DARPA Chooses Leader For 100-Year Starship Project

I have no idea as to exactly how qualified Jemison is. She may fit the bill on her own merits.

However, it is true that the foundation of Affirmative Action is the suspension of hiring standards in order to fill racial quotas for ethnic groups with lower mean qualifications, especially IQ. It cannot work any other way if it is to be implemented across the board in a society. If AA is enacted, it follows that most (not all) black people in highly qualified positions did not get there solely because of merit. It also follows that organizations like NASA that exist to pioneer very difficult things will be adversely impacted by AA.

Jesus Christ. OK, sure, the fact that she added some variety to the space program after a parade of white men in the 1960s and 1970s undoubtedly helped her career and opened some doors. But read her bio on Wikipedia. She entered Stanford at 16 and majored in chemical engineering, she has an MD from Cornell, she worked in the Peace Corps, she was an astronaut, she was a professor at Dartmouth for seven years, now she's hired by DARPA... yeah, sure, maybe you could get one or two lucky breaks as a diversity hire. But you don't have a career like that without being the smartest kid in your class and working amazingly hard. You don't have a career like that by being below average, you don't have a career like that just by being good, you have a career like that by being better than 99% of everyone else out there, and I guarantee this woman didn't bring down the average IQ of the astronaut program.

To do all of those things and to have some bigoted, asshole internet troll like you say that maybe she's not really qualified, and to suggest that perhaps she just got a pass because she's a black woman... well, what the hell have you ever accomplished with your life, other than to write perhaps the single most racist, sexist comment I've ever seen on Slashdot? Although perhaps you could argue that this is an accomplishment, in a perverse sort of a way. If nothing else, it's eye-opening about just how far we all have to go. Maybe we've got black astronauts and a black president, but we're still a damn long way from the color-blind Star Trek universe that inspired Jemison to become an astronaut in the first place.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/cS6PM-CDZnQ/darpa-chooses-leader-for-100-year-starship-project

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