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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).
There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:
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.
Well gosh, I cannot understand how this could possibly be. When those companies are signalling as hard as they can:
"Hey, uterus-havers! (Because we are impeccably DEIB and would never use a discriminatory and hurtful term like "women" staff or employees) We're willing to pay if you have to travel to get rid of that clump of cells, because if you had a baby you'd probably be whining at us about maternity leave, and then if the brat "got sick" or "is graduating college" then at best you'd be thinking about them instead of putting your job first and foremost as the most important thing in your life, as is right and proper, and at worst you'd even be expecting paid time off to go attend to the spawn. So we, your socially progressive owners*, are going to graciously pay for your travel costs to prevent that happening (*when you take on a job, the job owns you, you should realise that by now if you want to 'have a career')".
Now what was that verse by somebody or other?
I thought "my private life is my own affair and nobody else's business"? But now your employer wants to know all about if you're knocked up and going to 'take care of that', so they can get "applause" for supporting you with the cost of a plane ticket or however much they'll give you. Do Planned Parenthood clinics do vouchers?
Well, two can play at that game.
It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.
I big part of this is perception though.
It’s seen as working as most jobs (and yes, motherhood is a job) are. The thing of any of the jobs you choose to do (or in earlier eras were thrust upon you) were the reasons behind them. Mothers are raising the next generation of humans. Rocket engineers are building things that can take us to the stars. Cops and soldiers keep people safe. Teachers are passing down critical knowledge to future generations. See the difference? Focus on the tasks and even the most important jobs will seem like drudgery. I mean, the President is in boring ass meetings with people he has to pretend to like all day, broken up by reading really complex boring reports. Those are the tasks, but the job is to lead the entire country.
There’s mystique to any set of tasks. From the daily, they’re all boring. But the mystique comes from the importance of the job that requires you to do the tasks.
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Oh no, a middle-class housewife is living in a "comfortable concentration camp".
I think perhaps the author has no fucking clue what the original concentration camps were like, and that the Boer women in them were not living dreary lives eating peanut butter sandwiches with their children. And that working-class women often combined paid work outside the home alongside child-rearing and home-making duties, because of economic necessity.
"Woe is me, I have food, shelter, clothing, and the looming shadow of the bailiffs repossessing our goods is not over us, but I'm bored because my life is easy and convenient. How much happier I would be working in a job outside the home!"
two decades later "Woe is me! I have to work outside the home and be a housewife and home-maker as well! And that's only if I can find a man who wants to marry me! I thought we were supposed to have it all!"
I'll weep tears over the hard burdensome toil of the women expected to "chauffeured Cubs and Brownies" when this book tells me the author had direct experience, like my mother, of living in a house with no running water and hand-washing the clothes for herself, husband, two kids and bed-ridden mother outside in a plastic tub - all of which I saw as a child.
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I've always thought this was a ridiculous question. The answer is clearly "yes" and I don't think this would have been difficult for most people before WW2. Indeed, Ecclesiastes said millennia ago:
The human condition is the indignity of being an eternal soul bound to a finite body, trapped in a fallen world filled with suffering. Even non-Christians feel a similar void. I'm no Nietzschean but I sympathize with him when he says:
The default experience is to "struggle alone," to wrestle with the apparent fact that life has "no goal, no ambition, no purpose," feel that one is "buried alive" by the hideously mundane, tedious, and exhausting demands of daily life.
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This is a bit complicated because the working mother chooses to forego motherhood to a greater extent than the non-working mother foregoes work in most cases. It's pretty easy to work a part-time job while caring for kids, or leave the workforce for a few decades and then return later (though shockingly, relatively few voluntarily return to the workforce). It's very difficult to raise kids while working a full-time job, or put off having kids for a few decades to work on your career.
I get what you're saying though. Especially in the modern world, where household chores are much less important and time-consuming than they used to be, it certainly seems like everyone should be participating in life outside the home to some extent, regardless of your views on gender.
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I don't think /u/FarNearEverywhere's point was that working life is drab and meaningless, rather that employers are pretending to be covering the costs of their employees' abortions under the guise of feminism, but it's really just naked self-interest. Paying for an abortion is cheaper than paying for maternity cover.
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