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Sucks to be a black person in such a society, though. For no reason other than their skin color they are lumped in with a group of people lower average prosperity and then are denied access to resources and systems because of this grouping. Especially when these disparities are themselves caused by a history of deliberate oppression. How convenient that we get to continue to perpetuate inequalities that were themselves caused by the group in the majority. The grouping itself is a problem and produces false or misleading ideas about individuals.

Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?



> Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. Should employers and landlords be able to blanket deny access to men?

No, but they're more likely to get in more car wrecks, and I have to pay a higher insurance premium because guys on average are worse drivers.


This is a topic that HN is particularly tone deaf on. Bringing this up tends to be seen as an attack on white or Asian people.


[flagged]


Could you please follow the guidelines by commenting civilly and substantively and not trolling?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Actually nothing like it.


Employers and landlords should be able to deny access to anyone they please. It's their company and their property, after all.


It's absolutely morally indefensible to refuse services because of what someone was born as.


Any company or landlord who does such a thing will go out of business, since any clever competitor will snatch those great deals that those companies and landlords are missing out on.


That is ... not actually true. It'd be great if that's what happened, but we have several decades of discriminatory housing/credit policies that haven't put companies out of business. _Equifax_ started primarily as a tool to help people discriminate.


I would love to live in the world you describe, but that is not this world.


Or other racist will seek them out, which is what used to happen before regulation was passed to prevent people from blatantly discriminating.


Were you... born yesterday?


A company that doesn't rely on the resources and services of society can argue that. But a company that wants to rely on any infrastructure like roads or electricity, and a landlord relying on the socially enforced theory of property, is not in that group.


That's a bad argument. There's no choice but to use roads, there's no way to create roads without government permission, there's no way to build any infrastructure without complying with myriad of expensive regulations (and for many things there are no way at all - try to build something where government doesn't want to permit something to be built) and they are paid with taxes that aren't exactly voluntary too. So the logic goes is "we control all the environment, we take money from you to create infrastructure the way we want and we ban you from competing with us - and then we demand from you compliance because you have no choice but to use the infrastructure".

If there were an option to use government infrastructure or create and use independent one, then demands on the users of the government one could be justified - our infrastructure, our rules. But instead, there is no choice and the government actively suppresses the possibility of choice arising - in this case, making some demands for using the only possibility available is hypocritical at best.


It's not a bad argument. You are describing a feature not a bug.

You are free to vote for policies and candidates that will make things the way you want them to be. I'm sure you have. Luckily a majority of us over time have voted against you and decided housing discrimination is wrong and made it illegal. The fact that you lack the choice to do it anyway is intentional.


Yep, one of the costs of living in society is that you have to follow some rules. If you don't like it, feel free to find somewhere else to live... although sadly, every spot of land is already taken. Sorry about that.


> Yep, one of the costs of living in society is that you have to follow some rules.

Another bad argument. Nobody argues agains having some rules. But that does not make every rule necessary. Especially ones that are justified by "since we have these rules that force you to use our services, you also owe us to abide by other rules". That's not a good justification, that's just circular logic.


Not if that property benefits from any public services. Once the public is subsidizing something (like roads, mail, utilities, education, emergency services, etc), the public gets some say in who gets to be included.


I agree with this, but as long as the public services are a forced upon monopoly this doesn't really work.




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