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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Richard Hanania reports (it seems someone leaked to him) that the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Uber has been placed on leave of absence following a DEI session called "Moving Forward: Don't Call Me Karen".

Unless I'm missing something, it's not clear that this is explicitly related to the recent and ongoing Citi Bike Karen.

That Karen is an anti-white slur only directed against white women seems pretty obvious. I never understood why so many on the right embraced the term. I am also not surprised that most of the people in the chatlogs are other women, since the term was mostly used by women or gay men.

One interesting point is that the most anti-white group at uber are blacks whereas Asians were most sympathetic. Latinos were sort of in-between but a bit closer to the Asian position. This makes me a bit more hopeful about America's future as traditionally the two most hostile anti-white groups were either blacks or Jews and both are losing relative demographic importance since the bulk of non-white growth is Asian and Latino.

The black population is estimated to remain stable at 11 to 13% of the US population out to 2100 last time I checked. I haven't heard about Jews but I imagine they're not declining precipitously.

So the US is moving from whites to more Hispanics, which aren't as pro-SJW as blacks are but certainly are sympathetic in many ways.

I haven't heard about Jews but I imagine they're not declining precipitously.

The Reform and irreligious ones are. TFR of 3.3 for Orthodox, but 1.8 for Conservative, and only 1.4 for Reform, 1.1 for "No particular branch", 1.0 for "No religion".

Basically the same pattern is found between different religions (except that Buddhist TFR is even a little lower than Nonreligious?) and within other religions (e.g. TFR correlates with Biblical literalism, and with rates of church attendance), but the effect size for Jewish people seems exceptionally large.

I think Scott Aaronson (Jewish "No religion" category, but IIRC 2 kids anyway, good for him) once described modern religious demographic trends most memorably, as "a contest between the Darwinian theorists and the Darwinian practitioners".

These kinds of leaks just reinforce my postion that woke corporations aren't just acting woke to 'respond to the market' or to cover their own asses from regulation (i.e. that corporations are only acting woke for sound, economically rational reasons), but that corporations have been subjected to entryism much the same as any other insitution and that market forces and competition aren't some impenetrable bulwark against woke entryism.

the chatlogs showed make it hard to believe these people are functioning adults at a big company.

"matt walsh said karen is a racial slur, do you agree with him???

"you deserve a pay raise and/or time off for all of this emotional unpaid labor"

and my favorite

"it was more of a lecture - I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting"

"matt walsh said karen is a racial slur, do you agree with him???

I wonder if there's a niche for a loathsome conservative to get paid to chime in every once in a while supporting a rival leftist's cause, just to irradiate the whole thing.

I wonder if there's a niche for a loathsome conservative to get paid to chime in every once in a while supporting a rival leftist's cause, just to irradiate the whole thing.

I was kind of under the impression that this was Hanania's whole thing.

How so? Can you give examples? I'm curious because I just discovered Hanania and have been reading his archive with relish. He's a great writer, IMO.

"it was more of a lecture - I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting"

I mean, that person isn't wrong. That's kind of the entire DEI modus operandi.

I think I just had a weird zoom-out moment. It strikes me that none of the things in this post need to exist. DEI officers, DEI sessions, black worker specific groups, all of this is completely needless people fighting over completely needless things. Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

It all just seems so silly. It's like the corporate priest led a sermon from a different faith and the churchgoers got angry about it. This is basically the reaction I'd expect if my local vicar held a reading from the Quran at the Church of St Mary.

Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

Why do people set up the people's commissariats to have a man of the people in every room of the soviet union where an actual decision is being taken?

Because we are besieged by imperialist traitors that are everywhere trying to sabotage our great socialist project and condemn humanity to the bondage of capital, that is why.

Only a simple man or a traitor would ask such questions. Which are you comrade?

I often wonder about the alternate reality where Scientology wasn't horribly mismanaged and took over most institutions. Companies would have mandatory auditing sessions and tech conferences would start and end with a Dianetics lecture. People objecting would still be called bigots.

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Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

It's insurance against employee lawsuits for mistreatment. If Employee X complains about harassment of a sexual/racial/whatever nature from Employee Y, the company can say "well Employee Y went through mandatory sensitivity training for all these things. Obviously this is not a part of our corporate culture. We have no legal or moral responsibility for what happened."

There are true believers involved at various levels presumably, but it's a lot easier to be a true believer if your economic incentives align with it as well.

The crazy thing is that the actual case law on hostile work environments is extremely employer friendly. It's just that cowardly general counsels and ideologically compromised HR departments are able to convince their bosses It's in their interests to settle and grovel. Any company that told these sorts of people to go fuck themselves would almost certainly prevail in court, but the people in charge are either true believers or have been lied to by true believers into having an irrational fear of liability that doesnt really exist.

I've seen it analyzed as due to legislation on workplace discrimination, and all of this makes it harder for the businesses to be sued, and so have some value to them in that respect. That, in combination with it looking really bad if you try to get rid of them.

Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”

― George Carlin

DEI is the tool that is used to scare you into obidience of due to its arbitrariness. DEI is based on something that rebukes objective reality and stacks arbitrary relativistic moral values which you can't predict logically.

Certainly. And if one was interested in making Uber profitable, a great way to start would be firing and/or eliminating the position of everyone in those tweets, including the DEI officer.

While probably true, is Uber's goal profitability? They've never to my knowledge posted a profit and seem to live off of various money sources enabled by easy credit- and access to those is probably significantly enabled by their robust DEI department, and also probably much easier than turning a profit.