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Comment by Manuel_D

3 months ago

The undisputed facts at hand are:

* The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants.

* The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

* Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission.

This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.

> I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are:

This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.

  • Is "eliminated the privilege of" some kind of dogwhistle for being racist against white people? You're intentionally using circuitous language but that appears to be the message. People are individual human beings, discrimination on the basis of skin color is evil. Not sure why this is so hard to understand for some people.

  • > You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated

    Man, you are now losing audiences that are sympathetic to your position. Are you accusing Manuel_D of edit-sniping you? Or are you claiming that the comment as it is currently written omits the above fact?

    • For transparency, yes, I did remove that first sentence a few minutes after posting (but before the reply was posted). I felt it was too harsh in tone. I don't remember changing "biological" to "bigraphical"