are grade 10 drop-outs, while 3 of the remaining 4 Johnson kids have tech school diplomas. Does that change your assumption? The fact that 2 of the Smith kids have university degrees gives us no insight at all into the qualifications of the remainder. I suspect that the university degrees are probably very helpful to the foreign born visible minorities who possess them, and probably of no help at all to the foreign born visible minorities who don't possess them. I suspect that the foreign born visible minorities who are out of work are probably in large measure those who lack university education (or recognized university education, at least) and might be lacking in other skills that Canadian born people possess (language fluency being a big one.) If enough MPs decided "you know, this is wrong, we should change this," or "this doesn't appear to be necessary, this isn't actually helping" they could repeal the law. But if somebody wanted to challenge this because they think it's "institutionalized racism", they're out of luck, because clearly the law says it's allowed. -k

Actually, that's not true when phrased that way. You need to rephrase that to convey what you actually mean. -k

You've already formed your opinion, August. You only need to see the movie so that you can tell us *why* it's terrible. -k

Proximity to schools is a factor in property values, so it might be reasonable to suggest that people with houses near schools pay extra tax. Weird thread drift, btw. Whatupwitdat? -k

The point was obvious. If the Tea Party ad with crosshairs on Giffords' district was an incitement to violence, then the Daily Kos article listing Giffords as a "target" and putting a bulls-eye on her district is clearly an incitement to violence as well. Maybe before throwing grenades back and forth, people should calm down and recognize that metaphors invoking military, battle, war, and violence are commonplace in politics. -k

I recall the Greyhound slaying from 2008. A witness says that the killer had a shaved head, another witness says they think the victim may have been a native, and pretty soon people are speculating that it was a neo-Nazi hate crime. Or the Oklahoma City bombing. How many fingers were pointed at Muslims before the facts became known... People have an emotional investment in their beliefs and would dearly love to see their biases confirmed. That's basically what it boils down to. -k

The information about Jared Lee Loughner don't make him sound like a Tea Party type. They make him sound like something of a fruitcake... more akin to the various self-proclaimed "Free Men" who've wandered through this forum in the past than to any organized political group. -k

Did you look at the graphs on pages 8 and 9 of the Stats Can paper, and particularly the graph at the bottom of page 9? That's because the author's conclusions are at odds with the information she presents to make her case. -k

If she was writing a paper on job market outcomes vs educational background, maybe that would be a reasonable conclusion. (Of course if she was writing that paper, she'd have also discussed trades, technical school, and other non-university types of education as well.) But she's writing a paper where she's asserting a labor market gap for visible minorities. Her appeal to this apparent "contradiction" is about all she has to work with, and it's her central thesis. Yet she completely neglects any mention of it from her paper. Why might that be? There's only a few possibilities. -she didn't know. (in which case she's an idiot.) -she knew, but didn't consider it relevant (in which case, she's also an idiot.) -she chose not to mention it because it undermines the point she wishes to make. I doubt she's an idiot... From the Stats Canada point of view, people choose to identify their ancestry, but Stats Canada decides whether they're visible minorities based on the chart I linked to. Perhaps government job applications have a check-box where you can identify yourself as a visible minority. I can't remember if I was presented with such a box when I applied for government jobs way back when. If it's strictly a matter of self-identification, it would be interesting to see what happened if I applied for a government job and identified myself as a visible minority. Do you think they'd go along with that, or do you think they'd re-classify me once they got a look at me? So a government minister could go in and say "I need a paper that shows the long gun registry isn't useful", for example? As has been pointed out a number of times, the Charter itself says that "employment equity" programs are constitutional, so even if the good folks at Justice did think it was "institutionalized racism", there's not much they could do about it. -k

Has this actually been established? Do you have a citation? Has anybody actually shown that this is really the case, or are you just assuming that to be the case because 'the conventional wisdom' says so? The latter. I have never heard anyone suggest that AA developed to address immigration/melting-pot etc. You're not actually sure that races are under-represented, and yet you're advocating that discrimination is necessary to solve a problem that you're not actually sure exists? Like, here you're claiming that "groups hire their own kind"... ...and yet the figures in the Stats Can paper say that the groups they've tagged as visible minorities are actually *more* successful than non-visible minorities. Doesn't this seem to suggest that peoples' perception of the "problem" might be rather different from the reality? Don't we need to better understand the "problem" before we undertake measures to "solve" it? -k

Why Coptic churches and not everybody else? Because Coptic churches are the target of specific threats by terrorists. Read Here and Here for more information about that. I can't really guess at how real the danger might be. Our security people believe they have the situation in hand, and maybe they do, or maybe the Liberals are correct in saying that more should be done. However, clearly what makes the Coptic churches different from others is that Islamists have singled out the Coptic church for violence right now. -k

I read Babble once in a while. It's always interesting to see different points of view. I even posted there for a few weeks a few years back. There were some thoughtful people there. However, there are also a fair number of complete fruitcakes who are so far off the rhetorical deep-end that they would wholeheartedly agree with Willie's "Harper = Hitler" rant. Personally, I occasionally look in on Rabble/Babble to see their reaction to things like the Ottawa bank bombing, or the Toronto 17 convictions, or so-on. If you want to hear people make excuses for convicted terrorists, or try to rationalize the bank bombing ("direct action!"), Babble's the place to go. -k

Has this actually been established? Do you have a citation? Has anybody actually shown that this is really the case, or are you just assuming that to be the case because 'the conventional wisdom' says so? The Statistics Canada paper that Da Shwa and I have been discussing presents some interesting statistics on that point: -Canadian born visible minorities had *lower* unemployment rates than Canadian-born non-visible minorities. -Foreign-born visible minorities who had been been in Canada for longer than 10 years had *lower* unemployment rates than Canadian-born non-visible minorities. -the only visible minority category that had higher unemployment rates than Canadian-born non-visible minorities were foreign-born visible minorities who had been in Canada for less than 10 years. Given the comparative success of visible minorities who are born in Canada or those who have been here for over 10 years, doesn't that cast serious doubt on the assumptions underlying "affirmative action" or "employment equity"? -k

I heard that the Ottawa Police have now referred the complaint to the Internet Police. -k

On a message board where referring to Michael Ignatieff as "Iggy" has provoked Extreme Moderator Intervention on several occasions, I'm surprised that "Hitlarper" has been allowed. You're a joke, William. There's no polite way to say it. Anybody who'd try to equate any Canadian politician with Adolf Hitler is clearly afflicted with either crippling stupidity or a delusional psychosis of some kind. You should return to Rabble and stay there. They'd appreciate you. -k

So what's your point? What conclusions do you draw from this? -k

Further to this... you appear to be attacking race as a scientific concept. But the relevant angle isn't race as a scientific concept, but race as a social construct. While the merits of race as a scientific concept may be slim or non-existent, race as a social construct is very real. What race is a very light-skinned Chinese-Canadian? What race is the child of a Metis and Caucasian? In discussing the subject of race-as-social-construct, the statement that has struck me most, and the one I've referenced before on this forum, is this: "In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you're black." -Colin Powell. -k

The only information she has provided regarding "skills and experience" is the factoid that visible minorities have more university degrees. But as I've said (and you haven't disagreed) that's far from adequate to discuss the "skills and experience" of the groups she wishes to compare. So her "contradiction" is based on a premise she has utterly failed to demonstrate. What does it matter what "race" they are? All that matters, for purposes of this discussion, is which fictional group they get filed under. The chart here says: the child of a white person and a Chinese person is ... a visible minority. The child of a white person and a Metis person would obviously be a non-visible minority... but subject to other legalities would possibly be eligible for some other advantageous classification. That's a matter for debate. This is a paper published by Statistics Canada. So, what is Statistics Canada's function? Are they supposed to provide objective information so that people can form opinions on social policy issues? Or is their mission to try to provide information to support a social agenda that has already been decided upon? I think Statistics Canada should be in the math business and leave the politicking to the politicians. This paper has the appearance of being designed to con casual readers into supporting a particular point of view. I don't care for it. I think we all realize that the Charter itself says "employment equity" is allowed. "In employment equity terms, there is no racism" because the issue has been dodged by categorizing people in terms that while not race are are functionally equivalent to race. -k

You seem to take it on faith that some sort of intervention is needed. Are you sure? The Stats Can paper that myself and Da Shwa have been discussing may suggest that it isn't. -k

I've expressed my outrage many, many times at the discrimination we blondes face each day. And yet, still no assistance from the government. I've said before that I'll never apply for another job with those douchebags. -k

I share your view about the target audience... I'm not a big-time scholar of scholarly things, but I've always been under the impression that footnotes were intended to substantiate the information you present in your paper, not as an alternative to presenting the information. Let's recap what she actually wrote: What pattern? That pattern she had identified in the previous sentence: Her argument boils down to "conventional wisdom says that skills and experience make you more employable, yet visible minorities have more university degrees and did worse in the job market! what up with that?" She *then* goes on to mention "other studies": one that shows visible minorities earn less, and another that shows differences in employment, income, and education, and another that she summarizes thusly: She continues to present it as some sort of contradiction that the presence of more university degrees in Group A doesn't translate into higher employment rates and more income for Group A. And I've already illustrated why she's out to lunch. Yes, she discusses women later in the story, but the case that makes up the primary thrust of her argument is based on the statistics specific to men. The reasons she doesn't make use of statistics regarding women is that womens' participation in the work force changed dramatically over the span of the statistics she has available, and because immigration sources shifted from countries where female participation is traditionally higher to countries where female participation is traditionally lower. The ratio of the aboriginal population to the white population in this country is very small. That aboriginals have been lumped in with "not a visible minority" might make the semantic argument that discrimination against "non-visible minorities" is not strictly discrimination against white people, but in practice it's pretty much the case, and aboriginals have their own equity programs and quotas anyway. I think we all recognize that Ms Tran isn't out to compare how "visible minorities" are doing in comparison to natives, and I think we all recognize that affirmative action supporters aren't worried that natives are taking jobs away from visible minorities. Sure, she says "more research is needed", but it's clear where her whole paper has been trying to lead the reader. That aspect of things is far more semantics-oriented than I have any interest in pursuing. Personally, my view is that whether it's "racism" or not, it's clearly discrimination, and it's clear who'll be discriminated against in most cases. I'd be all in favor of efforts to assist recognition of credentials from overseas. Politicians talk about this sort of thing all the time, but it never seems to happen. It sounds as if professional associations (college of physicians, associations of engineers, etc) may be part of the reason for that. -k

Of my mom's peeps, those who remained in the old country also most likely died at the hands of Russian communists, though not in a gulag or a firing squad. -k

Why? Less less opportunity for fat-kids to get blasted in the head with soft rubber? Unfortunately, I think that if we're depending on gym class to get kids the exercise they need, they're beyond hope. This has to begin at home. Didn't there used to be a time when being good at sports made you "cool"? -k

That's because Willie's interweb skills are about as sharp as his analytical skills. The specific nature of the screw-up in his post makes me suspect he cut-and-pasted it from another post elsewhere. Here's the article: Canada to ease physical fitness guidelines. Why is Canada lowering the guidelines? The first paragraph of the article says... There's your answer, William. Glad I could help. By the way, who here actually knows what the government-recommended exercise guidelines are? Who here will be exercising less now that the government has reduced the guideline? Who here would exercise more if the government increased the guideline? Exactly. -k

In a related development... Governments in Europe are stepping up security at Coptic churches and Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis is asking why our government isn't doing the same. There is fear of more attacks, because... Yes, specific targets have been listed on an Al Qaeda-linked website, including over 100 Canadians. Over 100 Canadians have been identified by name as targets for violence, by a bunch of foreign douchebags. Personally, I am not a fan. -k