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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.

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.