Open Mic for the week of 5/13/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
It’s Monday the 13th.
Duke graduates walk out on (((Jerry Seinfeld))):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrGpPag0K8M
PS – This is the week of 5/13/2024, Jaybird. Last week was good, but this week has its own story to tell.Report
Fine, fine, I fixed it.
The Free Press has a transcript of Jerry Seinfeld’s speech.
He has a couple of golden paragraphs in there:
“My point is we’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things that we should be embarrassed about.”
That’s a great line.Report
In case anyone is wondering, this is the Harvard that Seinfeld was talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969%E2%80%931970_Harvard_University_unrestReport
And this is what he’s complaining about Harvard having turned into.Report
Uh huh.
Shirley, Harvard students in the days of yore were never so silly!Report
I can’t help but think that the ones from the 70’s might have talked to someone in the botany department.Report
As with any such complaints about the Good Old Days, how do you know?
Were you a college student in the 1970s, did you walk around the a campus and talk to the students?
What makes you think the anti-apartheid protesters of the 80s or gay rights protesters of the 1970s were any less foolish and ridiculous as the kidz you are deriding today?
I mean, I do know because I WAS there, I WAS a college student in 1979 and I can say with complete authority that today’s students are not one bit less serious or more ridiculous than their parents were.
But…to be fair, our La Salle really did run great.Report
How many trees did you guys kill?Report
If the people paying $85k a year to go to Duke can’t hold a multimillionaire accountable for his problematic words and lifestyle who can? It’s called punching up. And besides, we all know people that go to Duke aren’t smart enough to get the jokes anyway.Report
Pro-Palestinian protestors also disrupted commencement at UC Berkeley.
https://abc7news.com/post/pro-palestine-protesters-interrupt-uc-berkeley-undergraduate-graduation/14799971/
They are certainly not doing a lot to endear their cause to the general population.Report
UC Berkley is not the general population.Report
I think any reference to Berkeley is probably fairly construed as nutpicking, given that everyone there is nuts and has neen for decades.Report
Eh, the protestors don’t care about the general population. They care about changing the policies.Report
I was at a Columbia PhD ceremony yesterday (which they held 100 blocks away from main campus). Protesters broke out shortly after the Dean started his speech — from where we were in the audience, we couldn’t tell who exactly was doing it and assumed these were outside agitators, but we found out later it was several of the PhD candidates themselves who stood up and slowly walked out, chanting loudly and waving a Palestinian flag.
Either way it was really annoying and rude, but there would’ve been slightly less aggravation among our crowd if we’d realized who was generating it.
Not long after they finally left and the speeches picked back up, the A/V stopped working and then a fire alarm went off — I haven’t heard who/what was behind these disruptions, whether they were random events or acts of sabotage. But after a bit of confusion, the crowd was invited to move up closer so that we could hear & see without amplification & video screens, and the rest of the ceremony went smoothly.Report
https://babylonbee.com/news/organizer-of-walkout-against-jerry-seinfeld-revealedReport
5/6/24, THE WEEK THAT NEVER ENDEDReport
Your friendly reminder that the DoJ is hunting witches everywhere:
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/13/1250541741/menendez-corruption-trialReport
The problem with witch hunts in the old days is that witches weren’t real.
Or so I have been told.
If witches are real, that completely changes the nature of witch hunts.Report
You do realize who is ACTUALLY claiming the DOJ is engaged in witch hunts… right?Report
Attorneys for New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who is under indictment, are continuing their push to convince a federal judge to dismiss bribery and corruption charges against the veteran lawmaker, arguing that federal prosecutors turned “an obvious political smear campaign, launched weeks before an election, into a witch hunt.”Report
People who claim the DOJ engages in witch hunts.
– The accused
– GOPers of all stripes in response to accusations against GOPers
For one of those groups (the former), it at least makes sense that they would claim that accusations against THEM were a witch hunt. They’re trying to avoid being punished so they’ll grasp at any straws to help them avoid taking accountability.
For one of those groups (the latter), it does not make sense that they would make such claims. Not if they were being serious and actually considering the facts (i.e., that DOJ prosecutes politicians of all political persuasions when they have sufficient evidence of wrong doing).
So, basically, you proved my (and Phillip’s) point.
Now, if you can point to large swaths of Democrats insisting that the Menendez prosecution is a witch hunt, I’ll happily eat my hat.
I’ll give you a head start. This is old but I’m not finding anything more recent: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/09/25/democrats-reaction-senator-bob-menendez-indictment-bribery-cnntm-ldn-vpx.cnnReport
On the other blog, we had a morning discussion on whether White Shoe lawfirms should be able to not hire people because they voiced Pro-Palestinian opinions. I know that people are good at compartmentalizing but I don’t understand how anybody can go from calling to divestment in Boeing for doing business in Israel to wanting to be Boeing’s lawyers within months.Report
When they were protesting they were virtue signaling to fellow students and doing the cool thing.
When they were trying to be hired by Boeing they were more serious.
Most of the protesters aren’t serious and/or are poorly informed. Someone took a map out and showed some of them where “the river” and “the sea” were then asked if they really backed turning all of that into Palestine and they said no.Report
I agree that many of the protestors wouldn’t even be able to get a simple chronology correct.Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/13/stiglitz-captialism-economics-democracy-book/Report
People sounded 100% like this about Bill Clinton in 1994.Report
There is an alternative. A 21st-century economy can only be managed through decentralization, entailing a rich set of institutions — from profit-making firms to cooperatives, unions, an engaged civil society, nonprofits and public institutions. I call this new set of economic arrangements “progressive capitalism.” Central are government regulations and public investments, financed by taxation. Progressive capitalism is an economic system that will not only lead to greater productivity, prosperity and equality but also help set all of us on a road to greater freedoms.
Government regulations and public investments.
Have we had anything like this in the past? If so, how did they do?Report
The 1950’s and 1960’s seemed to work very well. 1970’s too despite OPEC’s best efforts.Report
For whom?Report
well for most Americans since this is when the middle class came into being and grew. Corporations made decent profits, and there was significant investment in public works -like bridges and road and ports – as well as in public institutions. At the same time, that success wasn’t equally distributed based on race or gender, but even there strides were made.
What point are you hinting at?Report
That we have government regulations and public investments right now.
Like, they haven’t evaporated.
They have, instead, been captured.Report
They have also shrunk significantly, and less and less of them are actually paid for through taxation.Report
How do you recommend getting from here to there given the principal-agent problem that we’ve got going on?Report
Please talk to my state then. My taxes have gone up. The roads are worse than they were 10 years ago, and 20 and 30 years ago. No, what’s not happening is the state is using road funds for other things. IIRC it was to cover overspending in some other areas, with an “iou” give to the road fund.Report
“well for most Americans since this is when the middle class came into being and grew.”
ah-heh
“most Americans” who were white straight Christian males, you meanReport
Indeed I did:
Report
I think you greatly overestimate the degree to which the benefits received by straight white Christian males trickled down to the rest of society.
And if you want to make the argument that a little progress is still progress, well. Welcome to the Republican Party, your complimentary racism is on the table to the left.Report
I don’t understand how someone can look into the past and claim we haven’t had growth or shared prosperity.
This sounds like someone drawing a line between things they don’t like (capitalism) and other things they don’t like and just claiming that one caused the other.Report
Stiglitz is hardly a doey eyed Marxist. Since the 1980’s – if not before – the nations economic fortunes have bifurcated. Sure, our GDP has risen substantially (growth), but we have a smaller and shrinking middle class, we have a large concentration of wealth in fewer hands, and we have public infrastructure crumbling before our eyes. Prosperity has not, indeed been shared.Report
In the Good Old Days, 1 in 3 workers was a member of a labor union, and the government bureaucrats set the prices of major commodities like gasoline, milk and flour.
Click “Like’ and “Share” if you think we should return to the Good Old Days!Report
Interestingly enough, 1 in 3 is the number of people who didn’t have indoor plumbing in 1950.Report
Yep and in the 1960s, the Great Society helped change that.
Ahhh, the Good Old Days. Mister, we could use a man like Lyndon Johnson agaiiiin.Report
Why did Union representation go down as the wealth went up?Report
We are spending a lot more on the Great Society than we did then by any measure (raw numbers, percentage of GDP, whatever).
What is it that a modern Lyndon Johnson should do and where would he get the money?Report
Flip that around.
After 40 odd years of market oriented solutions, privatizing government services, free trade agreements and tax cuts, we are still stuck with poverty.
It wasn’t supposed to wind up like this!
I know, because I was there when the
Deep MagickReaganomics was written.ReportWe are “stuck with poverty” because we insist on defining it as “the bottom X% of society” or we move the goal posts so it’s still with us.
We’re down to dealing with the mentally ill and other people who insist on making bad choices.
If we want to evaluate Free Trade by actual results, then it’s lived up to expectations. Free Trade is well studied and it’s solidly pro-growth from an economic point of view.
If we want to look at “market orient solutions” for something like the cost of housing; the problem is too much government regulation and interference, not too little. If the gov won’t allow enough housing to be created then the cost will go up.
Gov mismanagement is also true in a number of our other problems. Health Care comes to mind.
The devil is always in the details and the various issues we have deserve details.
If you want to talk about market failures then we need to be clear about what is failing and why. The only example I can think of is we probably need a way to force some of the mentally ill to get treated.Report
Actually I part ways with some more leftists in that I don’t think any vast structural changes are needed in American economy, for the same reason I keep saying that the big arguments over the proper economic model is over and done with, with the optimum structure for human freedom and flourishing being a market economy with a robust social welfare state all administered under a liberal democracy.
We can tweak the dials this way or that and maybe get a better or worse result but the broad outlines don’t seem to be in any serious dispute.
And contra the WSJ article, I don’t see any connection between the rise of authoritarians and economic matters. The people clamoring most loudly for authoritarianism seem to be the people who are well taken care of by the modern economy and even in their own telling of things, they don’t want to make any serious change to our economic policy.Report
Ditto on all of that.
The people clamoring most loudly for authoritarianism seem to be the people who are well taken care of by the modern economy
Yeah that’s weird. My impression is we’re looking at fall out from the rise of social media and targeted news.Report
The largest single change in the typical state’s general fund spending compared to 1965 is the large share of K-12 education funding that comes from the state rather than local taxes.
Here in Colorado, about 34% of state GF spending is K-12; about 27% is Medicaid.Report
Presumably that increases equality by a lot.
Military spending is down a lot, from 7-8% of the GDP to about 3.5%
Overall spending of the gov is massively up, almost all of it is entitlements.Report
Indeed. In most states it started as explicit equality funding aimed at poor (typically rural) school districts.Report
I’ve read some deep dives on this. The middle class is mostly shrinking because people are moving up, not down. Well, and divorce is up, but presumably that’s a good thing.
That “large concentration of wealth” is “large creation of wealth”, and the bulk of super rich are new money.
Entitlement spending is massively up. In 1980 we spent $493.4 Billion on social welfare and in 2023 we spent $3.8 Trillion.
The math doesn’t seem to support the (common) idea that there’s a problem.Report
Median family income, adjusted for inflation. Up 125% since 1960.Report
I should add that this is not due to the number of workers per family doubling. In 2022, only 53% of families had at least two workers, and a big chunk of those had only one full-time worker. IIRC, the share of families with two full-time workers peaked decades ago, after women reached peak LFPR and the effect of increasing prevalence of single parenthood dominated.Report
And expenses?Report
“Adjusted for inflation” deals with that.
We also have increases in technology.
In 1960 the cure for cancer cost zero because it didn’t exist. We’re better off for having it (and hundreds of other cures), but cutting edge medical tech is expensive. On the other hand my 1980 meds cost less than a dollar per month.
Everyone in the US has access to insane levels of information compared to 1960.Report
Yup. Expenses are the price of the stupid things you buy times the number of stupid things you buy. Technology helps us get access to a lot more stupid things. That’s a harsh view, of course – fresh vegetables all year and the great works of philosophy are pretty nice. But expectations are the killer. I didn’t need a surveillance doorbell then, and I don’t now.Report
Remember last week when I posted about SJP demanding disinvestment from any “Zionist” Jewish groups and have them kicked out of campus? Guess what? I learned that the demands are even more radical than that. They also want universities to have more non-Jewish professors in Jewish studies departments to basically monitor them and make sure that they aren’t Zionist. The activist set would not do this with any other minority.Report
Link?Report
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/diaspora-affairs/artc-pro-palestinian-group-demands-california-uni-cut-ties-with-jewish-community-orgs
https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/a-history-lesson-for-the-hillel-haters/Report
UCSC came out with a statement smashing down the idea very quickly: https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/05/continuing-strong-partnership-hillel.htmlReport
Good. I didn’t think that any university would do what SJP demanded in this case but the audacity of the demand is something.Report
The cited demands are indeed ridiculous and should be pushed back upon. That said, I didn’t see in either article the claim that they were pushing for non-Jewish professors to be placed in Jewish Studies departments to watch out for support of Zionism.Report
Ashley Biden wrote a letter to the judge in the case about her diary getting stolen.
Report
Freddie’s got a pretty good post:
It Seems Like “The Reckoning” Has Become Embarrassing.
Report
All of this can be said with equal truth of most of the training on most topics that our corporate or governmental overlords insist on.Report
DEI can be liberal graft many times. Some of it is good stuff but it is extraordinarily hard to separate the good stuff from the graft and the self-flagellation.Report
The difference you see between good and bad DEI seems to be whether it’s protecting or attacking your particular group. That’s far less principled than you seem to think it is.Report
I wonder if this is what it was like when the PC movements’ tide went out in the early 90’s? I’m presuming not because the internet wasn’t a thing at that time but I wonder if there’re similarities.
For me it reminds me of how the right wing has kind of memory holed their vehement opposition to SSM now that they both have been routed and the predicted sky falling failed to materialize. Just a lot of silence, an uncomfortable kind of denial that it was ever a big deal and some perfunctory throat clearing.Report
I object to same-sex marriage, and I’ll talk about it as much as it comes up. I don’t know any socon who wouldn’t. The moderates and libertarians don’t want to talk about it, but they never did.Report
You’d be a #2 in Jay’s cited breakdown then.Report
The comments to Freddie’s post get into that. There are a handful of responses about why conservatives have shut up about SSM.
1. I predicted that it would be the end of the world and the world didn’t end. My bad.
2. It’s bad and it’s still bad but fighting it isn’t on the table. The whole trans thing is what’s on the table now.
3. I never really cared about SSM. It was just the topic du jour and it’s very important to me to oppose Team Good on the topic du jour.Report
Jaybird: it’s still entirely unclear if they help anyone but the highly paid consultants who run those workshops and trainings.
Of course it helps, just not in the way that is advertised since the training is a joke and divorced from reality.
If a company is large enough, at some point it’s going to have an employee be exposed as a serious racist.
Then the professional race baiters will claim the company knew and did nothing or even that the company itself is racist. Your brand will be dragged through the mud until you pay them off.
So just pay them off ahead of time. This training shields the company against accusations.Report
DEI has some very good points but it is hindered by the fact that the most sincere believers and practitioners can’t escape from the jargon and the script. Rather than use plain ordinary English to get their point across, there is a series of rituals and key terminology that DEI sticks to no matter what. This is a big problem on the liberal-left side of politics in different forms, the inability to get rid of the jargon.Report
This is like saying Marx has some very good points.
It’s correct, but it shouldn’t be believed and followed (much less taught) because a number of the core tenants are wrong.Report
Would you say the same about Plato?Report
We don’t teach that Plato was correct.
We most certainly don’t try to change the definitions of “truth” and “evidence” so we can claim Plato was correct.
Nor do we hire administrators to enforce his views on the world.Report
I’m sorry, are you under the impression that we live in Russia? Are there classrooms where it is taught that Marx’s ideas are “correct,” not just some of them, which we all admit is true, but all or almost all of them? Then try the same question with Plato.
What specifically Marxist ideas do you think college administrators try to enforce? The falling rate of profit? The immiseration of the working classes? The proletariat as the class that will overthrow the bourgeoisie and usher in a classless society? Or is Marx just a boogeyman, a stand-in for ideas, Marxist or not, that you don’t happen to like?Report
The comparison is between DEI and Marxism.
If we treated DEI like we did Marxism, i.e. some good points but the over all philosophy was deeply flawed and has a lot of real world problems, then I’d be fine.
Or if you want, DEI and Plato.
We don’t do that. We have DEI administrators trying to enforce DEI purity on the rest of the administration and the students.Report
I treat DEI like Marxism. I acknowledge that it’s evil. This isn’t difficult. It’s at best evil means to theorized good ends, but more commonly evil means to evil ends.Report
Out of curiosity, which do you think are wrong, specifically?Report
Typed like a true Capitalist.Report
Labor theory of value and the idea that profits are the surplus labor value taken from exploited workers.
I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of the actual writings of Marx; much of what I know of Marxism comes from modern Marxists, whose whole theory of economics seems to revolve around not having gotten the memo on marginalism 100+ years ago.
What do you think that Marxists get right that mainstream economists get wrong?Report
This is the usual answer, and to be fair, the LTV is the biggest point of disagreement between Marxian economists and mainstream economists, and even between different types of Marxian economists (e.g., Kalecki and Sweezy integrate marginalism, at least to some degree, into a Marxian economics, and in Kalecki’s case at least, one that became somewhat influential in some areas of mainstream economics). I think the later volumes of Capital, and his more philosophical work, show that he wasn’t trying to build a microeconomic theory of pricing in his use of the labor theory of value, but to use it to critique political economics, as it existed at the time (where the LTV was dominant; and strangely, you don’t hear conservatives saying we shouldn’t read Smith), as a project. That is, he’s trying to undermine economics as a discipline. To the extent that’s true, even the Marxian economists who continue to try to figure out pricing using the LTV are doing it wrong.Report
All of the magic thinking. That it’s possible to fundamentally transform human nature and make true communism possible. That it’s possible (much less desirable) to remove human greed and human desire for self elevation.
At one point I took most of my life savings and started a business. It failed. If it had worked then I’d be off buying islands somewhere.
If the profit from the business were going to be collectivized, then I wouldn’t have taken the risk.Report
POSIWID. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Sure, you can talk to me all day about the theory behind why this or that policy is a good, or humane, or moral, or ethical policy but if, in practice, the policy makes things worse?
Eventually you will need to wrestle with that instead of retreating back to intentions.Report
POSWID is a very modern Just One Drop theory of intellectual engagement; “if Just One Drop of the thing is bad then that badness is the only thing we need to engage with, and all other aspects of the thing are irrelevant, even if they greatly outweigh the bad part”.Report
Eh, I don’t think so. There are differences of degree and differences of kind.
The people talking about how a system will make the good numbers go up 4% and the good numbers only go up 3%, there can be discussions about how to better calibrate either the system or better calibrate the expectations.
But if a system promises to make the good numbers go up 4% and the numbers go *DOWN* 10% and this is consistent over time… it’s fair to ask whether the point of the system isn’t to make the numbers go down.Report
Like if a series of “business-friendly reductions in job killing regulation” results in child labor rising then we can say that the purpose of deregulation is to facilitate child labor.
If “pro-life” abortion restrictions result in a rise in women bleeding out and obstetric clinics closing their doors, we can say that the purpose of pro life legislation is to prevent women from getting medical care.
I’m warming to this concept.Report
Like if a series of “business-friendly reductions in job killing regulation” results in child labor rising then we can say that the purpose of deregulation is to facilitate child labor.
Absolutely. Look at stuff like illegal immigration labor and wage theft as well.
If “pro-life” abortion restrictions result in a rise in women bleeding out and obstetric clinics closing their doors, we can say that the purpose of pro life legislation is to prevent women from getting medical care.
If women can get, for example, flu shots and knee surgery and prescriptions for Amlodipine, you may want to rephrase your criticism lest someone come up with a counter-argument that would take less than a second to come up with.Report
As noted in the article you linked, POSIWID is not really a claim about intent. It just means that a system does what it does, regardless of what was intended, and once we know what it does, we shouldn’t pretend that it actually does something else.
Also, complex systems often do lots of things. Yes, if a system is claimed to make a certain number go up and it actually makes the numbers go down, it’s fair to criticize people for continuing to support the system, but it’s not really fair to assume that the actual intent was to make that number go down. Maybe they continue to support it because it makes some other good numbers, like employment of DEI consultants, go up, and the other number going down is an unfortunate but acceptable cost.Report
That’s what the industry will have you believe but it isn’t really true. On balance you want to have some kind of training you can point to in the event of a lawsuit. You’re also required to keep some data on hiring practices. But no lawsuit is ever going to turn on having a training (most settle anyway), or whether the training is an hour long module employees mindlessly click through once per year versus elaborate Robin DiAngelo style struggle sessions. The latter IMO can increase your chances of lawsuits because of the simple fact that DEI is racist and tends to be full of people that walk around saying and doing things that seemingly violate what are still race neutral laws, not to mention raising the salience of race (or sex, or whatever) in ways that make lawsuits more likely rather than less.Report
“an hour long module employees mindlessly click through”
If only… or, more accurately, if only there was one module.Report
Heh the number of modules directly correlates with how much make work is necessary to justify the size of the HR team.Report
Ask me anything about selling software to Russian Oligarchs.Report
Gotta watch out for that. And while you’re at it make sure not to make any grease payments to anyone on your next trip to India.Report
That’s a good one too because it cross-threads our cultural awareness module.Report
1 Hour long training session on “diversity is our strength”
1 Hour on emergencies in the office (fire, etc)
1 Hour on Kickbacks, gifts, donations
1 Hour on international trade, prohibited items, customs, etc.
1 Hour on radiation exposure, it’s uses, etc.
All have end of training quizzes and most have in training sub quizzes, requiring 80% success to continue.
I’m missing several more but i’m too lazy to log in and count them.Report
Of course, it’s possible that there is a third option: DEI works at curbing the behavior of a small group of people who would otherwise be overtly racist and sexist and homophobic while on the clock, causing huge problems for the corporation with lawsuits and PR nightmares. And it is moderately good at that, enough to justify the cost and expense and annoyance on average, and works to help stop those PR nightmares.
While just wasting everyone else’s time with stuff that seems incredibly basic.
Because, and this is important: Sometimes people do not know things that everyone assumes is very basic and trivial and a waste of time to be told.
Now, can this go to far? Yes, probably no one needs to be told not to drink bleach, and if printing that on bleach took literally any time or effort instead of just being part of the label, it would be stupid to waste that time and effort.
But are we really going to try to assert that absolutely no one would show up at work being overtly bigoted to customers? (I know conservatives like to pretend there is no systemic bigotry in the country, but are they really at the point of ‘no one is ever bigoted, ever, under any circumstances?’) And that some amount of them might change their behavior if they are informed, via a stupid one hour video that everyone else thinks is stupid, that such a thing is Not Tolerated and it might get them fired?
And we all know that people are much more responsive to following rules if they are told them generically in advance, with details spelled out, so the rules seem neutral, instead of someone having to say ‘Do not do that, this is a warning’, at which point a lot of people get defensive and feel targeted. So, no, just dealing with the situation as it comes up is not the best way to do that.Report
I would say that the two-step is more of a motte/bailey.
Of course people shouldn’t be racist!
But that’s not the same thing as explaining that punctuality is white supremacy.
In theory, DEI is good. People shouldn’t be racist.
In practice, you get “your fave is problematic” tumblr posts.Report
There is the problem that DEI consultants, like all consultants, are always attempting to expand their scope into more and more detail, and most large corporations are run by complete and utter morons so will accept anything consultants are selling.
This isn’t really DEI specific, though. There’s exactly the same problem with efficiency consultants or image consultants, all of which are a) useful to occasionally consult and set up procedures at some minimal level, and b) can be complete lunatics who will spent all your money and waste everyone’s time so badly that nothing happens if you give them free reign. (Which was especially ironic with the efficiency consultant explosion that happened in the 90s, as lampooned in Office Space.)
The problem is that, once again, the far right has decided that corporate incompetent is a) part of the culture war, and b) somehow the fault of the other side of it instead of a side effect of the incestuous-moron daddy-got-them-into-Harvard-and-then-gave-them-millions top-level corporate culture they enable.
You know how to actually reduce the level of DEI and other parasitic consultants? Listen to employees, who almost certainly know the problem areas better than the executives. Also, actually have managers that understand what their job is, and to operate as bridges between employees and upper management.
Corporations shouldn’t even need DEI consultants at all normally, assuming they have corporate lawyers and HR. The ones that don’t have those probably need to hire them once a decade to rewrite or refilm or whatever some trivial stuff.Report
“[A]re we really going to try to assert that absolutely no one would show up at work being overtly bigoted to customers?”
(bailey)Report
Perhaps you would like to find a place where I have defended any DEI practices beyond that sort of thing?
But the truth is, anything beyond that is a) barely are real, statistically, and b) are the result of corporate mismanagement, not some magic mind control by the left.
For example, in the article above, this isn’t something anyone was forced to attend, this was literally an online seminar that she paid to attend.
Oh, but don’t worry, we’re assured that some large companies have ‘DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings’…granted, we have no idea what that actually means, and ‘inspired’ is doing a lot of work there while also straight-up telling us she doesn’t have anything official to do with.
But we’re able to pretend it is the same, I guess. Despite almost all the complaints she have involving interactions between various attendees and the people running it, a thing that is clearly not even possible in the standard DEI dumbass video that new employees have to watch.
If there’s anyone trying to pull off the bailey-motte here, it’s the people who talk about fricking Robin DiAngelo, and use that to attack ‘DEI’, aka, an incredibly tepid and almost entirely boring super-obvious video for most people, and occasionally HR having to step in and do something about obvious bigots, which I suspect is really the concern here.
Robin DiAngelo’s theory has a name, it’s an entire thing, called ‘white fraility’ or various other things. If that is the thing that is concern, attack _that_, not ‘DEI’. To be clear: I don’t think Robin DiAngelo theory is generally wrong. I’ve read her stuff, I agree with what she says, if not the stupid seminars which seem rather pointless and possibly just a money grab. Other people may disagree.
But Robin DiAngelo is also not being taught in any sort of normal DEI. We know this, a huge chunk of people here _have corporate DEI_ that they deal with. InMD and Damon mentioned their experiences with them, I had the same experience, if pretty far in the past at this point.
I’m not actually sure she does DEI _at all_, I can’t find any evidence of it, indeed, one of the most notable stories about that involving Coke, was not true in multiple ways. In fact, that could be described as ”DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings’, which was basically some randos took some quotes of hers, putting them together, and put them on LinkedIn: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coca-cola-training-less-white/
I literally can’t find an example of her doing anything with corporations except sometimes being a paid speaker.Report
Although if anyone does want to read an account of what DiANgelo’s theory is from someone who actually _is_ a DEI consultant, here is someone explaining it:
https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2018/07/16/why-does-white-fragility-show-up-at-workplace-diversity-trainings
Notice it’s not what it’s portrayed as, and the examples she gives, where white people act extremely defensive to the slightly perception of their actions as racist, because white people have built up racism to be a) the greatest evil ever, requiring deliberate intend to actively harm people, b) they can’t have done it.
Including white people freaking the hell out in really absurd ways.
But this is the sort of DEI that happens where there actually is an obvious problem, not the sort of background DEI of ‘Do not touch or ask to touch Black people’s hair, no matter how cool you think looks or how that’s a compliment’ that is 99% of DEI and somehow gets included when condemning all this.Report
i am extremely amused by your contention that one way you can tell white people are incorrigibly racist is that they’ve built up racism to be the greatest evil everReport
and if she does float, it’s got to be witchcraftReport
Of all the individuals in the examples, I’d not want to work with any of them, especially the one who overtalks folks. What an ass. Thank god, remote work is available.Report
From your link on what that DEI “consultant” actually thinks:
I can describe our culture as white supremacist and say things like, “All white people are invested in and collude with the system of racism,” without my fellow white people running from the room or reeling from trauma.
I can easily understand why people would “freak out” when dealing with that.
You have an expert, who is obviously a serious racist himself, who is proclaiming everyone in the room has to agree with him.
And he was hired by HR, and they can be fired for disagreeing with him.Report
“Perhaps you would like to find a place where I have defended any DEI practices beyond that sort of thing?”
I would, but I’m sure you’ll immediately give me 2500 words on how that wasn’t really you defending real DEI practices and therefore I’m a lying liar who’s wrong about everything.Report
UN has halved the number of women and children killed in Gaza.
If Israel is right the new number is still too high.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-800772Report
UM, not so much:
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll-women-childrenReport
The U.N. humanitarian agency, citing Gaza’s Health Ministry,
The “Gaza Health Ministry” is run by Hamas. We seriously shouldn’t be taking them at face value. Multiple math people have looked at their numbers and decided they’re made up.
That’s over and above that we care about “soldier” and “civilian”.
A 17 year old soldier being reported as a child is inappropriate. Of course we think that Hamas reports all of their soldiers’ deaths as women and children so there’s that.Report
Who likes experiencing flashbacks to 2016? I know I do!
Report
The interesting thing to me is that *DEM* analysts who are confronting this are openly talking about the primary issue being Non-white poll numbers.
That is, I have no interest in unpacking the crosstabs… but those who do seem concerned in areas they weren’t expecting to be concerned about.
And, to be clear, these are not the partisan hacks either denying or affirming whatever is in their interest.
Still, it’s too early for the OT presidential predictions because the election is, what? A year or two away? Something like that.Report
In “the writers are running out of ideas” news, the hedge funds are trying to short Gamestop and AMC again and the WallStreetBets crowd is squeezing the hedges again.Report
If this story repeats it’ll be because the hedge fund types are quietly going long on those stocks this time.Report
I thought we determined the last time that this happened is that the markets protect themselves. Specially, I seem to recall last time a few high profile traders doing things that made absolutely no sense and lost them large amounts of money, so as to not allow the situation to actually explode. (They’re the only people allowed to break people via the stock market.)Report
POLITICS
Biden announces new tariffs on Chinese EVs, semiconductors, solar cells and more
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-to-announce-new-100-tariffs-on-chinese-evs/Report
Are you really surprised? He may be the “most union” president in along time, but he’s also a neoliberal centerist.Report
Good news for the people irritated at Biden’s halting of a bombing package for Israel: Biden is moving forward on a $1Billion weapons package.Report
https://people.com/ringo-starr-says-the-beatles-would-have-made-less-albums-had-it-not-been-for-paul-mccartney-8648528
“In a new interview for AXS with Dan Rather, the drummer, now 83, opened up about how the “Say Say Say” musician [McCartney]…”
My, how the world has changed.Report
“Popular Wings artist, Paul McCartney”.Report
Some other good ones from Reddit:
“Father of musician James McCartney, Paul McCartney”
“Ex Quarrymen member, Paul McCartney”
“Father of fashion designer Stella, Paul McCartney”Report
“Longtime associate of Thomas The Tank’s ‘Mr. Conductor'”Report
LOL. That’s a good one.Report
“writer of the popular holiday tune ‘Wonderful Christmastime’…”Report
Heh. I actually think it’s a pretty catchy tune that gets a lot of undeserved criticism.Report
Really? Every time they play it I get a little closer to giving in to my yuletide urge to lobotomize myself with a power drill.Report
https://mississippitoday.org/2024/05/15/on-this-day-in-1970-law-enforcement-open-fire-on-jsu-campus-killing-two-students/
11 days after Kent State. I had never heard of this one.Report
I hadn’t either until I moved here. There’s a lot history of these sort of things that gets buried.Report
This has a lot of good stuff on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TwjxRvA7XkReport
Thanks!Report
I remember Jackson State. It was outrageous at the time, that having been fired on excused shooting up a whole building was absurd. It never got the traction that Kent State got even then. Presumably because it was blacks, not whites.Report
Another boat hit another bridge. Doesn’t look as if anyone was badly hurt.
https://www.aol.com/news/barge-hits-bridge-galveston-texas-170614431.htmlReport
The Preliminary NTSB report on the Baltimore bridge collapse is out. They are focused on the electrical switching components, which suggests maintenance issues at worst not nefarious actions as some would like to believe. Read more here –
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA24MM031_PreliminaryReport%203.pdfReport
So it was criminal negligence and not Islamic terrorism and the racist right-wing rumors that there was a dirty bomb on the ship are false?
Whew! Nothing to see here!Report
component failure on a ship is not likely to be criminal negligence. Ships work in corrosive environments, and even the best maintained ship systems will fail unpredictably at some point. While it will be some time longer until the NTSB makes its case regarding that, as someone who has been to sea on numerous vessels in his career I fully expect there to be minimal prosecution regarding this incident.Report
Waiting to find out what happened is good advice, but it does get in the way of quick, splashy hot takes from the guy three barstools down.Report
Yeah this prelim report just backs up all the derision said barstool prognosticator got initially.Report
I’m just glad that it was maintenance issues rather than a deliberate attempt to ram into the bridge, destroying it, like all of those strawmen were saying.Report
Maybe it’s the camera angle, but the picture suggests that the barge was very nearly as big as the channel under the bridge, with little room for maneuvering error. If the people who know what they’re talking about aren’t bothered by this, I’ll defer to them, but it would scare me.Report
All those major channels have authorized depths and widths given by Congress to the US Army corps of Engineers, who spend billions annually around the nation to maintain those dimensions. It takes about a decade for the Corps to study, recommend and receive changes to those dimensions. Language on this is generally in the Water Resources Development Acts Congress passes every few years. No idea what the dimensions are for the channel in Baltimore or when it was last reauthroized.Report
Teen gunman who ‘sprayed DC neighborhood with 26 rounds from an AR-15’ is released on bail by self-confessed ‘woke’ judge
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13413621/teen-gunman-washington-dc-ar-15-bail-soros-judge-nolan.html
18 Years. 26 Rounds from a fully auto weapon.
“Residents on the street where Moody allegedly opened fire reacted with fury following Nolan’s ruling on May 3, which will also see Moody fitted with an ankle monitor and ordered to avoid the people he allegedly aimed at. ” but of course, “Prosecutors argued that house arrest and GPS monitoring are insufficient for keeping the community safe.
The reason for this, the USAO filing noted, is that the Pretrial Services Agency (PSA) ‘only works during normal business hours.’ Shockingly, this would mean that if a suspect violates their terms at certain times, ‘PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact, once normal business hours resume.’ ”
Yeah, that’s going to keep the neighborhood safe.Report
I have an acquaintance that is formerly of the USA office for DC. My understanding is that they just will not prosecute with any vigor due to leadership decisions and will plea virtually everyone down to negligible time under the sentencing guidelines. There’s also a substack called DC Crime Facts that really digs into the data. It’s pretty crazy, for as hard as the gun laws are in the district, being completely unwilling go throw the book at anyone.Report
In other news, it appears the Biden Administration is indeed serious about down-listing cannibis:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/politics/joe-biden-marijuana-rules/index.htmlReport
Texas approves of political murder as long as the murder victims are on the left: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/texas-abbott-pardon-daniel-perry.htmlReport
Wiki reads like he should have stayed in prison. Conservatives shouldn’t have made him a cause.Report
yeah well that horse ran away with Kyle Rittenhouse.Report
Where is Richard Widmark when we need him?Report
Have you ever wondered what stupidity plus malice looks like?
NC Senate votes to ban people from wearing masks in public for health reasons
https://www.wect.com/2024/05/16/nc-senate-votes-ban-people-wearing-masks-public-health-reasons/Report
But but but but freedom!Report
To be clear, this is not a new law. It’s an amendment to a 1953 law which appears to have been passed in order to control the KKK. In section 14.12-11, there is a list of exceptions to the use of masks to conceal identity, the last of which is for health purposes.
Now, in the interest of controlling another violent hate group, the new amendment strikes 14‑12.11 (a) (6) (the health exception, which, as noted in the article, was added in 2020), adds a penalty enhancement for committing a crime while wearing a mask in order to conceal identity, with some additional prohibitions on impeding roadways (with or without mask). It also adds a provision that says that churches can’t be held to different standards than other private organizations when it comes to enforcement of emergency-related executive orders and local regulations.
Some of these provisions strike me as excessive, but they’ve been on the books for 70 years, and the health exemption has only been in place for four of those years. And people really have been abusing the health exemption to conceal their identities while committing crimes.
That said, I’m not sure what good removing the exemption does that isn’t accomplished with the penalty enhancement. I get that the goal is to identify people committing crimes after the fact, but if you can’t identify them because they’re wearing masks, then you can’t identify them to arrest them for wearing masks.Report
The “good” it does is makes Republican politicians look like they are “doing something” about a “challenge” to “freedom” that they railed against for … checks notes … most of the pandemic. Much like all the “voting integrity” legislation that solves no problem and addresses no threat – this is legislative virtue signaling.Report
There were similar discussions in March 2020 about the fact that many places made it illegal to go masked in public, and the same reasoning was pointed out back then — that the laws were aimed at the KKK specifically because obviously nobody else would consider it a moral imperative to wear a mask outside. This was considered to be obviously racist Republican nincompoopery because there was a pandemic, man, what are you doing telling us about laws and stuff, don’t you understand this is more important than that?Report
The media is confusingly reporting that the IDF has found three hostages, dead, which…isn’t technically true. They found three people they maybe thought were hostages, but were killed at the music festival and Hamas just drove off with their bodies. Although it’s actually unclear if anyone ever thought they were alive…Shani Louk, at minimum, was already known to be dead because Hamas paraded her dead body in the streets.
Before anyone asks why I’m nitpicking, why that matters, because they’re still dead and Hamas killed them…it’s because there is a rather large difference in the already-known fact that Hamas killed a lot of people at the music festival, and the implication they are currently murdering people they have already taken hostage, which as far as we know they haven’t. And Israel knows this, and that is why they are misreporting this as ‘recovering dead hostages’ instead of ‘recovering bodies of victims of Oct 7’.
Anyway, it’s good they finally got them back, and I’m actually somewhat startled to realize that an exchange of the dead apparently did not happen in the prior ceasefire…or maybe Hamas lost track of these bodies in the chaos of retreat?Report
“Were these people murdered? Yes. Were they murdered by Hamas? Also yes. Was it clear that Hamas had killed and kidnapped so indiscriminately and thoughtlessly that even they didn’t know whether any particular missing women were being held or not? Also also yes. But I think we need to focus on the important thing here, which is that when Jews claimed that searching for missing possibly-kidnapped persons justified their continuing to roll over Gaza, they were clearly lying, which only goes to show how you can never trust those damn dirty Jews…“Report
Yikes
https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/1791517736415203670?s=61Report
We are discussing the Lucy Letby case on the other blog. Lucy Letby is a British nurse who was convicted for murdering seven infants during her shifts. Much of the evidence in her case rested on what is basically a confession in her diary where she more or less wrote “I intentionally killed the babies.” This month an article in the New Yorker by Rachel Aviv casts doubt on whether Letby killed the babies. One of the arguments is that it ignores Letby’s reasonable explanation for her diary sentence that was a sign of her big mental health issues and needs to be read metaphorically as a statement of her feeling she failed as a nurse.
A lot of the arguments between the side that basically believes the conviction was legally proper and the prosecution met it’s burden of proof, which in the interest of disclosure I’m on, and the skeptics, is whether the jury had a duty to buy Letby’s explanation that the statement in her diary was a literal confession or a metaphorical statement about guilt. I’m inclined to believe that a jury has to listen but not necessarily buy the explanation. Huge coincidences combined with what seems to a handwritten confession, and Letby admit that she did write these thing and they weren’t planted evidence, gives juries enough evidence to convict.Report
“Much of the evidence in her case rested on what is basically a confession in her diary where she more or less wrote “I intentionally killed the babies.” ”
please don’t put quote marks around something that a person accused of murder did not actually write, sir
“Huge coincidences combined with what seems to a handwritten confession”
protip: when what you’re saying is exactly the kind of thing that the bad guy says in a Very Special Sitcom Episode morality-play about racism, you should probably think about what it is you’re saying and why you think it’s okayReport
Here are some of Letby’s writings that were used to convict here: “The police spent the day searching her house. Inside, they found a note
with the heading “NOT GOOD ENOUGH.” There were several phrases scrawled
across the page at random angles and without punctuation: “There are no
words”; “I can’t breathe”; “Slander Discrimination”; “I’ll never have
children or marry I’ll never know what it’s like to have a family”; “WHY
ME?”; “I haven’t done anything wrong”; “I killed them on purpose
because I’m not good enough to care for them”; “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.””
There are at least two damning sentences in this. “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them” and “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.” When you combine these two sentences with “I haven’t done anything wrong”, which reads as self-justification and deflection than it doesn’t really take that much mental energy to see why a finder of fact, judge or jury, would decide to take a really huge coincidence and what appears to be a big hand-written confession and take it literally rather than as a metaphor for professional failure. i really have no idea why some members of my political tribe decided to take up this case as a hill to die on.Report
” i really have no idea why some members of my political tribe decided to take up this case as a hill to die on.”
someone’s vague maunderings in a diary were used as proof that she intentionally murdered seven babies? the conviction was based mostly on the fact that a tall white man yelled real good? gosh i wonder why people might find that troubling.Report
Iran’s President and several top officials are apparently missing after their copter went down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D83BHkVrJM8Report
That’s some bad luck right there.Report
The two main theories seem to be “Israel did it” and “Iran did it”.Report
Both the weather and the terrain are very difficult. This could easily be something more mundane.
We saw this in Poland. Combine flying in the fog, under dangerous conditions, with high ranking officials who can order the pilot to do stupid things, and that’s what happens.Report
So that’s three main theories. But yours is no fun. Just the most likely one.Report
After what happened to Kobe I don’t know why anyone would get into one of those things.Report
In this case, basically because he had to. Iran has serious mountains and a lot don’t have roads. Like with Poland, he was going to a remote area because of politics. Recovery crew haven’t even gotten to the crash site yet. Videos show serious fog, like “unsafe to drive”.
Also, new theory. This was an old helicopter and they have trouble getting parts because of sanctions. If something goes wrong then they have to land… on a roadless mountain where the fog is so bad that they can’t see.Report