What an appalling comment. You can’t possibly justify what you’re doing so you pretend it’s something “the left” did first. Did the left deport students because they wrote an op-ed article, or went to a protest? Did senior administration officials call for jailing opponents for thought crimes?
You are correct in your assumption that I am a conservative, but I abhor the lunacy of the MAGA right as much as anyone. But the fact remains that the roots of this behavior are in men like Foucault and Marcuse, who were squarely on the left.
So just to be clear - by "abhor the lunacy of the MAGA right" you mean you did not vote for the current crop societal arsonists and otherwise generally denounce them, right? I ask because there is a common disingenuous pattern of people claiming to distance themselves from the methods or other things they find distasteful (eg the profligate deficit spending), but ultimately still falling in line with support.
Not disingenuous, I think. I did vote for Trump, and even if I had a crystal ball in November and knew then what I know now, I would still prefer him to Harris. On the other hand, I have been quite vocal in my criticism of him -- but the circle of friends and acquaintances who have heard my criticisms is pretty small.
It's disingenuous because you're bringing up the lunacy as if its one of your primary concerns while invoking the concept of "integrity". But then you're not actually living out that concern, rather assuaging your own ego by imagining that "the left" is still somehow worse in this measure. You don't get to bemoan societal decay when you're directly contributing to that decay.
A recent report from the Goldwater Institute found that 80% of job postings for Arizona’s public universities required applicants to submit a statement detailing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. - https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-report/the-new-loy...
“If you write: ‘I believe that everyone should be treated equally,’ you will be branded as a right winger,” Vinod Aggarwal, the chair of Asian Studies at the university, said in an interview. - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...
UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating diversity statements penalized candidates for saying that they prefer to “treat everyone the same,” or for objecting to racially segregated affinity groups. As my reporting has shown, by the early 2020s, the Berkeley rubric had become something of a gold standard, used by search committees across the country, including at the University of New Mexico, University of South Carolina, Northwestern University, and Ohio State University. - https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-death-knell-for-diver...
(to debunk the usual counterpoint that these diversity requirements merely test for being able and willing to teach all demographics of students)
But if we point out the McKinsey study that finds companies with greater ethnic and cultural diversity were 36% more likely to experience above-average profitability compared to their counterparts, the facade of the conservative dedication to free market capitalism crumbles.
Look, plenty of DEI programs weren’t done well, especially affirmative action programs at some prestigious universities where the design of the admissions programs were boneheaded at best and illegal at worst.
But in truth, many DEI opponents who just “want everyone to be treated equally with merit” don’t actually realize that “merit-only” doesn’t mean utopian pure equality, it means going back to a status quo state where the concept of merit is tainted by personal biases.
I also think this idea of “merit-only” is hyper-individualist, because this type of thinking resists the consideration of the social interaction of humans. A business owner needs employees who can not only have merit on their own but also work well together.
Typical corporate DEI was never about race/gender quotas or anything malicious like that, it was just training to help avoid employees/managers being biased toward solely hiring and working with people who are aligned with their world view.
And it isn’t just cultural or racial or gender-based, it’s also based on things like diversity of background. E.g., maybe we don’t just hire people with a degree from a prestigious university, maybe someone who got experience through some non-traditional way is also qualified.
A lot of the focus of the training is also just informing employees about how they can respect/accommodate different types of thought and culture so that the diverse people you already hired don’t decide to quit.
For my anecdote, I worked with a black woman in an SRE role who said she almost never lasts more than a year at an employer before she can’t stand someone she works with being racist/biased against her and has to quit for her own sanity. This is a person that is getting hired because she’s highly qualified but keeps getting pushed out because employees frequently have bias against her ingrained in them. Turnover costs tens of thousands of dollars for each occurrence, and that’s one area where DEI training is meant to help.
And yes, that’s why it’s important to use people’s preferred pronouns. Employees are supposed to be adults and not big dumb babies who can’t adapt to basic changes in the world. The company already hired a trans or non-binary person because they are the most qualified for the role, and now they want employees to not ruin it for them and cost the company a bunch of money because their bigotry causes them to quit.
I wanted to reply to this in detail because it's a very interesting topic for me, but the result exceeded the HN comment length limit (I don't know by how much) and this is already quite derailed from the original topic, and layers deep beneath a dead comment. I did save my thoughts in a local text file, though. Please feel free to reach out by email (I use this username on the Proton email service) if you're interested.
> Did the left deport students because they wrote an op-ed article, or went to a protest? Did senior administration officials call for jailing opponents for thought crimes?
Did the right? What incidents are you referring to?
Specifically because they protested and not for any other reason (such as, for example, specific actions taken at the protest; or just opportunistically because appearing at the protest made it possible to catch someone that they'd already been looking for)?
Except there weren't really any mass harassment, rape and death threat, and firing campaigns being coordinated against ordinary people for not sufficiently mourning someone. Most of the "cancel culture" stuff was overblown nonsense, the few real events were against massive public figures credibly accused of heinous things like Weinstein.
Pretending this is in any way equivalent betrays either an intense naivete or a supporter of this pre-pogrom behavior.
Maybe some of them knelt voluntarily. But what would have happened if they hadn't. To me at the time there seemed to be a lot of social pressure to "kneel" and accept the narrative and the will of the mob.
I fear I've been misunderstood, or at least over-interpreted.
> mass harassment, rape and death threat
From what I've seen (and notwithstanding the claims in TFA, which are unsupported by evidence other than allegations), these things aren't happening this time either, and the voices organizing the firing campaigns are against them.
In particular, Ms. Gilmore's story cannot be reconciled with the evidence available to me.
I have in some places seen dehumanizing rhetoric. This is of course still not okay, but it clearly comes from a place of genuine hurt.
Also, my standard objection here: telling people that you hope a terrible thing happens to them is not acceptable, but it is also objectively not a "threat", and it bothers me when it's falsely characterized that way.
> for not sufficiently mourning someone
This is not a reasonable representation of the cause of action. We're talking about people who outright celebrate Kirk's death or insinuate that it was somehow deserved.
> Most of the "cancel culture" stuff was overblown nonsense, the few real events were against massive public figures credibly accused of heinous things like Weinstein.
Strongly disagree. Matt Rose, James Damore, the list goes on and on (but I've left behind the days when I kept track in any serious way).
> Pretending this is in any way equivalent betrays
I feel much the same about people who equate a guy getting killed for his political beliefs with people losing their job for expressing ideology that can reasonably be considered incompatible with doing the job.
(I'm sure there are people outside the professions I mentioned in the other thread getting targeted. As I already said, I oppose that.)
Ah yes, the dangerously effective leftist power-grabbing playbook. This is the playbook with accomplishments like:
- Losing two Supreme Court nominations because the opposing party said so, refusing to pack the court in response (also see: next bullet)
- Failing to make general legislative progress by having two critical senators in their party refuse to caucus with them, with both eventually leaving the party entirely
- Controlling less than half of state legislatures in the whole country, less than half of all state governors
- Running unpopular candidates for president 3 times in a row and losing 2/3 easily winnable campaigns over it
- Allowing their unpopular presidential candidate to decide to drop out at the last minute rather than convincing him to do it with enough time to do a proper primary and grassroots campaigning
- Sitting around for years instead of expediting prosecution of Trump for obvious crimes (e.g., classified documents case, Jan. 9 insurrection case) before he could return to office
- Tossing a bucket of quicksand onto voter enthusiasm by splitting the party over the Israel/Gaza conflict and other wedge issues
I actually hope the Republican Party adopts the left's "power-grabbing playbook" so that we can go back to having Democrats in control. Who knows, we might even get universal healthcare - last time, a public option was blocked by a single independent congressperson, which is too much power for the power-grabbing leftists to handle!
