A very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about:
Critical Race Theory: If it is not taught, it cannot be CRT, period, as CRT is a sociological and political theory, not any form of action. Moreover, as the name suggests, it is a _critical_ theory. Critical theory is Marxism-based, as in, it critiquing (Hence the name) power structures. It's not the same thing as postmodernism (Which is a different theory) or social justice (Yet a different theory)
And it is at this point I'll admit that I don't fully understand the theory or care that much about this academic sociological theories. Literally nothing about it is important unless you need to learn it for a sociology class or are a practicing sociologist writing papers.
But to be clear, just because something is taught doesn't make it CRT either. A lot of people decided that what was being taught to kids was CRT because it pointed out racism was a systemic problem. Which is something CRT asserts, yes. And...so does everyone else. That's pretty much agreed by all people who study the issue. Doing otherwise is sorta like trying to discribe a gas by looking at the movement of individual gas molucules and how they bounce of each other. I'm not here to argue that, just to say 'This is generally accepted by people who study it'
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Affirmative action: This is generally used to mean quotas and reduced standards for minorities and women, a thing that really never caught on anywhere except higher education.
It hasn't been legal in colleges since 2023, and has been on pretty shaky legal ground for corporations for a while, despite the Supreme Court explicitly saying it was legal back in 91. And, of course, 'standards' is incredibly nebulous when hiring, so about the only thing anyone could _maybe_ in trouble for would be explicit quotas.
Referring to this as DEI is...just misleading. I'm not saying it wouldn't be under that if it was being done today, but it's simply not a thing that's done anywhere, and really wasn't done anywhere except colleges after the 90s. (This is what Starbucks is alleged have done, and denies.)
The Federal government, notable, has _never_ done this with employees. With the sole exception, which was much debated, of reduced physical standards of women in the military. And I'm not taking a position on that, but regardless, it is a unique thing done in that one instance. So anyone who thinks that what we're talking about WRT removing governmental DEI programs is misinformed.
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Now stuff that does fit under the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion umbrella and is done in the modern world. I'll give them names so people can talk about them. First, job stuff, aka, 'diversity':
DEI-Job Applications: This is a company (And schools often do it.) being willing to spend extra time and effort to get minority and female job applicants, while not preferring them in the hiring. For example, a company might make a specific recruitment brochure that has Black people on it, and send Black recruiters to a job fair in a specific place they know there will be Black people at, with the intent of increasing the amount of Black applicants.
Now, you might be thinking 'If they're willing to do that for applicants, to spend extra effort to find Black people to hire, they surely are willing to hire them over equally qualified white people', but the joke is on you (Well, really the joke is more on the Black applicants), because studies show this does not actually change the racial makeup who is hired, and is, indeed, nearly completely useless for race except you can list it as part of your company's DEI program. yay?
But I used a minority as an example because this does work, to some level, for women. Companies that actively try to hire women do get more female applicants but _do_ start hiring more of them, although the field is still tilted towards men. My theory is because women are more likely to be closer to the right social networks to get hired and often just need to be made aware a job is possible, whereas minorities often are not. But that's just my theory.
DEI-Changing requirements: Job requirements are, to put it bluntly, an incoherent mess. I think we all agree. They often requires degrees for no reason at all, a thing that doesn't actually help anything. And is a requirement that can easily can harm minorities, may of which lag behind whites in education. So some companies have just...changed the requirements for everyone.
This is, frankly, something more companies should do anyway, not because of DEI, just because those requirements are stupid.
Theoretically, you can call these two things Affirmative Action too, because they were sometimes done with that name also, but in reality they're more 'alternatives to Affirmative Action'
DEI-Blind hiring: Actually hiring based on literal written requirements and testing, instead of dumbass social networks that require you have personal connections and hiring managers that are weird bigots. This is how the Civil Service and Post Office hires people, and almost no one else. You'd be startled at how well this alone results in the hiring of more women and minorities, it's also as if there is some sort of systemic discrimination against them during hiring, _even when_ they have identical qualifications as white men.
I'm lying, that isn't really called DEI. This is just actually an efficient way to get diversity, and incidentally has resulted in a government that _liars are asserting is full of incompetent DEI hires_.
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And now we're at the stuff that isn't to do with hiring, but is under DEI. First, equity:
DEI-Harrassment: Yeah, so it turns out that there's a fairly small but significant portion of the population that will sexually harass others in the workplace, and it turns out that the courts frown on that. Some people will even coerce people into sex or relationships using the relative power they have in the company, and courts _really_ frown on that. I cannot stress how much they frown on that. And HR departments, since prehistoric times, have introduced training to make sure that, when this happens, the company isn't legally liable. Sorry, I mean to make sure it doesn't happen. Same with harassment based on race. And religion. And national origin. *keeps reading list* Wow, there a _lot_ of ways to harass a protected class. All of which will get us sued. Okay, so...let's there's this list of videos you are going to need to watch.
DEI-Accessibility: Yes, often this is under DEI, and sometimes it's even called DEIA, like it is in the government. (Weird how everyone kept talking about how Trump was removing DEI programs instead of DEIA. It's almost as if removing protections form handicapped workers would be massively unpopular. Please note the ADA does not _cover_ the executive branch.) I don't think I have to explain what this is.
And last, and certainly least, inclusion:
DEI-Weird employee celebration: Basically, have odd celebrations of...um, non-mainstream stuff. I don't really know how to describe this, it's a very broad umbrella. It can cover everything from celebrating Pride to having a Hispanic Employee Day to the military showing a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in training.
DEI-The same, but outwardly facing: Aka, having a booth at Pride. Having a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in recruitment. Some of this overlaps with 'DEI-Job Applications', and weird 'trying to get applications from minorities' can loop back and be a thing to brag about to potential customers.
Basically, this is sorta saying 'These sort of people belong here'.
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Now, I have sat down and explained what some of this stuff is. I've probably explained it badly, and I've probably completely forgotten something, but I have at least _vaguely_ explained it and presented actual terms that people can use to talk it.
Note that this is all extremely watered down from DEI, as as a theory, wants. For example, no one does actual equity. Everything they do in that regard is basically required by law, or at least risking lawsuits if they don't. I'm not talking about some ideal form of DEI, I'm talking about what exists.
Whatever the heck it is that the Smithsonian was doing, it wasn’t that.
The Smithsonian wasn't doing anything except making a museum exhibit. There's not some magical name for 'museum exhibits that say kinda silly things'.
No, I’m pretty sure that what is being fought is “quit talking about race in ways that cost us votes”.
And once again, we are in the 'Are Democrats _actually_ talking about this in any perceivable way, or are Republicans just claiming that?'
Because it's pretty easy to notice the stuff you are talking about is not, uh, anything Democrats are doing, or even anything the government is doing. (No, the Smithsonian is not part of the government, and isn't controlled by the government, although the government provides so much funding for it that if the government wants to force something to happen, it can by threatening purse strings. But the government doesn't control the leadership in any direct way, and there's no indication that it was told to make an exhibit in that way.)
OMG! That’s part of the name of the essay I wrote way back when!
And yet this site has learned nothing, apparently.
You mean stuff like Kendi’s thing at Boston University? Was that really DEI? Was it CRT?
I like how you are just pretending these are things we cannot know. I think I'll give a very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about. *proceeds to spend an hour on it*.
We hammered out that everybody who was complaining about CRT was not, in fact, complaining about what CRT actually was but they were, instead, complaining about bad DEI.
I honestly have ignored 90% of what this site talks about as CRT because it is all so stupid it risks making people near it stupid by proxy. If that's the conclusion you all came to, okay. I can see how that makes sense, and it's not 100% wrong. (I mean, teaching kids stuff in school isn't CRT, but isn't DEI either.)
My argument is that the Smithsonian was right to pull it and a *LOT* of the DEI folks out there should have followed the lead of the Smithsonian and, had they done so, we wouldn’t be here talking about how even freakin’ Vox is talking about the importance of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater now.
So now the thing that is being fought is 'talking about race in stupid ways'? (To be clear, talking about the Tuskegee Airmen is talking about race in _good_ ways, right?) I could have _sworn_ the suppose problem with DEI was racial determination in hiring that discriminated against certain people. That's the reason the Republicans want to get rid of it, right?
If we were having this discussion on this site, and were smart people, we'd be talking about motte-and-bailey. Oh, wait, we are having it here. I cannot emphasis how incredibly fishing stupid this entire decade-long conversation has been, at every level, from the national to this exact site.
Perhaps most importantly: DEI programs in the government literally exist in real life, and have actually done things in real life, they are not _assumptions_ we cobble together out of _other places_ like 'Museum exhibit' and 'article in magazine' and 'What someone who writes on DEI has said'. These programs are not some hypothetical we are debating, where we try to prove what is 'really DEI'.
Those programs LITERALLY EXIST AND DO THINGS. WE CAN KNOW WHAT THOSE THINGS ARE. WE DO NOT HAVE TO GUESS.
Haven't we _always_ had to defend the world against aggressive countries indefinitely? Was there some timeline we were going to stop?
And I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of that, but the option to doing it is...not doing it, and watching the world get conquered by whoever.
And even if we don't care about that for some reason (Pretty sure we should), that already threatens our allies, so are we going to stop having allies?
And...won't that eventually that threaten us? There's not some imaginary world where we live safely with a nation that makes it clear it wants to conquer the world. You can't give people 11 inches and expect them not to take the entire foot.
Of course, the ideal situation is that no country wants to behave that way, then we don't have to defend anyone, and that _used_ to be the ultimate policy goal of the US, which we did with soft power and the little bit of threat of hard power.
...well, until very recently, where Trump has made it clear that expansionism was good, actually.
"Hey, look, isn't it funny that this person was so worried about the health risks of unintended pregnancy under this administration's attack on reproductive rights that they had to take a permanent option there. Ha ha, what a loser!"
Wait, so they have to send out a letter that says “you have grounds to sue us”?
That's what the lawsuit wants, yeah. They want Starbucks to send out a letter _notifying_ employees and potential employees that their rights might have been violated by Starbucks.
To be clear, requiring this sort of notification isn't super-uncommon in actual real employment discrimination cases that companies lose in court. But it's not something that tends to be part of a _settlement_, even in, again, real cases that can show real harm. Which this...isn't. Which is why I am pretty sure that Starbucks is going go hire every lawyer that exists to fight this.
What I'm unsure about is if Missouri put that in there to play hardball as something they can take out later, have Starbucks settles for a trivial fine and policy changes they don't care about...or if Missouri is doing this entire thing as a political stunt and doesn't not actually care about the outcome.
Honestly, both ways it is a political stunt, but the question is really 'Does Missouri want to win a weak victory, or do they want to string this out and run it as a long-term attack?'
The first would be the obvious answer if I believed that Missouri understood how weak their case was. Throw a bunch of stuff at Starbucks, hand Starbucks a deal that requires them to change policies and pay a fine that _sounds_ big to the rubes that do not understand quite how rich Starbucks is, declare victory, and go home.
But we are now at the point where it makes sense to assume that anyone doing any sort of lawyering on conservative sides could be a raving lunatic 10 seconds from disbarment and 30 seconds from being arrested for fraud, so I really don't know if they understand that.
(Oh, speaking of people being disbarred...Bove has stepped into the Eric Adams case and signed the dismissal of the case herself. Hey, hint: When a bunch of your subordinates resign rather than do something that could get them disbarred, _don't do it yourself_. And...you do understand the judge can _refuse_ to let you dismiss the case, right? And after this clown-show, will do exactly that?)
I went to look at Jacobin and The Nation and they don’t have any articles about the importance of a Steelmanned DEI instead of a Strawmanned one.
Saying 'This particular person's slideshow that goes along with training is being misrepresented and lies are being told about what the training is actually teaching' is not 'steelmanning'.
The actual things that is being said in those courses is not some position being taken in a debate. It is a pretty objective fact, it is a knowable thing that can be known by observing reality. We have records of these courses being taught, we have material that explains what a _slideshow_ means.
Or we can read some extremely short text on a slideshow out of context and conclude whatever makes the slideshow sound the worst. Or, even better, we can just somehow absorb from the air that DEI training generally includes this.
Are there no objective opinion writers out there?
Eric Levitz isn't 'unobjective', whatever that is supposed to mean in an opinion writer. He's just fallen for a particular conservative lie without looking into it much. It's pretty easy to do, conservative lies permeate the very air that political writers breathe.
And his job at Vox is basically to write articles that lean left while nominally throwing a few bones to conservatives. As it says in his bio before the article, 'He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right.'. In Vox-speak, that means 'Write like normal but say something nice about the right'.
And I now notice we've gotten into a discussion abouce this guy, _instead of_ his opinion piece or the specific claims about Tema Okum, which is the part of the article you quoted and it appeared you wanted to talk about.
Do you want to talk about the _other_ parts of the article now? We could do that instead. I mean, this part seems pretty important to me:
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie deems that last argument dangerously naive. Bouie grants some of Sunkara’s premises: He concedes that DEI programs often serve little purpose beyond corporate PR. But he contends that the Trump administration’s war on DEI is not narrowly targeted at frivolous multicultural messaging or diversity workshops. Rather, the administration is rolling back civil rights enforcement, denigrating nonwhite and female federal workers, and restricting the recruitment of Black professionals. All this is more likely to yield something approaching “segregation” than a renewal of class solidarity, in Bouie’s estimation. “To concede that this administration has a point about DEI,” he writes, “is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law.”
But, hey, why don't you lead the discussion here. What part of this article are we talking about? I'll let you choose.
Or are we having a discussion about Eric Levitz, a person I don't think anyone particularly cares about and I'd barely heard of before?
I think the 'if they end up sending out notices about how the were possibly unlawfully discriminatory to employees and former employees as the AG wants, making it both easier and likely for someone to sue them' is The Line there.
Both because settling without that is likely to be trivial (Fines are never at even vaguely harmful levels.) and will be a result of Missouri trying to back down without losing face, and also because it might be hard to judge other parts of the settlements. But either the letters go out or they do not, that's something that will be known.
And I am willing to bet that Starbucks is very unwilling to send out those letters, whereas they will be perfectly willing to pay trivial amounts of money or even change policies. In fact, they _already_ changed policies to some extent back in 2023.
I'm actually a little baffled as to why we care what the 'official' outcome is? My claim is that Missouri has a crap case, not that Starbucks is some morally upright corporation that will never cave. Starbucks has no morals, it's a sociopath, like most corporations. It has no problem with paying a fine and changing whatever, it's not going to 'protect' anyone.
The reason they won't cave is the Missouri AG is trying to set up a situation where they have to admit guilt and notify people of said 'guilt', opening them up to tons more lawsuits. (In other words, settling does the exact opposite of what it normally does, aka 'end this'.) And they have more money than Missouri and can pay more lawyers.
What fits under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is _huge_.
It's like railing against 'Public Relations', claiming it's some sort of evil entity that denies real life dangers of products. A statement that has,, in fact, been true about the public relations of, for example, cigarette companies back in the 60. But it's not a generally true statement.
What’s worse, certain diversity trainings promote ideas that are at once arguably racist and organizationally unhealthy. For instance, one of the most influential equity gurus, Tema Okun, argues in her trainings that “objectivity,” “a sense of urgency,” and thinking in binaries such as “good or bad” and “right or wrong” are defining characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” She therefore advises organizations to be on guard against these exclusionary tendencies.
Oh, and the article is straight-up lying about this, repeating falsehoods from conservatives.
Yes, Tema Okum does point out that thinking in binaries is bad. Thinking in binaries is incredibly reductive and not at all good approach to manage people. Conservatives lie about this point, trying to imply that this is saying that right and wrong don't exist, which is an entirely different idea. She doesn't say that. She merely says 'Do not run around classifying everything you see as X or Y', and one of the things she lists is right or wrong, a perfectly normal lesson to teach people and not controversial except among lunatics. You should not run around classifying all human behavior as good or bad.
In fact, this is _literally_ how you behave here, Jaybird: Talking about Team Good and Team Bad in sarcastic ways, trying to make the point that people have picked sides and see every thing that anyone on their side does through that lens. I disagree with a lot of the point you think you're making there because the two sides do not behave identically at all, but the actual concept holds, and you can see how that would be a bad _management_ style to do that, right?
Or to put it in management terms: You don't need to classify any employee's request for accommodations as right or wrong. You can just do it if it's possible, or not if it is not. You don't need to make a _moral_ decision about it. Likewise, you don't need to have an opinion if an employee's boyfriend is 'good for her'. Or judge their lunch. That's not actually within your remit.
What has happened here is the same thing that has always happened: Conservatives have tracked down a single example of something that they can remove all context from and invent distortions about, and then repeat it over and over as if their distortion not only is true, but the entirety of the thing. So suddenly DEI becomes teaching 'there is no such thing as right or wrong', instead of the actual thing it's teaching, which is 'Why are you trying to judge if this disabled person 'needs' his wheelchair?'
And even that 3.75% is misleadingly high. That number is, statistically, _below_ 0%.
How? They got 3.75% retirement in a workforce, over a span of 75% of the year (From now until September), that has a yearly turnover of 6%.
To repeat, they just had 3.75% of the workforce resign in a way that gets them paid until September, a time period over which 4.5% of them were going to resign anyway.
And those people, uh, wouldn't have gotten paid for several months after resigning. Or would have worked for several more months. One or the other.
This has produced _negative_ savings.
(Presumably, that last 0.75% just haven't _decided_ they are resigning yet.)
Well, if you read the lawsuit, there are changes to policy that the AG wants to happen. (Any fines, as I said, are completely pointless for a corporation their size.)
So, it would seem like that's the logical victory condition, objectively speaking. Whether Starbucks makes those changes or not. I suspect that if Starbucks asserted it would make those changes, the lawsuit would be settled with no money tomorrow.
The problem is that Starbuck has claimed that some of the stuff being alleged _isn't_ their policy. It's easy to say 'Oh, they agreed to these changes that are not in fact changes'.
And I don't think they're going to put up with this, and aren't going to settle. I think they realize what's going to happen if they do, because part of the setup is to try to get them to admit something to make it easy for people to sue them.
Starbucks earns almost thrice the yearly revenue as Missouri. And unlike Missouri, they aren't about to have government aid to them crash into the ground and set their budget on fire. They can fight this.
Okay, yes, I will admit would actually be a violation of Federal law to take out those ads, but I am fairly certain that is dead letter thanks to the corporations getting first amendment rights.
I guess we'll see, and we'll also see if what Starbucks has done qualifies as that. That law actually is about _printing advertisements_, not internal policy.
No judge is going to allow discovery for whatever this is.
Anti-discrimation lawsuits, and in fact all lawsuits, need _victims_. Victims that were harmed by some tort. There are no victims listed in the lawsuit besides a handwave at 'non-BIPOC Missourians'. That is...not how the law works.
If you could just handwave at a class of people as possible victims, civil rights court cases would have been _so much easier_. We wouldn't need cases like Loving vs. Virginia, organizations not harmed by the law could have just sued over the law directly.
It's actually amazing how much of this lawsuit is complete gibberish that exists to sound important but completely fails to lay out the legal theory it is working under.
No. It is perfectly legal for a business to have a overtly discriminatory employment policy. It is entirely legal for a business to assert, publicly, that they only hire white people. They can take out ads saying that.
To quote: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including transgender status, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business.
You see where it says 'have a disproportionately negative effect'? It doesn't mean 'Logically will have an effect', or even 'is explicitly stated to do that exact effect'. It means have. It requires a thing that has actually happened. The negative effects must have happened, and must be disproportionately happening to one group.
Aka, there has to be a victim. A possible employee who applied and can prove they were denied. Or an employee who tried to get the mentorship program and was denied it. (For the record, Starbucks has denied that was only available to BIPOC, so _someone_ is lying.) And not only do they have to prove not only was it denied to them _for_ that reason, but that it happens enough to be 'disproportionate'
And at that point, that individual victim could recover damages, the company would also get fined, and the court could issue an order barring future behavior like that. It's not going to be a big fine.
And they better find such a victim quickly, the status of limitations for filing such a claim is 180 days, which can be extended to 300 days if certain things are true, which I do not believe they are here but I could be wrong. Either way, the stuff the talk about in the suit about the policy in 2023 is overt nonsense, no employment discrimination that happened in 2023 can be sued over.
And that's not even getting into the stuff the _courts_ make people jump through. That's just the text of the law.
So anyway, yeah, conservatives have basically completely defanged any sort of anti-discrimination employment law...have fun trying to sue anyone under it, LOL.
When I say 'conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection', I do not mean 'people wrote articles'.
I mean 'Conservatives group got cases put before courts and conservative judges set precedents in both those cases and other cases'.
It is incredibly hard to prove discrimination in employment, even with a very specific case, aka, a specific _person_ who got harmed, even with tons of documentation that they were harmed because they were in a protected class.
Here, there literally doesn't appear to be a specific case, no actual person being harmed, and I'm not even sure how the lawsuit is supposed to _work_.
Reading the lawsuit, it really does look like he's vaguely handwaving at the Missouri population and asserting 'Starbucks could operate cheaper and faster if they hired the best person for the job instead of minorities, and that harms residents', but how poorly a company is operating and supposed bad choices they are making is literally not something you can sue over, at least not under _antidiscrimination_ law. (I guess shareholders could sue over that, but that's not what is happening.)
Or to put it simplier terms: A lot of proving discrimination is demonstrating _patterns_, and not only is there not a pattern here, there isn't even an incident. Instead, there's a lot of quoting their web page. Do you know what web pages talking about the behavior of yourself are called in court?
HEARSAY
You have to prove it actually happened, and _then_ you can quote them talking about their own motives. You can't just quote them.
LOL, in fact, the article goes into the percentage, I had forgotten. So, uh, looks like 46.5% of Starbucks is BIPOC, and the current population is 41.6%, which not only is essentially even, but also fails to account for the fact that Starbucks generally exist in cities, which statistically have a higher percentage of BIPOC than the nation, so it's entirely possible Starbucks is under the percentage of people who could plausibly be working at any particular Starbucks. Regardless, they are extremely close.
Good luck proving that, even pretending the statistics were on their side, which even in a company like Starbucks is not true. The odds are that Starbucks has no more minorities working for it than exist in the general population, and in fact probably less.
Hey, remember all that arguing about how the reason that certain industries had more men in them than women is that women didn't want to do those jobs as much?
None of you understand quite how much conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection, and making it harder and harder to prove discrimination based on race and sex.
And their statement about diversity may sound statement that they're going to hire minorities instead of white people, but the court isn't going to treat them that way, because conservatives argue for years that the opposite isn't true, or at least isn't inherently true, victims still have to prove that they were personally discriminated against, and there aren't even any victims here!
This is why, incidentally, these lawsuits instead have a weird basis in the idea that these hiring decisions are costing customers time and money, a thing that Starbucks is legally 100% allowed to do. They are allowed to actually have as written policy that all coffee orders take an hour
My theory on all this is that Elon is legitimately so stupid, and Trump legitimately just believes everything he's told, that they believed that they were going to be some huge examples of actual fraud they could point at, like government employees just writing checks to themselves or their spouses or things like that.
They assume that they'd find this almost instantly, because this is how they would operate. And this is the sort of stuff that does happen at local government levels.
But it's not really the sort of stuff that happens at the higher levels, in fact they can't happen like that. And they haven't found the stuff they thought they were going to immediately find.
This is why they have to keep inventing things like Politico and I assume everyone has heard about the Reuters 'social deception' story by now and what it actually was about? (I kept waiting for that to hit this site, but I guess people were smart enough not to buy it? To spend 10 seconds googling it before posting about it? I admit I am surprised.)
Which, should be pointed out, are not examples of fraud or corruption, even if they had been as presented. So at best we're quibbling over microscopic amounts of government spending that were properly authorized. Which does not sound important enough to upend the entire government.
And I also think they actually believed that a huge amount of government employees would take the buyout because a huge amount of them were functionally criminals, grifting the system, and would want out before being caught.
Again, projection. I cannot emphasize enough how much this is how they literally think and operate.
That's why this isn't going particularly well for them, and they're being forced to lie about what they find and just start firing people. But it's not how they expected things to go.
As someone who has read that fanfic, I thought at the time that the fanfic wasn't half bad, if way too long and with a lot of weird philosophical stuff that the writer was obviously trying to push.
But the reason it was semi enjoyable was mostly that it was deconstructing all the nonsense in Rowlings' story, making everyone in all sides in the war act in a much more intelligent manner, and trying to figure out how magic should actually work, and looking back, that doesn't really make it a good story as much as it makes the original a bad story.
And again, can I emphasize how insanely long it was, like 10 times as long as it needed to be.
References to trans people have been removed from the National Parks Service web page abut Stonewall. It was done fairly ineptly and in real time, as Blue Sky noticed, with 'gay and trans people' ending up saying things like 'gay and people' and stuff like that, and LGBTQ being edited to LGBQ, before whoever realizing how dumb that was and editing that down to 'LGB', which is not a thing, and then making another pass to get rid of the word 'queer' in general.
It's unclear if this was the National Parks Service or some intern with write access to the website.
What makes this worse is, for the record: The riot at Stonewall was not technically over homosexuality laws, but gender policing. While homosexual _sex_ was illegal, that, uh, was pretty hard to police at a bar where people were not having sex, so the police were actually looking for people violating 'crossdresser' laws (1) and wearing clothing that did not match their sex...which the police sometimes found hard to determine so would forcibly check genitalia.
So now the government is officially leaving trans people out...when the arrests were literally about gender and the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie(2), who was being arrested for not conforming to gender norms.
1) Which often were themselves incredibly vague interpretation of 'masquerade' or 'impersonation' laws. There is a myth among the queer community that you had to be wearing three items of the correct gender's clothing to be legal, but that never appears to have been the law, and in fact police were often harassing crossdressers with literally no laws backing them up at all, just a vague feeling of 'You are not allowed to dress like that'. And often arrest anyone near those people just because they wanted to.
2) She was a butch lesbian who probably was being arrested for dressing like a man, aka, _wearing pants_. Although considering she could pass for a man, and had once been arrested on the assumption she was a man dressed as a woman, who even know what was going through the police's head. Translated from caveman, probably something like 'This not normal girl or normal boy, arrest weird person!'. Law do not matter to the police.
I was planning on mentioning earlier today, but got busy, that it was weird was that the Manhattan US attorney's office had not dropped charges against Eric Adams, despite being told to do so Monday and that is fairy trivial paperwork , and the media had not noticed and acted like it had been done. Someone pointed this out on Blue Sky, that the only real reason it would take so long it there was pushback.
Well, there was: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd
It's worth pointing out the reason the Justice Department gave in their memo was:
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said in a memo Monday that the case should be dismissed so Adams could aid Trump’s immigration crackdown and campaign for reelection free from facing criminal charges. The primary is four months away and Adams has multiple challengers.
To start with, 'so he can campaign for months for reelection without criminal charges' is nonsense. We're four months out from the primary, not the election, and the charges were filed September 26, 2024, so eight months from the primary. And the actual election is November 4, 2025. So they were filed slightly over a year out.
Soon we will reach the point where you can literally never be charged with a crime if you plan to run for office, ever.
Secondly...yeah, um, 'helping on an immigration crackdown' is not a valid reason for people to get away with corruption. That reason is, itself, blatantly corrupt. Whether or not someone is 'helpful' to the administration should have no bearing on whether or not they are criminally prosecuted for crimes they did.
I mean, we all know they're doing that, but the Justice Department just out and _said_ it in the memo.
So the US Attorney just...refused to do it. And has now resigned.
Meanwhile, I've had people point out the courts probably will not approve dropping the case without prejudice anyway. They will not be happy with the explicit statement that Adams' trial is delayed _only as long as he is helping the administration_. If they do allow it to be dropped (Which they do not), they will certainly require it to be dropped with prejudice so it cannot be filed again if he stops helping them. Because courts are often against *checks notes* literal criminal extortion.
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It's going to be interesting to watch how the court system and professional lawyers react to the current administration's ineptness. Like just blatantly saying the illegal stuff in a memo.
For another example, the Justice Department has filed an idiotic lawsuit against New York that is going to be laughed out of court, asserting that somehow New York is endangering Federal immigration officials by not turning over driver's license data to the Federal government. The lawsuit, hilariously, claims that Federal law trumps state law, a thing that is true and might be more relevant if there _was_ a law requiring that data be turned over. There is not.
The last time Trump was in office, his idiotic lawsuit gibberish hadn't really started, and didn't infect the Justice Department. This time, it has, with cases that are just as grounded as his election cases, with legal theories that are completely insane. And he's brought in lawyers willing to do them.
Did you all know there's not legally a reason the courts couldn't declare the DoJ a vexatious litigant and thus requires the court's approval before DoJ file lawsuits in Federal court? You'd think logically that shouldn't be possible, but there ain't no exception for 'You cannot do this to actual Federal Department of Justice' in the vexatious litigant rules.
This conversation started with the following situation:
a) The Trump administration told the military to remove all DEI programs
b) The Tuskegee Airmen videos that were part of Air Force Basic Training were part of a DEI initiative
c) thus is extremely obvious that the decision to remove those videos was an entirely correct interpretation of the EO
I was making the assumption you actually knew the first, and have enough basic logic to understand the last point, and your point of misunderstanding was the second point.
Which means you (And Jaybird), objectively, did not know at least one thing a DEI program did at the start of this thread. Not just didn't know it, but dismissed the idea that such a video _could_ be part of a DEI program without even bothering to check.
I guess, alternately, you could have no idea what the EO said, or might be Patrick Star levels of dumb and not be able to put together 'If they say to remove all of a thing, and something is part of that thing, they have told you to remove that something'.
In any case, I think that a policy of removing too much and then putting back some of the stuff that shouldn’t have been removed is an acceptable price to pay.
Price to pay for what, is the goal to not having other DEI videos that do the same thing for women and Muslims and whoever the military has actively tried to recruit by showcasing _their_ accomplishments in the military? Is that the thing we were trying to do? And we accidentally included this one video in that we wanted to not include?
Jaybird, could you explain what you think DEI in the military _did_? And what now is no longer doing, or will eventually not be doing under the new policies?
Hardly. The way the local program works is we get worthless meetings on fighting microaggressions and there is pressure to hire non-white non-males.
Hey, Dark Matter, how about a compromise on that. There will officially be no pressure to hire 'non-white non-males' if we can implement exactly one law and a Federal agency to do it. The law is simple: The government will send out identical resumes, one with the name of someone that sounds like a white man, and one with the name of someone who sounds like a woman or minority. If a business follows up with the first one, and not the second, repeatedly, to a statistical level, we fine the company a large amount.
Maybe we already have information about that: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names
And realize how much worse that is when you realize how _automated_ that system is. That at that first passs, resumes are being sent through a computer and scanned and spit out. Which means people are inserting themselves into the process at some point to discriminate, probably at the actual hiring manager's location. The hiring manager gets handed something by a computer telling them to call someone, glance at the name, and think 'Nah, not hiring a Jamal', even if they do not _think_ that's what they are thinking. The discrimination that happens at the interview level is likely much worse, just much harder to pin down objectively.
The entire conservative bugaboo of 'Unqualified non-white non-men hired instead of white men' literally isn't happening. First, because that isn't the goal of that form of DEI, it's to hire equally qualified non-white non-men, but even that does not actually work, they make, statistically, almost no difference. DEI programs like that do not actually accomplish their goals.
What they end up doing is pulling noise makers and throwing themselves a party because the company, entirely normally, did hire someone who wasn't a white man.
If those such programs vanished, no one would care. The problem is that isn't all DEI does.
That’s somewhere between worthless, unethical, and illegal.
Yes, a huge chunk of DEI are worthless and accomplish nothing. Welcome to the business world, where huge chunks of middle management do nothing useful.
But I'm lying there, because there actually is evidence that doing things like talking about microagressions may have people dismiss the idea mentally, but they actually do start understanding the concept of 'don't make assumptions about people and force them to interact with those assumptions'. And it makes it clear that more overt bigotry is completely off the table. So it's not entirely worthless.
Other chunks of DEI do things like 'Talk about the accomplishments of Black people in the military in an attempt to recruit and keep more Black people in the military', as some people at this site have been startled to learn.
Other parts of DEI are making sure buildings are wheelchair accessible, and in fact DEI has started to be called DEIA, with 'accessibility' at the end.
Other parts of DEI are basically 'This brochure we are putting out is entirely full of white people, and as we do not have any actual minorities, let's hire some models to pose for some photo', which is obviously not useful to _anyone_. But hardly needs to be barred by law.
It's almost as if 'a vague term to refer to a program that reduces biases and increase understanding of differences in this specific place' is a term that can, in fact, be used to refer to many different things. Some of which are worthless, some of which actually do useful short-term things, some of which might meaningfully change things long term, and some of which, I guess, can be evil.
But railing against it is like railing against marketing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
A very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about:
Critical Race Theory: If it is not taught, it cannot be CRT, period, as CRT is a sociological and political theory, not any form of action. Moreover, as the name suggests, it is a _critical_ theory. Critical theory is Marxism-based, as in, it critiquing (Hence the name) power structures. It's not the same thing as postmodernism (Which is a different theory) or social justice (Yet a different theory)
And it is at this point I'll admit that I don't fully understand the theory or care that much about this academic sociological theories. Literally nothing about it is important unless you need to learn it for a sociology class or are a practicing sociologist writing papers.
But to be clear, just because something is taught doesn't make it CRT either. A lot of people decided that what was being taught to kids was CRT because it pointed out racism was a systemic problem. Which is something CRT asserts, yes. And...so does everyone else. That's pretty much agreed by all people who study the issue. Doing otherwise is sorta like trying to discribe a gas by looking at the movement of individual gas molucules and how they bounce of each other. I'm not here to argue that, just to say 'This is generally accepted by people who study it'
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Affirmative action: This is generally used to mean quotas and reduced standards for minorities and women, a thing that really never caught on anywhere except higher education.
It hasn't been legal in colleges since 2023, and has been on pretty shaky legal ground for corporations for a while, despite the Supreme Court explicitly saying it was legal back in 91. And, of course, 'standards' is incredibly nebulous when hiring, so about the only thing anyone could _maybe_ in trouble for would be explicit quotas.
Referring to this as DEI is...just misleading. I'm not saying it wouldn't be under that if it was being done today, but it's simply not a thing that's done anywhere, and really wasn't done anywhere except colleges after the 90s. (This is what Starbucks is alleged have done, and denies.)
The Federal government, notable, has _never_ done this with employees. With the sole exception, which was much debated, of reduced physical standards of women in the military. And I'm not taking a position on that, but regardless, it is a unique thing done in that one instance. So anyone who thinks that what we're talking about WRT removing governmental DEI programs is misinformed.
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Now stuff that does fit under the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion umbrella and is done in the modern world. I'll give them names so people can talk about them. First, job stuff, aka, 'diversity':
DEI-Job Applications: This is a company (And schools often do it.) being willing to spend extra time and effort to get minority and female job applicants, while not preferring them in the hiring. For example, a company might make a specific recruitment brochure that has Black people on it, and send Black recruiters to a job fair in a specific place they know there will be Black people at, with the intent of increasing the amount of Black applicants.
Now, you might be thinking 'If they're willing to do that for applicants, to spend extra effort to find Black people to hire, they surely are willing to hire them over equally qualified white people', but the joke is on you (Well, really the joke is more on the Black applicants), because studies show this does not actually change the racial makeup who is hired, and is, indeed, nearly completely useless for race except you can list it as part of your company's DEI program. yay?
But I used a minority as an example because this does work, to some level, for women. Companies that actively try to hire women do get more female applicants but _do_ start hiring more of them, although the field is still tilted towards men. My theory is because women are more likely to be closer to the right social networks to get hired and often just need to be made aware a job is possible, whereas minorities often are not. But that's just my theory.
DEI-Changing requirements: Job requirements are, to put it bluntly, an incoherent mess. I think we all agree. They often requires degrees for no reason at all, a thing that doesn't actually help anything. And is a requirement that can easily can harm minorities, may of which lag behind whites in education. So some companies have just...changed the requirements for everyone.
This is, frankly, something more companies should do anyway, not because of DEI, just because those requirements are stupid.
Theoretically, you can call these two things Affirmative Action too, because they were sometimes done with that name also, but in reality they're more 'alternatives to Affirmative Action'
DEI-Blind hiring: Actually hiring based on literal written requirements and testing, instead of dumbass social networks that require you have personal connections and hiring managers that are weird bigots. This is how the Civil Service and Post Office hires people, and almost no one else. You'd be startled at how well this alone results in the hiring of more women and minorities, it's also as if there is some sort of systemic discrimination against them during hiring, _even when_ they have identical qualifications as white men.
I'm lying, that isn't really called DEI. This is just actually an efficient way to get diversity, and incidentally has resulted in a government that _liars are asserting is full of incompetent DEI hires_.
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And now we're at the stuff that isn't to do with hiring, but is under DEI. First, equity:
DEI-Harrassment: Yeah, so it turns out that there's a fairly small but significant portion of the population that will sexually harass others in the workplace, and it turns out that the courts frown on that. Some people will even coerce people into sex or relationships using the relative power they have in the company, and courts _really_ frown on that. I cannot stress how much they frown on that. And HR departments, since prehistoric times, have introduced training to make sure that, when this happens, the company isn't legally liable. Sorry, I mean to make sure it doesn't happen. Same with harassment based on race. And religion. And national origin. *keeps reading list* Wow, there a _lot_ of ways to harass a protected class. All of which will get us sued. Okay, so...let's there's this list of videos you are going to need to watch.
DEI-Accessibility: Yes, often this is under DEI, and sometimes it's even called DEIA, like it is in the government. (Weird how everyone kept talking about how Trump was removing DEI programs instead of DEIA. It's almost as if removing protections form handicapped workers would be massively unpopular. Please note the ADA does not _cover_ the executive branch.) I don't think I have to explain what this is.
And last, and certainly least, inclusion:
DEI-Weird employee celebration: Basically, have odd celebrations of...um, non-mainstream stuff. I don't really know how to describe this, it's a very broad umbrella. It can cover everything from celebrating Pride to having a Hispanic Employee Day to the military showing a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in training.
DEI-The same, but outwardly facing: Aka, having a booth at Pride. Having a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in recruitment. Some of this overlaps with 'DEI-Job Applications', and weird 'trying to get applications from minorities' can loop back and be a thing to brag about to potential customers.
Basically, this is sorta saying 'These sort of people belong here'.
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Now, I have sat down and explained what some of this stuff is. I've probably explained it badly, and I've probably completely forgotten something, but I have at least _vaguely_ explained it and presented actual terms that people can use to talk it.
Note that this is all extremely watered down from DEI, as as a theory, wants. For example, no one does actual equity. Everything they do in that regard is basically required by law, or at least risking lawsuits if they don't. I'm not talking about some ideal form of DEI, I'm talking about what exists.
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The Smithsonian wasn't doing anything except making a museum exhibit. There's not some magical name for 'museum exhibits that say kinda silly things'.
And once again, we are in the 'Are Democrats _actually_ talking about this in any perceivable way, or are Republicans just claiming that?'
Because it's pretty easy to notice the stuff you are talking about is not, uh, anything Democrats are doing, or even anything the government is doing. (No, the Smithsonian is not part of the government, and isn't controlled by the government, although the government provides so much funding for it that if the government wants to force something to happen, it can by threatening purse strings. But the government doesn't control the leadership in any direct way, and there's no indication that it was told to make an exhibit in that way.)
And yet this site has learned nothing, apparently.
I like how you are just pretending these are things we cannot know. I think I'll give a very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about. *proceeds to spend an hour on it*.
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I honestly have ignored 90% of what this site talks about as CRT because it is all so stupid it risks making people near it stupid by proxy. If that's the conclusion you all came to, okay. I can see how that makes sense, and it's not 100% wrong. (I mean, teaching kids stuff in school isn't CRT, but isn't DEI either.)
So now the thing that is being fought is 'talking about race in stupid ways'? (To be clear, talking about the Tuskegee Airmen is talking about race in _good_ ways, right?) I could have _sworn_ the suppose problem with DEI was racial determination in hiring that discriminated against certain people. That's the reason the Republicans want to get rid of it, right?
If we were having this discussion on this site, and were smart people, we'd be talking about motte-and-bailey. Oh, wait, we are having it here. I cannot emphasis how incredibly fishing stupid this entire decade-long conversation has been, at every level, from the national to this exact site.
Perhaps most importantly: DEI programs in the government literally exist in real life, and have actually done things in real life, they are not _assumptions_ we cobble together out of _other places_ like 'Museum exhibit' and 'article in magazine' and 'What someone who writes on DEI has said'. These programs are not some hypothetical we are debating, where we try to prove what is 'really DEI'.
Those programs LITERALLY EXIST AND DO THINGS. WE CAN KNOW WHAT THOSE THINGS ARE. WE DO NOT HAVE TO GUESS.
A lot of you are _really_ bad guessers.
On “Beware: Promises Being Kept”
Haven't we _always_ had to defend the world against aggressive countries indefinitely? Was there some timeline we were going to stop?
And I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of that, but the option to doing it is...not doing it, and watching the world get conquered by whoever.
And even if we don't care about that for some reason (Pretty sure we should), that already threatens our allies, so are we going to stop having allies?
And...won't that eventually that threaten us? There's not some imaginary world where we live safely with a nation that makes it clear it wants to conquer the world. You can't give people 11 inches and expect them not to take the entire foot.
Of course, the ideal situation is that no country wants to behave that way, then we don't have to defend anyone, and that _used_ to be the ultimate policy goal of the US, which we did with soft power and the little bit of threat of hard power.
...well, until very recently, where Trump has made it clear that expansionism was good, actually.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
"Hey, look, isn't it funny that this person was so worried about the health risks of unintended pregnancy under this administration's attack on reproductive rights that they had to take a permanent option there. Ha ha, what a loser!"
"
That's what the lawsuit wants, yeah. They want Starbucks to send out a letter _notifying_ employees and potential employees that their rights might have been violated by Starbucks.
To be clear, requiring this sort of notification isn't super-uncommon in actual real employment discrimination cases that companies lose in court. But it's not something that tends to be part of a _settlement_, even in, again, real cases that can show real harm. Which this...isn't. Which is why I am pretty sure that Starbucks is going go hire every lawyer that exists to fight this.
What I'm unsure about is if Missouri put that in there to play hardball as something they can take out later, have Starbucks settles for a trivial fine and policy changes they don't care about...or if Missouri is doing this entire thing as a political stunt and doesn't not actually care about the outcome.
Honestly, both ways it is a political stunt, but the question is really 'Does Missouri want to win a weak victory, or do they want to string this out and run it as a long-term attack?'
The first would be the obvious answer if I believed that Missouri understood how weak their case was. Throw a bunch of stuff at Starbucks, hand Starbucks a deal that requires them to change policies and pay a fine that _sounds_ big to the rubes that do not understand quite how rich Starbucks is, declare victory, and go home.
But we are now at the point where it makes sense to assume that anyone doing any sort of lawyering on conservative sides could be a raving lunatic 10 seconds from disbarment and 30 seconds from being arrested for fraud, so I really don't know if they understand that.
(Oh, speaking of people being disbarred...Bove has stepped into the Eric Adams case and signed the dismissal of the case herself. Hey, hint: When a bunch of your subordinates resign rather than do something that could get them disbarred, _don't do it yourself_. And...you do understand the judge can _refuse_ to let you dismiss the case, right? And after this clown-show, will do exactly that?)
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
Saying 'This particular person's slideshow that goes along with training is being misrepresented and lies are being told about what the training is actually teaching' is not 'steelmanning'.
The actual things that is being said in those courses is not some position being taken in a debate. It is a pretty objective fact, it is a knowable thing that can be known by observing reality. We have records of these courses being taught, we have material that explains what a _slideshow_ means.
Or we can read some extremely short text on a slideshow out of context and conclude whatever makes the slideshow sound the worst. Or, even better, we can just somehow absorb from the air that DEI training generally includes this.
Eric Levitz isn't 'unobjective', whatever that is supposed to mean in an opinion writer. He's just fallen for a particular conservative lie without looking into it much. It's pretty easy to do, conservative lies permeate the very air that political writers breathe.
And his job at Vox is basically to write articles that lean left while nominally throwing a few bones to conservatives. As it says in his bio before the article, 'He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right.'. In Vox-speak, that means 'Write like normal but say something nice about the right'.
And I now notice we've gotten into a discussion abouce this guy, _instead of_ his opinion piece or the specific claims about Tema Okum, which is the part of the article you quoted and it appeared you wanted to talk about.
Do you want to talk about the _other_ parts of the article now? We could do that instead. I mean, this part seems pretty important to me:
But, hey, why don't you lead the discussion here. What part of this article are we talking about? I'll let you choose.
Or are we having a discussion about Eric Levitz, a person I don't think anyone particularly cares about and I'd barely heard of before?
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
I think the 'if they end up sending out notices about how the were possibly unlawfully discriminatory to employees and former employees as the AG wants, making it both easier and likely for someone to sue them' is The Line there.
Both because settling without that is likely to be trivial (Fines are never at even vaguely harmful levels.) and will be a result of Missouri trying to back down without losing face, and also because it might be hard to judge other parts of the settlements. But either the letters go out or they do not, that's something that will be known.
And I am willing to bet that Starbucks is very unwilling to send out those letters, whereas they will be perfectly willing to pay trivial amounts of money or even change policies. In fact, they _already_ changed policies to some extent back in 2023.
I'm actually a little baffled as to why we care what the 'official' outcome is? My claim is that Missouri has a crap case, not that Starbucks is some morally upright corporation that will never cave. Starbucks has no morals, it's a sociopath, like most corporations. It has no problem with paying a fine and changing whatever, it's not going to 'protect' anyone.
The reason they won't cave is the Missouri AG is trying to set up a situation where they have to admit guilt and notify people of said 'guilt', opening them up to tons more lawsuits. (In other words, settling does the exact opposite of what it normally does, aka 'end this'.) And they have more money than Missouri and can pay more lawyers.
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
This is literally the point I've been making.
What fits under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is _huge_.
It's like railing against 'Public Relations', claiming it's some sort of evil entity that denies real life dangers of products. A statement that has,, in fact, been true about the public relations of, for example, cigarette companies back in the 60. But it's not a generally true statement.
Oh, and the article is straight-up lying about this, repeating falsehoods from conservatives.
Yes, Tema Okum does point out that thinking in binaries is bad. Thinking in binaries is incredibly reductive and not at all good approach to manage people. Conservatives lie about this point, trying to imply that this is saying that right and wrong don't exist, which is an entirely different idea. She doesn't say that. She merely says 'Do not run around classifying everything you see as X or Y', and one of the things she lists is right or wrong, a perfectly normal lesson to teach people and not controversial except among lunatics. You should not run around classifying all human behavior as good or bad.
In fact, this is _literally_ how you behave here, Jaybird: Talking about Team Good and Team Bad in sarcastic ways, trying to make the point that people have picked sides and see every thing that anyone on their side does through that lens. I disagree with a lot of the point you think you're making there because the two sides do not behave identically at all, but the actual concept holds, and you can see how that would be a bad _management_ style to do that, right?
Or to put it in management terms: You don't need to classify any employee's request for accommodations as right or wrong. You can just do it if it's possible, or not if it is not. You don't need to make a _moral_ decision about it. Likewise, you don't need to have an opinion if an employee's boyfriend is 'good for her'. Or judge their lunch. That's not actually within your remit.
What has happened here is the same thing that has always happened: Conservatives have tracked down a single example of something that they can remove all context from and invent distortions about, and then repeat it over and over as if their distortion not only is true, but the entirety of the thing. So suddenly DEI becomes teaching 'there is no such thing as right or wrong', instead of the actual thing it's teaching, which is 'Why are you trying to judge if this disabled person 'needs' his wheelchair?'
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
And even that 3.75% is misleadingly high. That number is, statistically, _below_ 0%.
How? They got 3.75% retirement in a workforce, over a span of 75% of the year (From now until September), that has a yearly turnover of 6%.
To repeat, they just had 3.75% of the workforce resign in a way that gets them paid until September, a time period over which 4.5% of them were going to resign anyway.
And those people, uh, wouldn't have gotten paid for several months after resigning. Or would have worked for several more months. One or the other.
This has produced _negative_ savings.
(Presumably, that last 0.75% just haven't _decided_ they are resigning yet.)
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Well, if you read the lawsuit, there are changes to policy that the AG wants to happen. (Any fines, as I said, are completely pointless for a corporation their size.)
So, it would seem like that's the logical victory condition, objectively speaking. Whether Starbucks makes those changes or not. I suspect that if Starbucks asserted it would make those changes, the lawsuit would be settled with no money tomorrow.
The problem is that Starbuck has claimed that some of the stuff being alleged _isn't_ their policy. It's easy to say 'Oh, they agreed to these changes that are not in fact changes'.
And I don't think they're going to put up with this, and aren't going to settle. I think they realize what's going to happen if they do, because part of the setup is to try to get them to admit something to make it easy for people to sue them.
Starbucks earns almost thrice the yearly revenue as Missouri. And unlike Missouri, they aren't about to have government aid to them crash into the ground and set their budget on fire. They can fight this.
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Okay, yes, I will admit would actually be a violation of Federal law to take out those ads, but I am fairly certain that is dead letter thanks to the corporations getting first amendment rights.
I guess we'll see, and we'll also see if what Starbucks has done qualifies as that. That law actually is about _printing advertisements_, not internal policy.
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No judge is going to allow discovery for whatever this is.
Anti-discrimation lawsuits, and in fact all lawsuits, need _victims_. Victims that were harmed by some tort. There are no victims listed in the lawsuit besides a handwave at 'non-BIPOC Missourians'. That is...not how the law works.
If you could just handwave at a class of people as possible victims, civil rights court cases would have been _so much easier_. We wouldn't need cases like Loving vs. Virginia, organizations not harmed by the law could have just sued over the law directly.
It's actually amazing how much of this lawsuit is complete gibberish that exists to sound important but completely fails to lay out the legal theory it is working under.
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No. It is perfectly legal for a business to have a overtly discriminatory employment policy. It is entirely legal for a business to assert, publicly, that they only hire white people. They can take out ads saying that.
To quote: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
You see where it says 'have a disproportionately negative effect'? It doesn't mean 'Logically will have an effect', or even 'is explicitly stated to do that exact effect'. It means have. It requires a thing that has actually happened. The negative effects must have happened, and must be disproportionately happening to one group.
Aka, there has to be a victim. A possible employee who applied and can prove they were denied. Or an employee who tried to get the mentorship program and was denied it. (For the record, Starbucks has denied that was only available to BIPOC, so _someone_ is lying.) And not only do they have to prove not only was it denied to them _for_ that reason, but that it happens enough to be 'disproportionate'
And at that point, that individual victim could recover damages, the company would also get fined, and the court could issue an order barring future behavior like that. It's not going to be a big fine.
And they better find such a victim quickly, the status of limitations for filing such a claim is 180 days, which can be extended to 300 days if certain things are true, which I do not believe they are here but I could be wrong. Either way, the stuff the talk about in the suit about the policy in 2023 is overt nonsense, no employment discrimination that happened in 2023 can be sued over.
And that's not even getting into the stuff the _courts_ make people jump through. That's just the text of the law.
So anyway, yeah, conservatives have basically completely defanged any sort of anti-discrimination employment law...have fun trying to sue anyone under it, LOL.
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When I say 'conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection', I do not mean 'people wrote articles'.
I mean 'Conservatives group got cases put before courts and conservative judges set precedents in both those cases and other cases'.
It is incredibly hard to prove discrimination in employment, even with a very specific case, aka, a specific _person_ who got harmed, even with tons of documentation that they were harmed because they were in a protected class.
Here, there literally doesn't appear to be a specific case, no actual person being harmed, and I'm not even sure how the lawsuit is supposed to _work_.
Reading the lawsuit, it really does look like he's vaguely handwaving at the Missouri population and asserting 'Starbucks could operate cheaper and faster if they hired the best person for the job instead of minorities, and that harms residents', but how poorly a company is operating and supposed bad choices they are making is literally not something you can sue over, at least not under _antidiscrimination_ law. (I guess shareholders could sue over that, but that's not what is happening.)
Or to put it simplier terms: A lot of proving discrimination is demonstrating _patterns_, and not only is there not a pattern here, there isn't even an incident. Instead, there's a lot of quoting their web page. Do you know what web pages talking about the behavior of yourself are called in court?
HEARSAY
You have to prove it actually happened, and _then_ you can quote them talking about their own motives. You can't just quote them.
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LOL, in fact, the article goes into the percentage, I had forgotten. So, uh, looks like 46.5% of Starbucks is BIPOC, and the current population is 41.6%, which not only is essentially even, but also fails to account for the fact that Starbucks generally exist in cities, which statistically have a higher percentage of BIPOC than the nation, so it's entirely possible Starbucks is under the percentage of people who could plausibly be working at any particular Starbucks. Regardless, they are extremely close.
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Good luck proving that, even pretending the statistics were on their side, which even in a company like Starbucks is not true. The odds are that Starbucks has no more minorities working for it than exist in the general population, and in fact probably less.
Hey, remember all that arguing about how the reason that certain industries had more men in them than women is that women didn't want to do those jobs as much?
None of you understand quite how much conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection, and making it harder and harder to prove discrimination based on race and sex.
And their statement about diversity may sound statement that they're going to hire minorities instead of white people, but the court isn't going to treat them that way, because conservatives argue for years that the opposite isn't true, or at least isn't inherently true, victims still have to prove that they were personally discriminated against, and there aren't even any victims here!
This is why, incidentally, these lawsuits instead have a weird basis in the idea that these hiring decisions are costing customers time and money, a thing that Starbucks is legally 100% allowed to do. They are allowed to actually have as written policy that all coffee orders take an hour
These lawsuits are going to be hilarious.
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Last I checked, corporations have free speech and can have whatever the hell political goals they want.
Was that only supposed to apply to corporations with conservative political goals?
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My theory on all this is that Elon is legitimately so stupid, and Trump legitimately just believes everything he's told, that they believed that they were going to be some huge examples of actual fraud they could point at, like government employees just writing checks to themselves or their spouses or things like that.
They assume that they'd find this almost instantly, because this is how they would operate. And this is the sort of stuff that does happen at local government levels.
But it's not really the sort of stuff that happens at the higher levels, in fact they can't happen like that. And they haven't found the stuff they thought they were going to immediately find.
This is why they have to keep inventing things like Politico and I assume everyone has heard about the Reuters 'social deception' story by now and what it actually was about? (I kept waiting for that to hit this site, but I guess people were smart enough not to buy it? To spend 10 seconds googling it before posting about it? I admit I am surprised.)
Which, should be pointed out, are not examples of fraud or corruption, even if they had been as presented. So at best we're quibbling over microscopic amounts of government spending that were properly authorized. Which does not sound important enough to upend the entire government.
And I also think they actually believed that a huge amount of government employees would take the buyout because a huge amount of them were functionally criminals, grifting the system, and would want out before being caught.
Again, projection. I cannot emphasize enough how much this is how they literally think and operate.
That's why this isn't going particularly well for them, and they're being forced to lie about what they find and just start firing people. But it's not how they expected things to go.
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As someone who has read that fanfic, I thought at the time that the fanfic wasn't half bad, if way too long and with a lot of weird philosophical stuff that the writer was obviously trying to push.
But the reason it was semi enjoyable was mostly that it was deconstructing all the nonsense in Rowlings' story, making everyone in all sides in the war act in a much more intelligent manner, and trying to figure out how magic should actually work, and looking back, that doesn't really make it a good story as much as it makes the original a bad story.
And again, can I emphasize how insanely long it was, like 10 times as long as it needed to be.
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References to trans people have been removed from the National Parks Service web page abut Stonewall. It was done fairly ineptly and in real time, as Blue Sky noticed, with 'gay and trans people' ending up saying things like 'gay and people' and stuff like that, and LGBTQ being edited to LGBQ, before whoever realizing how dumb that was and editing that down to 'LGB', which is not a thing, and then making another pass to get rid of the word 'queer' in general.
It's unclear if this was the National Parks Service or some intern with write access to the website.
What makes this worse is, for the record: The riot at Stonewall was not technically over homosexuality laws, but gender policing. While homosexual _sex_ was illegal, that, uh, was pretty hard to police at a bar where people were not having sex, so the police were actually looking for people violating 'crossdresser' laws (1) and wearing clothing that did not match their sex...which the police sometimes found hard to determine so would forcibly check genitalia.
So now the government is officially leaving trans people out...when the arrests were literally about gender and the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie(2), who was being arrested for not conforming to gender norms.
1) Which often were themselves incredibly vague interpretation of 'masquerade' or 'impersonation' laws. There is a myth among the queer community that you had to be wearing three items of the correct gender's clothing to be legal, but that never appears to have been the law, and in fact police were often harassing crossdressers with literally no laws backing them up at all, just a vague feeling of 'You are not allowed to dress like that'. And often arrest anyone near those people just because they wanted to.
2) She was a butch lesbian who probably was being arrested for dressing like a man, aka, _wearing pants_. Although considering she could pass for a man, and had once been arrested on the assumption she was a man dressed as a woman, who even know what was going through the police's head. Translated from caveman, probably something like 'This not normal girl or normal boy, arrest weird person!'. Law do not matter to the police.
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I was planning on mentioning earlier today, but got busy, that it was weird was that the Manhattan US attorney's office had not dropped charges against Eric Adams, despite being told to do so Monday and that is fairy trivial paperwork , and the media had not noticed and acted like it had been done. Someone pointed this out on Blue Sky, that the only real reason it would take so long it there was pushback.
Well, there was: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd
It's worth pointing out the reason the Justice Department gave in their memo was:
To start with, 'so he can campaign for months for reelection without criminal charges' is nonsense. We're four months out from the primary, not the election, and the charges were filed September 26, 2024, so eight months from the primary. And the actual election is November 4, 2025. So they were filed slightly over a year out.
Soon we will reach the point where you can literally never be charged with a crime if you plan to run for office, ever.
Secondly...yeah, um, 'helping on an immigration crackdown' is not a valid reason for people to get away with corruption. That reason is, itself, blatantly corrupt. Whether or not someone is 'helpful' to the administration should have no bearing on whether or not they are criminally prosecuted for crimes they did.
I mean, we all know they're doing that, but the Justice Department just out and _said_ it in the memo.
So the US Attorney just...refused to do it. And has now resigned.
Meanwhile, I've had people point out the courts probably will not approve dropping the case without prejudice anyway. They will not be happy with the explicit statement that Adams' trial is delayed _only as long as he is helping the administration_. If they do allow it to be dropped (Which they do not), they will certainly require it to be dropped with prejudice so it cannot be filed again if he stops helping them. Because courts are often against *checks notes* literal criminal extortion.
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It's going to be interesting to watch how the court system and professional lawyers react to the current administration's ineptness. Like just blatantly saying the illegal stuff in a memo.
For another example, the Justice Department has filed an idiotic lawsuit against New York that is going to be laughed out of court, asserting that somehow New York is endangering Federal immigration officials by not turning over driver's license data to the Federal government. The lawsuit, hilariously, claims that Federal law trumps state law, a thing that is true and might be more relevant if there _was_ a law requiring that data be turned over. There is not.
The last time Trump was in office, his idiotic lawsuit gibberish hadn't really started, and didn't infect the Justice Department. This time, it has, with cases that are just as grounded as his election cases, with legal theories that are completely insane. And he's brought in lawyers willing to do them.
Did you all know there's not legally a reason the courts couldn't declare the DoJ a vexatious litigant and thus requires the court's approval before DoJ file lawsuits in Federal court? You'd think logically that shouldn't be possible, but there ain't no exception for 'You cannot do this to actual Federal Department of Justice' in the vexatious litigant rules.
On “The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending”
This conversation started with the following situation:
a) The Trump administration told the military to remove all DEI programs
b) The Tuskegee Airmen videos that were part of Air Force Basic Training were part of a DEI initiative
c) thus is extremely obvious that the decision to remove those videos was an entirely correct interpretation of the EO
I was making the assumption you actually knew the first, and have enough basic logic to understand the last point, and your point of misunderstanding was the second point.
Which means you (And Jaybird), objectively, did not know at least one thing a DEI program did at the start of this thread. Not just didn't know it, but dismissed the idea that such a video _could_ be part of a DEI program without even bothering to check.
I guess, alternately, you could have no idea what the EO said, or might be Patrick Star levels of dumb and not be able to put together 'If they say to remove all of a thing, and something is part of that thing, they have told you to remove that something'.
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Price to pay for what, is the goal to not having other DEI videos that do the same thing for women and Muslims and whoever the military has actively tried to recruit by showcasing _their_ accomplishments in the military? Is that the thing we were trying to do? And we accidentally included this one video in that we wanted to not include?
Jaybird, could you explain what you think DEI in the military _did_? And what now is no longer doing, or will eventually not be doing under the new policies?
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Hey, Dark Matter, how about a compromise on that. There will officially be no pressure to hire 'non-white non-males' if we can implement exactly one law and a Federal agency to do it. The law is simple: The government will send out identical resumes, one with the name of someone that sounds like a white man, and one with the name of someone who sounds like a woman or minority. If a business follows up with the first one, and not the second, repeatedly, to a statistical level, we fine the company a large amount.
Maybe we already have information about that: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names
And realize how much worse that is when you realize how _automated_ that system is. That at that first passs, resumes are being sent through a computer and scanned and spit out. Which means people are inserting themselves into the process at some point to discriminate, probably at the actual hiring manager's location. The hiring manager gets handed something by a computer telling them to call someone, glance at the name, and think 'Nah, not hiring a Jamal', even if they do not _think_ that's what they are thinking. The discrimination that happens at the interview level is likely much worse, just much harder to pin down objectively.
The entire conservative bugaboo of 'Unqualified non-white non-men hired instead of white men' literally isn't happening. First, because that isn't the goal of that form of DEI, it's to hire equally qualified non-white non-men, but even that does not actually work, they make, statistically, almost no difference. DEI programs like that do not actually accomplish their goals.
What they end up doing is pulling noise makers and throwing themselves a party because the company, entirely normally, did hire someone who wasn't a white man.
If those such programs vanished, no one would care. The problem is that isn't all DEI does.
Yes, a huge chunk of DEI are worthless and accomplish nothing. Welcome to the business world, where huge chunks of middle management do nothing useful.
But I'm lying there, because there actually is evidence that doing things like talking about microagressions may have people dismiss the idea mentally, but they actually do start understanding the concept of 'don't make assumptions about people and force them to interact with those assumptions'. And it makes it clear that more overt bigotry is completely off the table. So it's not entirely worthless.
Other chunks of DEI do things like 'Talk about the accomplishments of Black people in the military in an attempt to recruit and keep more Black people in the military', as some people at this site have been startled to learn.
Other parts of DEI are making sure buildings are wheelchair accessible, and in fact DEI has started to be called DEIA, with 'accessibility' at the end.
Other parts of DEI are basically 'This brochure we are putting out is entirely full of white people, and as we do not have any actual minorities, let's hire some models to pose for some photo', which is obviously not useful to _anyone_. But hardly needs to be barred by law.
It's almost as if 'a vague term to refer to a program that reduces biases and increase understanding of differences in this specific place' is a term that can, in fact, be used to refer to many different things. Some of which are worthless, some of which actually do useful short-term things, some of which might meaningfully change things long term, and some of which, I guess, can be evil.
But railing against it is like railing against marketing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.