All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
H/T to Mike Simonelli
The five black officers involved in the Tyre Nichols death were affirmative action hires who bypassed a rigorous selection process that the police force normally used. Turns out being picky about who is hired as a policeman is pretty important. Who knew?
Interesting. So this is what diversity, equity and inclusion gets a city when applied to police hiring. Not so good. https://t.co/1c0PYcHv1a
— orionscoldfire (@orionscoldfire) January 28, 2023
Corporations throughout the United States and probably the rest of the developed world have codified the madness of the last year in a new and improved version of the Human Resources mantra of diversity. Now they have installed a whole “office” of its own called Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. And what do those things mean? Apparently, whatever they need them to mean this week. How exactly can diversity which means incorporating many different things increase equity which means making things the same? And how can you say something is inclusive when the specific and overarching intent of the whole endeavor is to exclude a major component of the population, namely white people.
I said white people. And in a general way that is the case. You could say that in the past white women and white homosexual men were excused from the exclusion group but lately their special status has begun to erode. And I have to admit it’s quite gratifying. It’s nice when others find out what it’s like in the barrel. In fact, I notice lately that now Asians and Hispanics are beginning to show signs of being thrown under the bus and sometimes, if they really offend, of being given honorary “white man” status to allow them to receive the full-on hate that is usually reserved for “white supremacist” monsters only. And, wonder of wonders, even some of the LGBTQ community, in fact the “L” at the front is being attacked for being trans-exclusionary (there is such a thing!). Lesbians who rebel at the idea that men in dresses must be allowed to have sex with them are being branded as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). I probably don’t have to tell you how hilarious I find that one. It reminds me of a joke this old guy that I used to work with twenty years ago used to say. Whenever a woman would catch him ogling her, he would defend himself by saying he was a lesbian trapped in a man’s body looking for sisterly solidarity. Well now he could buy a purse and a wig and ogle to his heart’s content. If any woman balked, he would shriek TERF! and automatically the woman would be forced to, at the very least, endure his leering. If not, she would risk being fired for sins against diversity and inclusion.
Anyway, all this gibberish is just how the Left is punishing white people. Everyone working for a large corporation is paying the price. I’ve spoken to people who say that managers use the concept of diversity to game the performance process used to make promotion and firing decisions. In a specific case a diversity hire was given the highest grade when she didn’t even have enough training in her job position to allow her to do a single project in the work year. So, for no work she was rewarded with a big raise and then a promotion! And these performance evaluations are a zero-sum game. If someone gets the highest rating then someone else will get the lowest. Guess who that will be? That’s right, the old white guy who is doing all the work in the department. And that will soon get him fired. But there are laughs to go around. Once the department gets too top heavy with diversity there really isn’t anyone left to do the work. At that point the real work is farmed out to contractors who are allowed to be white guys and everyone wins! Well, except for the company that has to pay for redundant workers to make up for diversity. Eventually the real winners will be the Chinese who compete against these woke corporations and don’t have the dead wood.
But I’ve taken a page out of the woke book. I’ve opened up my own Office of Conformity, Exclusivity and Difference. In my organization you have to conform to my standards of normalcy to get me to give a damn about you. I strictly exclude anyone who believes in white privilege, gay marriage, intersectionality, critical race theory, hate crime, physician-assisted sexual mutilation of children or any other insanities they invent next. I exclude them from my circle of acquaintances or compassion. And I celebrate the differences that exist all around us. There are smart people and dumb people and men and women and graceful people and clumsy people and people who like art or literature or sports and those that dislike one or the other or all of these things. There are losers and winners in every size and color. And I think that’s great. A black basketball player can make fifty million dollars a year because he can dunk a basket and that’s great. And there is a white guy who can make a billion dollars a year because he invented PayPal and that’s great. And I can’t do either of those things and that’s great too. I believe myself to be much more important to me than either of those guys. I’d love to have their money but I’d still rather be me than either one of those jokers.
So, there are the limits of my selection process for acceptance in my organization. It’s wonderful to have such power, playing godling with other people. But at least my office is based on real value. And in the long run I bet I have a better result and a much nicer group of people. Sure, I’d miss out on getting to know the guy in the wig and the sundress from the Biden administration and the Antifa guy who practices bestiality and all of the people with BLM signs on their cars and yards. But somehow, I’m willing to take that chance.
For someone as old as I am, one of the more horrific side effects of reading Christopher Caldwell’s book “The Age of Entitlement” is reliving all of the political debacles that he chronicles. Each one comes back and delivers the same pain you felt originally plus the additional grief you get from reflecting on how that defeat reverberated through the years.
To select a specific example, Caldwell details the 1978 court case in which a white male applicant to the UC Davis medical school, Allan Bakke, was rejected in favor of a minority student. Allan Bakke had board scores in the 96th, 94th, 97th and 72nd percentile while the minority candidate had scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th and 18th percentile. Back then the California court rightfully ruled that Bakke had been discriminated against and also ruled that the California program that made this preference was racially discriminatory and must be eliminated. But the University of California appealed to the Supreme Court and by a five to four vote the Court decided that although discrimination was being practiced, diversity was so important that quotas were acceptable as long as they were masked by calling them diversity “plus factors.” Previous to this, no one had ever heard of diversity as a constitutional requirement. So what we had was the very same anti-discrimination laws that the civil rights movement championed ten years before would now be purposefully broken by their government allies to disadvantage a population of people on the basis of race and gender. How ironic.
This was the decision that sealed the fate of white male students across the country. Women and various minorities would be put at the front of the line and regardless of how low their scores were they would get the seats ensured by the hidden quotas that all the universities employed. And eventually the same system would be used by all the major corporations that were monitored by the Federal government which is essentially every one that had more than a handful of employees.
And that is where we are today. The only difference is that additional “protected groups” like homosexuals and illegal aliens have been added over time to the rolls of the favored. And now we have reached a place where every organization, whether a college, corporation or non-profit social group justifies this by employing a mantra that they drum into their employees, namely, “diversity is our strength.”
Diversity is our strength. What does that even mean? In what sense is it a strength? I have personally witnessed diversity hires who have proven so incompetent that they effectively destroyed the functionality of a whole department.
I can remember a technical director standing up at a company meeting and during the “diversity and inclusion” sermon stating that he knew diversity was our strength because a company culture survey had confirmed that it was. I tried not to smile, but failed because I remembered the last time a supposedly “anonymous” culture survey had provided results that contradicted the official narrative. But anonymity was only maintained at the individual level. All survey respondents were identified to the level of the supervisor above. The low-level supervisors of the anonymous dissenters were told that their poor managerial skills were responsible for the “uninformed” nature of the contradictory responses of their direct reports and if the trend continued it would be handled by demoting the supervisors. Naturally, the supervisors then begged their reports to toe the line if they didn’t want to see them fired. So essentially the proof of diversity being a strength is that the company told the employees that it is.
Let’s look at it rationally. If you wanted to hire mechanics what would you be looking for? Several things; mechanical aptitude, strength, conscientiousness, experience and resourcefulness. Now several of these general qualities we could hope to find in applicants of any race or either gender. But if you are looking for strength and mechanical aptitude you would not be surprised to find that the great majority of the best applicants were men. So, hiring an equal number of men and women as mechanics, while obviously producing more diversity than with an all-male staff is going to provide you with a weaker crew both in terms of strength and skill.
If you wanted to choose good medical school students what would you look for? Until 1964 you would be looking for emotional composure, honesty but most importantly for very high analytical intelligence. That is why science and math are the most important prerequisites for medical school. But if after the civil rights era you would accept candidates solely based on their sex or race regardless of how low their testing scores for analytical intelligence were then you would get a weaker class of medical students.
This same exercise can be employed for any job that requires anything more than rudimentary skills. In each case choosing candidates by a quota, regardless of fitness for the position does not give you a stronger employee, it gives a weaker one. From this analysis I conclude that “diversity is our strength” is not just untrue but that the opposite statement is shown to be true. If choosing applicants according to core job competency is subordinated to checking off gender and race boxes then you have purposefully picked less talented individuals as part of your selection process. That is stupid. And worse than stupid, it is dishonest. And since the victims of this dishonesty, namely the co-workers, have to pretend they don’t see what’s happening it is also highly demoralizing for them.
There it is. A dishonest process to defend an illogical goal.
There are many things that a conservative Supreme Court needs to do. Reverse the homosexuality agenda, re-establish the right of free association and protect the First and Second Amendment Rights of all Americans. But if I were to rank the priorities, I would say that ruling affirmative action unconstitutional is the first priority of a conservative agenda. American society as a whole would benefit from the elimination of the dishonesty, incompetence and resentment that this insane practice foists on all of us.
Will the Supreme Court take up something like this? Under John Roberts and with the current conservative/liberal 5/4 split it will not. But with the 6/3 split that might soon exist it is possible. And that is why I especially hope that President Trump ends up with a strong majority in the Senate after this year’s election. I know he will be making an additional nomination within the next five years. I want it to be a bold conservative judge who will make a bold step like eliminating affirmative action.
The latest corporate re-education-camp mind game is pointedly telling older white normal men that they harbor unconscious bias against people that aren’t exactly like them. And because of this condition they need to be shown their biases in a group setting where they can all be embarrassed and taken down a few pegs in front of others. Now this is just an extension of all the other sensitivity trainings that we have been enduring for decades. But finally, we’ve reached the point where apparently the evil is so ingrained that we can’t even be trained out of it but must assume it will always be there and so we’ll need to be punished in advance and at regular intervals to offset the effect.
The funny thing is that based on my harassment training I think I recognize in this process the text book definition of creating a hostile work environment. Here we have people being shamed and ridiculed not for anything they’ve done wrong but wholly on the basis of their sex and race. If there were a friendly group inside the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that was interested in fairness something like this seems like a class-action suit just dying to be litigated. Since I didn’t have a lawyer interested in the case, I simply told the quisling fink annoying me that all my biases were conscious and I’ll continue to cherish them as I do my tonsils and appendix.
Honestly, somebody eventually has to figure out a way to punish these corporations for this harassment. The constant celebration of the alphabet people has gotten more than a bit thick. There are stickers, posters, wall magnets and for all I know commemorative underwear to show support for the incredibly brave deviants. And if your cubicle is not festooned with these you could be accused of insensitivity.
We have leadership teams for women, Asians and heaven knows who else but apparently men are without leadership qualities. I wonder if word has gotten back to the ghosts of Hannibal and Napoleon. When we have our various upper management harangues, we are guaranteed to spend one segment on the miraculous powers of diversity and inclusion. We are assured that diversity is our strength but no actual proof is ever provided for this flat statement and a rigorous definition of what diversity actually is always escapes the speaker. But it is our strength.
Five years ago, one of our most mindful upper managers hired a new employee that checked a whole slew of diversity boxes all by herself. Needless to say, he was extremely pleased with this turn of events and told me specifically what a coup it would be for our department. After a short time, it became obvious that this employee was completely unqualified for the position and in addition would be absent for a good portion of her remaining tenure giving birth to three children. Meanwhile, the workload that she should have been doing had to be divided among the already understaffed department. Finally, after filling out her family she moved onto a new company at an even higher grade because of the prestige of her work with us. And just to add insult to injury her position wasn’t filled but left vacant since the manager knew that the rest of the department had somehow managed to get the job done without her anyway. Now that doesn’t mean that all minority employees are unqualified. Far from it. But it’s the fear of sinning against diversity that causes the train wrecks like the one I mentioned above. Instead of correcting the mistake they’ll punish everyone else in order to pretend that a diversity based hiring mistake doesn’t exist.
So, I guess that’s what they mean when they say diversity is our strength. Compensating for the bad diversity hiring decisions that management is afraid to correct forces everyone else to get stronger by dragging the dead weight of the sacred cow until luck sends it on to greener pastures. All hail diversity the strength that exhausts.
Ben Boychuck has a nice take on the whole “Diversity is our Strength” meme. The article on American Greatness ends in the middle and has a link so I linked to the whole article on the Sacramento Bee. He makes a good point.
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article189654789.html