site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

12
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The government instituted a 'volume management strategy' to comply with the government's policy on 'employment equity', and that strategy was to just ignore people with the wrong skin colour or genitals because the government says they (the government) can't do anything else and you see no mention of quotas or hiring equity?

Except that strategy wouldn't even be a consideration if they weren't trying to increase equity in the first place. It is absolutely not "just a side effect of a tool that they're wielding to reduce the number of applicants they have to deal with", the tool you are seeing in use is the one that gives the government justification to do what they please by blaming the bureaucracy they fucking created. "Oh so sorry we had to throw out your resume, we didn't have a choice because policy! If we spent all that time going through resumes for the best possible candidates we wouldn't have time to make all these policies about employment equity (which is different to hiring equity)!"

Agree, it's a completely ridiculous justification and there are clearly ideological considerations at play here. As you already noted, if the government mandates ideological woke policies that uniquely protect certain groups and allow for their preferential treatment over others, it can't then utilise that self-created loophole and state that it has nothing to do with ideology.

You could make the argument that the specific people making the hiring decision might not be thinking about equity, but I'm inclined to doubt that, since employers aren't necessarily backed into a corner here either. You can whittle down your candidate list without randomly throwing applications out or excluding people from consideration based on arbitrary demographic criteria. Those applying to business and computer science roles often have to take psychometric and aptitude tests, and the government could do the same and exclude any candidates whose performance isn't up to scratch. As a bonus, if this is implemented properly the quality of their employees would be better. But that's not going to happen, because the demographic imbalance that's going to result in is probably anathema either to them or some higher-up they're accountable to.

EDIT: clarity