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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.

This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).

Gillard and her colleagues in DEI are bracing for a crisis. Gillard created Factuality, a 90-minute interactive game and “crash course” in structural inequality that has been used as an employee-training tool at companies such as Google, Nike, and American Express, as well as at Yale University, among others. Factuality has seen an uptick in demand in recent years, but Gillard is under no illusions about why companies hire her: “I really feel that there are people who participate in these programs and initiatives because it’s required and mandatory,” she tells Fortune, “and that with this decision they’re just emboldened to stop.”

There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:

It’s crucial, too, for companies to diligently vet public statements related to diversity initiatives. For example, in today’s climate, making public promises that a company’s board will be 25% female could create a legal vulnerability, Bryant, the McGlinchey Stafford lawyer, says. “Sometimes messages that are very well intended can get an organization in hot water if it’s not necessarily done and crafted in the right way.”

That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.

“There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.

I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.

My prediction is that everyone just fudges it and keeps discriminating. Blue states might pass some laws mandating discrimination, and they'll play the same shell game they do with gun laws. It will all get struck down, in a decade. By which time they'll have come up with a new bullshit workaround.

This still strikes me as an improvement. As the old saw goes, Hypocrisy is the tithe virtue pays to vice. Force the fucker to be hypocrites if they want to maintain the status quo rather than allowing them to maintain the false veneer of scientific impartiality. Make them expose who they are for all to see and let them be judged accordingly.

Their capacity for doublethink, and their capacity for making the bulk of the population swallow the doublethink, is essentially unlimited. You cannot expose them; they will continue to claim they aren't discriminating against whites and Asians even as they rather blatantly do it and claim to do so in other contexts.

We've been over this before

Just because you choose to live in a progressive bubble, and you choose to toe the woke line as means of protecting your status within that bubble, doesn't mean that everyone else must inevitably make that same choice.

I don't choose to toe the woke line. In fact, I don't toe the woke line; I'm at a company now where I can ignore the woke stuff and neither contradict nor acquiese to it. But my personal situation is irrelevant to the point. The Supreme Court can rule against discrimination against whites and Asians. The colleges will ignore the ruling. The administrative agencies will ignore the ruling. The lower courts will ignore the ruling. And none of them will see any problem with that, nor will the population at large.

Again, we've been over this, you might not like it but yes you do. After all, all you're doing in this post right here right now is mindlessly parroting progressive propaganda like a good little stooge.

After you get out of jail, I would like to see an Inferential Distance episode where you finally explain your strange predilection to insist that people believe things they vociferously repudiate and belong to groups they consistently and vocally loathe. Surely you do not hope for this to result in a productive discussion, nor are you so naive as to expect them to agree if you accuse them enough times.

And sure, bad faith exists. But if bad faith opponents are so persistent, it looks quite futile to me to do… this.

mindlessly parroting progressive propaganda like a good little stooge.

5-day ban

Have you guys decided to tighten the screws or something? A minor spat between regulars doesn’t require the banhammer imo.

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Noticing what they do is not "parroting progressive propaganda". I'm not sure what accusing everyone who opposes them as being them and ultimately suggesting a retreat into mysticism is, but it isn't going to help either.

This is exactly what will happen. The University of California has been flagrantly violating California's constitutional prohibition on affirmative action for decades with absolutely no consequences.

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