The DEI thing is where the teeth are going to be and every attempt on the part of the various departments to route around it are going to result in DOGE defenders pointing out how important this actually was.
This is actual gibberish.
DEI programs make up almost _no_ amount of the budget, and a huge chunk of it is just normal HR stuff that has to be done anyway.
The reason that it is 'important' that they are being cut is that the cutting of it is accompanied by _overtly bigoted decisions_. It is, to use a word, 'signalling', and the thing is it singalling is that 'white straight men are back in charge'.
There have been a number of times where the Diversity Department was quickly renamed in the middle of the night to “Wellness” or some crap like that and various hall monitors have cheerfully posted screenshots saying “they’re trying to pull a fast one!”
Ah, clever plan, if you don't actually link to anything, no one will point out how getting you're your news from liars on Facebook.
Personally, I think that the bad job people should be fired but…
...you're okay with people who are doing a good job and who just got promoted being fired.
I guess that's how your sentence is supposed to end?
I continue to believe Obama’s talent as a politician and his popularity among progressives convinced a lot of what is effectively the Dem base (white, educated, middle to upper middle class people) that everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party, even though he basically didn’t accomplish anything for the last 7 years of his presidency, and the Democratic Party as a whole was a rotten-to-the-core gerontocracy that no longer seemed to have any principles, messages, or really any ideas whatsoever, much less the hope that got Obama elected.
I just want to make it clear it's _even worse than that_: The ACA existed solely because the insurance industry needed it. It wasn't some last glorious grand thrust of 'The last right things the Dems did', it was 'the system is so broken that even the people paying the lobbyists started worrying about things'.
It's not just Obama, it's all the way back to Clinton, too.
For the last 35 years, neither party has gotten elected by presenting useful political ideas to the American people. Neither of them. At all. This is because the Republicans do not have useful ideas (Well, they were no longer _allowed_ to have them or they would be primaried...before Trump. Now, the only ideas they are allowed to have is Trump stomping on a human face, forever.) and the decaying-and-molding Democrats will do everything in their power to stamp out the useful ideas that their individual members might come up with. 10% of Dems are allowed to have good ideas, sometimes even say them in front of cameras, but nothing can ever come from it, and it will never be used nationally.
Instead, every election, the most 'charismatic' person on the ballot got elected. There were only two exceptions...the first was Gore and Bust, one who presented as incredibly boring and the other who often couldn't talk...and they, for all statistical purposes, _tied_. The other exception was when we got tired of the first term of Trump and elected Biden, but we weren't electing him because of his policies either.
Thanks to the wealthy getting what they wanted from Reagan, and collecting enough money to purchase both the political system and the media, we sorta just...stopped doing politics ~35 years ago, if by politics we mean 'actually electing people based on real things they promise and intend to at least attempt'. The system has been held in stasis, with Republicans unwilling to move, Democrats also unwilling to move but doing some performative struggling, and all of them just getting older because if you don't allow new ideas into the system, you also end up not allowing new people.
Which is why what is happening right now is such a shock. It's horrible and stupid, yes, but it's also a shock because it turns out things actually can change.
Randi Lee Harper bragged about getting Social Autopsy shut down. From the horse’s mouth:
You do understand the conspiracy Owens has is about the harassment, right?
It is not about who pointed out to Kickstarter that the project violated Kickstarter's terms of service by, essentially, being designed as a dox tool. That was reported to them by, at minimum, Randi Lee Harper. (Although it probably was reported by like half the damn planet, because her Kickstarter was being read as 'We will track down people saying stuff people don't like and dox them' by _everyone_. We can argue whether Owens meant for it to say that, but that's how everyone read it.)
Those two things are, uh, not at all the same things.
If I'm throwing a party with loud music, and someone reports me to the police, and someone drives by taking shots at me...that doesn't make them the same person. Especially if my loud music has angered half the town.
For people who do not understand what happened here, this article is illuminating: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/how-social-autopsy-fell-for-gamergate-trutherism.html
(I cannot believe I just linked to a Jesse Singal article. The phrase 'newcomers wander into the weirder, angrier corners of the internet without first reading a tour guide or two.' is honestly so hilarious and said without the slightest self-awareness of what happened to him later on.)
And a lot of the illumination reading that _now_ is that it now is 2025 and we now actually all know how these sort of explosive harassment campaigns start and exist and things they do. Owens...didn't. Yes, that's right, she was proposing her tool with literally no context of any this, because her experience was basically 'Some people sometimes said mean things on Facebook under fake names', not the absolute meltdown of GamerGate that was still sputtering along.
So she wandered into a situation she didn't understand at all, almost everyone got horrified at the idea of what she was trying to do (I cannot emphasis enough how no one, on any side, liked the idea.), Zoe Quinn reached out and tried to reason with her, pointing out it not only was a bad idea, but also that she needed to brace herself for when everything started, 45 minutes later the hate started, she decided that was Quinn, and everything from there on was just a gibberish conspiracy, eventually slipping into the conspiracy that Quinn was faking all the harassment to start with and that Social Autopsy would have exposed that.
I'm now actually interested if you believe _that_ conspiracy theory.
I would ask to see whether the official reason given was something like “they screwed up by doing X” and then whether X actually happened.
I thought you would have figured this out by now, but they _were_ all fired.
And here's the quote as to why he fired them.
“We want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice,” Hegseth told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday” in response to the firings of three judge advocates general aka “JAGs” for the Army, Navy and Air Force. “And don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots.”
There was no actual individual justification given. Not a single error on their part cited.
And I feel it's important to point out he said _constitutional_ advice. Not 'laws of war' advice. War crimes do not have anything to do with the constitution. Rules of Engagement in other countries do not have anything to do with the constitution. Almost no part of a war has anything to do with the constitution.
There's pretty much just two things to do with the military that might raise constitutional question and one of them is about the use of the military in invading other countries without any sort of Congressional authorization...which JAG would not weigh in on, that's a political question that needs to solved in the civilian process.
No, the only real actual place you'd run into a constitutional question is...using the military against US citizens. You know, the thing Trump has repeatedly mused about doing. The thing he had to be stopped from doing his first term: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-esper-trump-shoot-black-lives-matter-protesters-1346079/
But, hey, while you're _still_ refusing to draw any sort of fascism line, I guess you refuse to say you'd have a problem with that.
I’d be interested to see an aside describing the role Candace Owens played in it.
She didn't really have a role in GamerGate. Her Social Autosy project site was set up in the very recent aftermath of GamerGate, and it probably is something that exists because of it, but I'm not aware of her being relevant _in_ GamerGate, just sort of imploding in the _aftermath_.
Basically, for those who do not know, Candace Owens had a somewhat bad idea that seemingly would seemingly involving doxing people on the internet (What it would actually do and how it could work without doxing was very vague.) So everyone (And I really do mean everyone, left and right.) objected to it, including Zoe Quinn, who was talking about it because she herself had been the target of massive harassment and it theoretically existed to help people like her.
Zoe Quinn also warned Candace that if she did it, if she didn't back away from it, the same people who came after Zoe would come after her.
And sure enough, people did come after Candace. Including with very racist stuff.
The people doing the harassment presented themselves as right-wing, sometimes even as Trump supporters, but Candace decided this was being lead by Zoe Quinn because...she's kind of gullible and dumb, honestly there's not a lot more than that.
I mean, here: https://quillette.com/2018/05/08/problem-candace-owens/
I'm actually kinda wondering if the GamerGate-gullible people on this site actually believe Zoe Quinn sent an army of harassment against Candace. On one had, there's no evidence whatsoever that Zoe had anything to do with it. On the other hand, [insert conspiracy]
It's worth pointing out that while it is nearly unprecedented to for _anyone_ at that level to be removed or asked to resign, it is pretty unprecedented to have two people missing at once from the Joint Chiefs. There's a reason we carefully stagger that.
We have _three Joint Chiefs_ missing. Although I guess the Commandant of the Coast Guard of technically just an attendee, not actually a Joint Chief.
Incidentally, this also means we have the Navy _and_ the Coast Guard without a Senate-confirmed head right now. If someone wants to try a naval invasion, I guess now is the time.
Now, that's a nice pithy joke, but try addressing the actual hypothetical:
Let's say we wake up, Tuesday, and all the heads of JAG have been fired.
These would be the lawyers in charge of prosecuting military personal for war crimes and issuing illegal orders, fired. Cause they're the _other_ people you would need to remove if you wanted to do something unlawful with the military.
Would it be serious if Hegseth did that?
It sure is weird how you will never state anything you think would be serious indications of something wrong.
The only reason you care about replacing them is if you want people who have a very different understanding of what orders are lawful and what the military is allowed to do under US and international law.
Hey, Jaybird. What would convince you that the Trump administration is planning to do something very illegal with the military?
What if next week they fired all the heads of the every service's JAG?
Jaybird, I literally explaing some of the three years-term before, but let me explain every single one of them in detail, since I guess you cannot even be bothered to check a single one:
First, Naval. Going down the list:
Admiral Mullen left his position to become Joint Chief.
Admiral Boorda died while holding the position.
Admiral Moore left his position to become Joint Chief.
Admiral Anderson took early retirement because he conflicted with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Cuban Missile crisis due to his stupidly aggressive stance of using depth charges on Soviet submarines, a thing that _objectively_ almost started a nuclear war. Two out of three people required people on that submarine voted to use nuclear weapons and the lowest-ranked, the executive officer, Vasily Arkhipov, voted no. So...yeah, Admiral Anderson guy got fired.
Admiral Carney seems to be before they decided on the four year thing. That doesn't seem like he was forced to retire, he was appointed for two years.
So, no, literally one person has ever been removed from their position as Chief of Naval Operations while the Joint Chiefs have existed. Obviously, that position has existed well before that, but huge amount of military policy and how it interacted with the civilian administration changed during and after WWII, and trying to compare before and after is very silly. Same with Spatz in the Air Force.
Now Air Force:
General Moseley was asked to resigned because, under his watch, the Air Force mishandled nuclear weapons, which caused huge amounts of outrage. That's it. That's the reason. It's very simple. You can ask if it was fair to blame him for that, it probably wasn't, but that was what it was for.
General Fogleman resign willingly, he was not asked to do so. That is a fairly complicated situation about military ethics and perceived influencing of judicial decisions that I don't really want to get into, but the relevant part is he literally was not asked to resign, he did it himself because he though this ethics required it. It sorta is political, but in the sense of 'I think I have accidentally become political so I will recuse myself entirely out of my position'.
General Dugan, and I cannot make this more clear, repeatedly disobeyed very direct orders to SHUT UP about the US trying to kill Saddam Hussein. Straight up insubordination, literally would not stop talking to journalists about this topic. And, as far as I can tell, him and Adminal Anderson are the only people in all of this who have actually been _fired_ instead of being asked to retire.
General Brown got prostate cancer and retired.
General LeMay was also asked to retire early (Barely early, like a few months) due to public disagreements with Defense Secretary McNamara.
If you actually want to know what happened between McNamara/Kennedy/Johnson and the Joint Chiefs, there are entire books written on it. The Vietnam war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all sorts of actual real conflict between the two groups, the civilians and the military, with the military repeatedly chaffing under the civilian control.
That was not a good situation to be in, and is actually one of the reasons the Joint Chiefs were restructured to no longer be in the chain of command.
And that is not the situation we have here, literally none of the fired people have ever argued at all with the civilians, as far as we are aware. Also, they are not in the chain of command, and cannot give orders to the rest of the military, so it doesn't really matter what they think.
If this sets a precedent for future Democratic Presidents being able to better direct the military to be a better place for people of color to live and work, I think that that will only be a benefit in the long term.
Also, and this a somewhat minor detail, but the Joint Chiefs do not have operational control. They are literally not in the chain of command, the US military does not have a unified high command at all.
The chain of command is president -> secretary of defense -> secretary of various service branches -> service or joint commanders
The first three people in that chain are civilians. The Joint Chiefs also serve under the Secretary of their service branch, and report to those Secretaries. Trump already has the power to change out the Secretaries, and in fact did the moment he got elected, and no one has a problem with that. That's the civilian side, that's political, the president gets to control it.
That's the people who made any decisions about DEI, not the Joint Chiefs. The Joint Chiefs don't have anything to do with policy. They are, explicitly, not there for that sort of policy, just military readiness policy. And any policy they're supposed to doing is just done via advising the President or Secretary of Defense to do it, they don't have any ability to do it themselves.
The Joint Chiefs are supposed to be politically-neutral advisory body. They advise about tactics to accomplish goals, and they not only knows what the military is currently doing, but what it can do, including what is lawful and what isn't.
And that, right there, is the real problem, because they not only are allowed to advise leadership, but they are allowed to contact and advise _the service commanders_, or in fact anyone in the branch. They are the person that can call up a service commander and say 'As far as I understand the situation, your orders to detain that Congressman do not sound lawful'. It's not _binding_, they have no authority to actually make anything happen, but it is a hell of a defense at your court martial for disobeying orders, to say 'The highest ranking person in this service agreed with my decision'.
The only reason you care about replacing them is if you want people who have a very different understanding of what orders are lawful and what the military is allowed to do under US and international law.
Jaybird, why are you pretending that these people were not fired mid-term?
Why are you pretending it is common for them to fired mid-term, or in fact _ever_?
I went to the Commandant of the Coast Guard, to cite how long it has been since one of them was fired, and it turns out...literally never, apparently. Or at least, not before 1946, when they started serving out four year terms. All of them after served exactly four years, within two or three days. (Except for the second one, who served four years and five month and appears to have done that to move the schedule to June 1 instead of Jan 1) And looking at the ones before that, before four years became a standard, I don't think _any_ of them have been fired. Many of them left due to death or age-mandated requirement from the Coast Guard.
As for the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force: That also is a four year term, although there has been one that retired early due to what could be considered political reasons, General Fogleman, and of course General Dugan was fired for continuing to flap his lips at reporters after being told to stop by the president. So let's check _why_ General Charles Q. Brown Jr. was fired, according to the the person who fired him:
"First of all, you've got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs," Hegseth said in a November appearance on the "Shawn Ryan Show."
"But any general that was involved -- general, admiral, whatever -- that was involved in any of the DEI woke s--- has got to go," he continued. "Either you're in for warfighting, and that's it. That's the only litmus test we care about."
"We'll never know, but always doubt -- which on its face seems unfair to C.Q.," he wrote in his book "War on Warriors." "But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it really doesn't much matter."
As has been pointed out by active-duty military, the only actual litmus test for top military leadership is following lawful orders given by the civilian chain of command. Asserting that military officials should be removed for not rejecting the _lawful orders_ of the previous civilian administration is flatly bonkers.
And note that 'lawful' means 'under the military code of justice and international law', not random civilian court decisions. None of which, incidentally, have involved the military _at all_, the military is generally not subject to that sort of constitutional scrutiny at all. There is absolutely no way to argue that 'what the military was doing' under Biden was unlawful in any sense.
So basically Hegseth's just arguing 'The military should have the right to disobey the civilian leadership, mostly because I am stupid enough to think it will only disobey the _liberals_ and it will love us conservatives.'
This is because Hegseth is, and this cannot be stressed enough, an extremely bad person who does not understand the military and how it exists within the government, and shouldn't be in charge of a tank, much less an entire armed force.
This is going to keep happening, folks. We've had decades of the American far-right inject the alt-right memes directly into their brain and merging into some sort of terminal online brain where Na.zi stuff is funny because it triggers the libs, but in Europe, far-right people have to distance themselves from the slightest hint of Na.zi _literally as fast as possible_.
Some of that is because, yes, there are legal implications for supporting Na.zis in a lot of European countries, but also, they have a functioning media and a population that, even at its far-righty-est, doesn't think _open_ Na.zis are funny or should be allowed in polite company.
As the US far-right goes completely masks off, Europe's far-right is going to keep backing away and crafting more and more elaborate masks and insisting they have nothing to do with that.
Which will actually be helpful in the recovery of this country.
Alright folks, we got Steve Bannon doing the Na.zi salute at CPAC. Any comments? Critiques on style? Any discussion about how we've openly moved into just straight up Na.zi symbolism with the current administration?
Don't worry, they're only doing it because the libs are _mistakening_ it for the Na.zi salute, it's not actually the real thing. [insert joke about having to be from Germany or it's just sparkling fascism] And, of course, pissing of the libs is more important not being mistaken for Na.zis...in fact, they don't really seem to mind being mistaken for Na.zis.
Europe, as always, does mind, and the French Na.zis-that-claim-they-are-not-Na.zis, who had a speaker named Jordan Bardella scheduled today to speak today, withdrew from his speech faster than [insert joke about France military here]
He said, I quote, "Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Na.zi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon", which is the sort of thing that normal people, or even far-right politicians like Jordan Bardella, do, after realizing they are about to stand on the same stage that a person who threw a Na.zi salute was standing on.
Edit: Ah, found the article: I don't know why he was startled, overt Na.zis were allowed last year, too: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nazis-mingle-openly-cpac-spreading-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335
Just no salutes from the stage
The completely self-destruction of the richest man in the world and his insane need for attention and for people to like him would be funny if he wasn't determined to do so much harm along the way.
That’s all very different though from the idea that companies are going to establish highly race conscious hiring practices, set up a bunch of identity based affinity groups, or worst of all bring in some Robin DiAngelo (or whoever) acolyte to confront your work force in live sessions and/or create really aggressive training materials.
Yeah, it is different from that, which is why almost no companies do that. In fact, the thing you're thinking of, the reason you picked the name Robin DiAngelo, is not an example of that.
Coca-Cola signed up for for something called LinkedIn Learning, a platform that has thousands of courses. They required a few of those courses to be taken by employees. They also, sorta randomly, selected some courses and put them in 'learning plans'. Robin DiAngelo's LinkedIn Learning webinar was one of those.
Was this a poor choice? Probably. Was it a deliberate attempt to create aggressive training materials? No.
In fact, _is_ that material aggressive? Not really. I really don't like the way it's using 'white', but the things she says are generally true and presented in a neutral manner, and it's somewhat ironic that she has consistent talked about how white men _constantly_ seem to take bald facts and very minor suggestions as direct attacks on them. She's written a book about it, in fact.
I mean, to quote her: "The number one most effective adaptation of racism over time, is the good/bad binary, this idea that a racist is a bad person and a good person is not racist. And so it’s about individuals who are either good or bad or who either do or don’t engage."
And because that quote is slightly confusing, she is saying that racism has basically adapted by making racism UTTERLY EVIL instead of normally a bunch of subconscious tendencies and assumptions that anyone can get (Which what 95% of racism actually is), so that anyone who gets any of their behavior pointed out, even the slightest hint of 'maybe don't say that' or 'we use this new term now' has to defend it to the death, or they are BAD PEOPLE.
He’s talking about specific, concrete instances of DEI based political (and policy) malpractice.
He's actually not. He's talking about literally one example of DEI, a thing that Democrats did 50+ years ago and was just struck down by the courts.
And then a bunch of completely unrelated stuff. Defunding the police has nothing to do with DEI, regardless of how popular or not you think the policy is. (It also, notable, is not actually a Democratic position.)
Along with absolute nonsense like 'He noted how just about the only people he encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were...' Um...yeah, _all_ elected politicians went to college, statistically speaking.
Along with completely insane complaints like how David Hogg tweeted something about...who started gun control? It is a completely insane thing to say, not just because who started 'gun control' is pretty undefined, but also the American gun control movement certainly wasn't started 'centuries again', it was started after a number of high-profile assassinations in the 60s. So it is an extremely dumb thing to tweet, David Hogg is sorta a moron, but in what possible way is that tweak supposed to be causing people not to vote for Democrats? Also, how is that DEI?
What is actually happening in this discussion is summarized in the paragraph that starts with 'What worldview am I complaining about?', and then he proceeds to summarize a worldview that the Democrats absolutely _do not have_, but instead has been ascribed to them by Republicans and the media has happily gone along with.
The very next paragraph, for example, is 'Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, and so they try to stack the deck against them.', a thing that did not happen. Again, I will point out that Affirmative Action is _almost sixty years old_ and the idea of using race in the way that is something that high education just...decided to do back then, and is not some recent thing that Democrats have done.
The difference is that he thinks there are practical steps that can be taken to distance from the DEI apparatchiks. I am not really certain this is possible.
It actually doesn't matter if 'distance' is possible, mostly because the Republicans will just overtly lie about things and the media will not bother to mention that while repeating their lies.
In fact, they already are massively lying about pretty much every aspect of this topic and built up a giant glob of nonsensical resentment about stuff that isn't actually true.
You actually can look at Jaybird, who has internalized all of this, and see how completely incoherent and angry he is about companies doing PR stuff and stuff like that.
I mean, this article itself is a good example. It claims to be about DEI, but here is the conclusion:
Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of its citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason that you should be admitted to the U.S. and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say the pullback from policing has been a mistake.
There is exactly one part of that that could be DEI, and that's affirmative action. And it's worth pointing out that that policy is _literally 50 years old_, created by executive order by JFK. Except not even that, the current system is basically just something education _invented_, it's not something directed from above. And it is now illegal.
Was there a big pushback by elected Dems when the court struck it down in 2023? I don't remember one. There were plenty of people going 'This will not have the effect that a lot of Asians have apparently been convinced it will' (and those people were right) and a lot of people, myself included, pointing out all the _other_ stuff that tilted the admissions process towards both white people and wealthy people, like legacy admissions and considering extracurriculars and other activities, things that often are completely inaccessible to the poor. (And the rich can literally just buy certificates saying their kids participated in those, as we've seen.)
But I don't remember anyone, and certainly no elected Dem, saying 'This is horrible! I approve of some sort of scoring system that explicitly includes race in it! We demand the courts allow this!' Maybe they did, maybe I missed it.
But I seem to recall a lot of people pointing out that colleges had mostly transitioned _away_ from doing that in favor of things that attempted to equalize things better, even if a few of them did include race as a pretty minor factor. And it wouldn't really matter if they couldn't do that anymore.
And, again...this isn't legal anymore. Are Democrats supposed to be running around yelling 'I am satisfied with how the courts ruled!' Do we think that would make the news? The news is barely covering Democrats at all.
Jaybird really does assume that Democratic governors are all extremely far left, all occupying positions that almost no elected Democrats occupy at all.
I think she's waiting long enough to remove him that it doesn't create some special election that Cuomo is going to win...at least, people keep saying that, I have not actually gone and looked at the law and deadlines to understand exactly what they're talking about.
The absolute best case scenario is that Adams' prosecution is delayed, he toadies up to Trump, and then Hochul removes him for the very obvious cause of 'actual literal criminal everyone has been yelling at her to remove', and he gets prosecuted anyway. We're already halfway there.
Just making it blatantly obvious how corrupt Adams and the Trump DOJ is.
I’m not sure it’s going to work. For one thing, who is the target audience? It wasn’t the people who couldn’t afford to drive! The target audience is the people that could.
Don't project how everyone else in the county thinks about mass transit to NYC...only _25%_ of the people who live in NYC have driver's licenses. A good chunk of the ones that do, keep their car outside the city, so even less of that 25% drive in the city. The amount of people who had to 'make the tradeoff' is nearly negligible, because the amount of New Yorkers who drive in and out of the city is negligible. (It's just that the city is so populated that 'negligible' still results in pretty bad traffic.)
I've heard from plenty of people who talk about how New York is literally now driveable, you can actually operate a motor vehicle in it and get places.
Several of them are people who do deliveries in Manhattan.
Even New Jersey, when attacking the program, attacked it on the grounds that NYC keeps all the money, not their population disliked it.
Like, everyone I hear talks about this doesn't quite understand the very unique situation of NYC WRT to cars. They absolutely do not think about mass transit in the way other people think about mass transit.
I didn't defend it. I defended my use of the term 'localization' to mean 'changing a conversation to something that the localizer thought was more relevant', a thing that is, indeed, called localization. As opposed to 'translation', which would not do that.
This incidentally was an incredibly weird thing for you to take issue with.
I care because it feels like a power play, one similar to those I grew up with in a fairly cloistered religious community.
I have no idea what the hell you are talking about 'a power play'.
When it comes to putting a Cuban flag in there? I’m mostly amused by the clumsiness of the devs mixed with some vague “you’d think that the inclusivity people would be appalled instead of some variant of AT LEAST THEY TRIED!!!”
What the f*ck are you talking about?
The idea that the 'inclusivity people' said 'At least they tried' is hilariously wrong. You did notice me talking explicitly how there's a term for 'inclusion-washing', which you didn't know, because, uh, your people...I guess they're anti-inclusion by default...the anti-inclusion people literally do not care about any of this except to attack people over.
Whereas the 'inclusion people' have been calling out purely performative crap, where companies talk up inclusivity, do the vaguest handwave towards, but then are not actually inclusive. (Which, again, this wasn't. This was a studio with a license, they did not decide anything about Miles, they didn't make him Puerto Rican or decide his personality to score points. But I am not saying 'That cannot happen', I am saying 'This is not that'.)
You know, if we were actually having a discussion about _that_, how about talking about how Target was a _sponsor of various Prides_ and then immediately folded to Trump's executive orders about DEI and was kicked out of quite a lot of Pride sponsorships.
And a lot of queer people who have been pointing out just how much queer-washing there has been going over the years, where companies do extremely safe-looking things to promote gay rights and then fold immediately with the slightest pushback, were proven right. In fact, it's the second time Target's done it, when Trump's blacksuits attacked Pride displays in 2023 and Target removed them immediately, and there was discussion of kicking them out _then_ and everyone tried to justify it with 'Oh, they have to do that to keep their employees safe'.
But we aren't actually talking about how a lot of this is purely performative, we're talking about your grievance that 'Sometimes people screw up inclusion and that means inclusion is bad!' Mostly because the fact that so much of it is performative really would undercut the theme you're trying to push.
From what I understand with LatinX, the *NEW* term is offensive. Like, People of Spanish Descent seem to get pissed off by it a hell of a lot more than they smile and nod and say “FINALLY! A change to the language for me!”
"Annoyed by a term" and "offensive" are not the same thing.
I am annoyed when people confused couldn't care less with could care less.
Academic types, mostly.
And you operate in a place where academic types have some sort of control over your life? Or, at minimum, have some sort of influence over your friends and social situation?
This was happening at around the same time that the importance of gender-neutral terms was being pushed.
Being pushed by _whom_? With _what_ repercussions to people who did not do them?
We had a discussion here, Jaybird, about whether or not a term, I thing it was 'dude', was gendered. You can probably pull it up. What were the repercussions for the people who did not agree that it was?
You are using language of oppression like 'policed' for things that absolutely, in no manner at all, harm you. You are upset when people with absolutely no power at all over you speak, not even specifically to you, but to the world at large and say 'This is what people should do'.
And I think you should ask yourself when it's only when _specific things_ are talked about like that you get upset? Do you get upset when some random fire-and-brimstone preacher insists that people living together should be married?
Why is this different?
I kinda see it as adjacent to neopronouns. It strikes me as a power play of sorts.
Ah, yes, the vibes-based argument.
I dunno. I still see a lot of the pivot between “THAT’S NOT HAPPENING!” and “But that’s good, though”.
Yes, Jaybird, sometimes the examples used are real things. For example, sometime a bank is owned by a Jewish person.
That does not actually mean the version of events being built is important or relevant.
You have brought up two _examples of things in video games that literally could not have impacted you_ in this very discussion. And I mean could not have impacted you in even the most indirect way, it wasn't even something tell you what to do or disapproving of you or anything. One of them was a possibly inept discussion of something in a language of a game you do not play on a topic you really don't have a reason to have formed an opinion on at all, and the other was an error.
Your complaints are f*cking _wet tissue paper_, and part of a completely manufactured backlash against...well, not being racist, I guess.
Would you mind if I gave you links to said target audience responding to having been localized?
A discussion about the word Latine is, indeed, more relevant to Spanish speakers than English speakers, so, yes, that would be 'more relevant'. I have no idea if that was a particularly _reasonable_ thing to insert, I have no idea how dialogue in Spider-Man 2 normally goes and if that was a particularly clunky thing to bring up or not.
Most importantly, I don't care. And I bet you cannot explain why you care.
There’s something else, though. The inclination to use this deficient knowledge mixed with carelessness to send an earnest message.
You know the thing that they were going for? And that they went for despite having deficient knowledge and being filled with carelessness that they didn’t notice?
So, I'm going to pause the fact you're incorrect in this specific example and address what you are trying to talk about:
What you are referring to is called diversity-washing. Or inclusion-washing. There's a similar concept as queer-washing. It's when you make absolutely token efforts towards appearing inclusive, while changing basically nothing and not even doing any real research.
The normal reaction would be to laugh and say 'You are fooling no one'.
The political right's reaction is, instead 'How dare someone even _pretend_ to be inclusive!'. They're the same people who think 'virtue signaling' (Which this could be a subset of) is bad because people shouldn't have virtue, not the fact the virtue is false.
Inclusion is good. Faking inclusion is...not good. That's not the same as bad, and in fact it's arguable better than nothing at all, but it's not very good.
--
That said, you are incorrect here: Miles Morales is half-Puerto Rican. Miles' heritage is very relevant to the character. He often speaks Spanish. Him having a flag on the wall is entirely in character, and probably straight from the comics, I don't know. But it certainly is something he could have on the wall. So Sony didn't just 'decide' to put the Puerto Rican flag on the wall. They made a licensed game that has a character that would logically have such a flag on the wall and (lazily tried to) put it in the background.
Actually, back up. What 'message' do you think the Puerto Rican flag is sending anyway? It is art, and I would agree that it does have a message beyond the actual object it is, a layer beyond the text, but that message is clearly 'This is someone who is proud of being part Puerto Rican, and that is important to him'.
That's a character trait, not a message of 'inclusion'.
Are you objecting perhaps to the inclusion of a half-Puerto Rican in the game _at all_?
You don't really need to pay attention here, Jaybird. Eventually, enough people will be using whatever new term enough that it will seem normal, and you'll just start using it.
You might have noticed, or not, that African-American has sorta fallout of use in the past decade, and that's because a few people, specifically journalists, have started making the distinction of African-American being more an ethnic group that is 'descendants of US slaves', and Black for the race, and people are almost always talking about the race. (We can, perhaps, blame this on Obama? Who was the second but not the first.)
And this is so unimportant to the world at large that most people haven't noticed. Everyone started saying Black, so they said Black even if they used to say African-American.
I think you've confused what is happening here with Latinx with slurs or think a new term makes the old one immediately offensive or something. That's not how it works.
Oh, I’m not feeling particularly attacked. Though I’d like to make a distinction for what I am feeling: I am feeling *POLICED*.
Because you...are not supposed to use Latino? Who has told you that? In what context are you using that term and people are disapproving? Or, alternately, what people with power have made it clear that using Latino is bad and that people who use it should be criticized for?
Or is perhaps what is happening not actual policing, but instead you being told you are being policed by groups that want you think people are trying to police your speech? Have ever experienced any negative consequences for using the word 'Latino'?
I haven't, and I'm pretty sure I hang around the sort of people who care about that a _lot_ more than the people around you. I have seen people's language policed, including using gendered terms. Just not that one.
For one thing, I believe that the similar faff is responsible for Trump 47.
I can show you demographic changes in voting groups, if you’d like.
What was the problem that the Na.zis, in 1930s German, were put in power to fix?
Just because some 'problem' gets people into office does not make it an actual problem. Sometimes it's a lie, and by lie I include 'taking singular examples of things that might offend people, of the sort that happen all the time in all sorts of context, and blowing them out of proportion'. Aka, listing the Jewish people who own banks.
Or that trans people get healthcare in prison, like literally everyone else.
And sometimes I just mean straight up lie, because that happens just as much. Right now large sections of the Federal government are being called 'DEI hires' with literally no evidence that their hiring had anything to do with DEI, and in fact the government does not and never has never considered race in hiring decisions.
There is a political party in this country that will make up gibberish about anything, and asserting the other party should agree and 'back off' not just cedes literally the entire argument to them, but it means they will pick some new thing to lie about.
The only way to solve that is to have a media that calls out these lies, and for people like you to stop falling for these lies. Which you are still doing!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Musk vs Gore”
This is actual gibberish.
DEI programs make up almost _no_ amount of the budget, and a huge chunk of it is just normal HR stuff that has to be done anyway.
The reason that it is 'important' that they are being cut is that the cutting of it is accompanied by _overtly bigoted decisions_. It is, to use a word, 'signalling', and the thing is it singalling is that 'white straight men are back in charge'.
Ah, clever plan, if you don't actually link to anything, no one will point out how getting you're your news from liars on Facebook.
...you're okay with people who are doing a good job and who just got promoted being fired.
I guess that's how your sentence is supposed to end?
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
I just want to make it clear it's _even worse than that_: The ACA existed solely because the insurance industry needed it. It wasn't some last glorious grand thrust of 'The last right things the Dems did', it was 'the system is so broken that even the people paying the lobbyists started worrying about things'.
It's not just Obama, it's all the way back to Clinton, too.
For the last 35 years, neither party has gotten elected by presenting useful political ideas to the American people. Neither of them. At all. This is because the Republicans do not have useful ideas (Well, they were no longer _allowed_ to have them or they would be primaried...before Trump. Now, the only ideas they are allowed to have is Trump stomping on a human face, forever.) and the decaying-and-molding Democrats will do everything in their power to stamp out the useful ideas that their individual members might come up with. 10% of Dems are allowed to have good ideas, sometimes even say them in front of cameras, but nothing can ever come from it, and it will never be used nationally.
Instead, every election, the most 'charismatic' person on the ballot got elected. There were only two exceptions...the first was Gore and Bust, one who presented as incredibly boring and the other who often couldn't talk...and they, for all statistical purposes, _tied_. The other exception was when we got tired of the first term of Trump and elected Biden, but we weren't electing him because of his policies either.
Thanks to the wealthy getting what they wanted from Reagan, and collecting enough money to purchase both the political system and the media, we sorta just...stopped doing politics ~35 years ago, if by politics we mean 'actually electing people based on real things they promise and intend to at least attempt'. The system has been held in stasis, with Republicans unwilling to move, Democrats also unwilling to move but doing some performative struggling, and all of them just getting older because if you don't allow new ideas into the system, you also end up not allowing new people.
Which is why what is happening right now is such a shock. It's horrible and stupid, yes, but it's also a shock because it turns out things actually can change.
"
You do understand the conspiracy Owens has is about the harassment, right?
It is not about who pointed out to Kickstarter that the project violated Kickstarter's terms of service by, essentially, being designed as a dox tool. That was reported to them by, at minimum, Randi Lee Harper. (Although it probably was reported by like half the damn planet, because her Kickstarter was being read as 'We will track down people saying stuff people don't like and dox them' by _everyone_. We can argue whether Owens meant for it to say that, but that's how everyone read it.)
Those two things are, uh, not at all the same things.
If I'm throwing a party with loud music, and someone reports me to the police, and someone drives by taking shots at me...that doesn't make them the same person. Especially if my loud music has angered half the town.
For people who do not understand what happened here, this article is illuminating: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/how-social-autopsy-fell-for-gamergate-trutherism.html
(I cannot believe I just linked to a Jesse Singal article. The phrase 'newcomers wander into the weirder, angrier corners of the internet without first reading a tour guide or two.' is honestly so hilarious and said without the slightest self-awareness of what happened to him later on.)
And a lot of the illumination reading that _now_ is that it now is 2025 and we now actually all know how these sort of explosive harassment campaigns start and exist and things they do. Owens...didn't. Yes, that's right, she was proposing her tool with literally no context of any this, because her experience was basically 'Some people sometimes said mean things on Facebook under fake names', not the absolute meltdown of GamerGate that was still sputtering along.
So she wandered into a situation she didn't understand at all, almost everyone got horrified at the idea of what she was trying to do (I cannot emphasis enough how no one, on any side, liked the idea.), Zoe Quinn reached out and tried to reason with her, pointing out it not only was a bad idea, but also that she needed to brace herself for when everything started, 45 minutes later the hate started, she decided that was Quinn, and everything from there on was just a gibberish conspiracy, eventually slipping into the conspiracy that Quinn was faking all the harassment to start with and that Social Autopsy would have exposed that.
I'm now actually interested if you believe _that_ conspiracy theory.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
I thought you would have figured this out by now, but they _were_ all fired.
And here's the quote as to why he fired them.
There was no actual individual justification given. Not a single error on their part cited.
And I feel it's important to point out he said _constitutional_ advice. Not 'laws of war' advice. War crimes do not have anything to do with the constitution. Rules of Engagement in other countries do not have anything to do with the constitution. Almost no part of a war has anything to do with the constitution.
There's pretty much just two things to do with the military that might raise constitutional question and one of them is about the use of the military in invading other countries without any sort of Congressional authorization...which JAG would not weigh in on, that's a political question that needs to solved in the civilian process.
No, the only real actual place you'd run into a constitutional question is...using the military against US citizens. You know, the thing Trump has repeatedly mused about doing. The thing he had to be stopped from doing his first term: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-esper-trump-shoot-black-lives-matter-protesters-1346079/
But, hey, while you're _still_ refusing to draw any sort of fascism line, I guess you refuse to say you'd have a problem with that.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
She didn't really have a role in GamerGate. Her Social Autosy project site was set up in the very recent aftermath of GamerGate, and it probably is something that exists because of it, but I'm not aware of her being relevant _in_ GamerGate, just sort of imploding in the _aftermath_.
Basically, for those who do not know, Candace Owens had a somewhat bad idea that seemingly would seemingly involving doxing people on the internet (What it would actually do and how it could work without doxing was very vague.) So everyone (And I really do mean everyone, left and right.) objected to it, including Zoe Quinn, who was talking about it because she herself had been the target of massive harassment and it theoretically existed to help people like her.
Zoe Quinn also warned Candace that if she did it, if she didn't back away from it, the same people who came after Zoe would come after her.
And sure enough, people did come after Candace. Including with very racist stuff.
The people doing the harassment presented themselves as right-wing, sometimes even as Trump supporters, but Candace decided this was being lead by Zoe Quinn because...she's kind of gullible and dumb, honestly there's not a lot more than that.
I mean, here: https://quillette.com/2018/05/08/problem-candace-owens/
I'm actually kinda wondering if the GamerGate-gullible people on this site actually believe Zoe Quinn sent an army of harassment against Candace. On one had, there's no evidence whatsoever that Zoe had anything to do with it. On the other hand, [insert conspiracy]
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
It's worth pointing out that while it is nearly unprecedented to for _anyone_ at that level to be removed or asked to resign, it is pretty unprecedented to have two people missing at once from the Joint Chiefs. There's a reason we carefully stagger that.
We have _three Joint Chiefs_ missing. Although I guess the Commandant of the Coast Guard of technically just an attendee, not actually a Joint Chief.
Incidentally, this also means we have the Navy _and_ the Coast Guard without a Senate-confirmed head right now. If someone wants to try a naval invasion, I guess now is the time.
"
Now, that's a nice pithy joke, but try addressing the actual hypothetical:
Let's say we wake up, Tuesday, and all the heads of JAG have been fired.
These would be the lawyers in charge of prosecuting military personal for war crimes and issuing illegal orders, fired. Cause they're the _other_ people you would need to remove if you wanted to do something unlawful with the military.
Would it be serious if Hegseth did that?
It sure is weird how you will never state anything you think would be serious indications of something wrong.
"
To quote myself:
Hey, Jaybird. What would convince you that the Trump administration is planning to do something very illegal with the military?
What if next week they fired all the heads of the every service's JAG?
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Jaybird, I literally explaing some of the three years-term before, but let me explain every single one of them in detail, since I guess you cannot even be bothered to check a single one:
First, Naval. Going down the list:
Admiral Mullen left his position to become Joint Chief.
Admiral Boorda died while holding the position.
Admiral Moore left his position to become Joint Chief.
Admiral Anderson took early retirement because he conflicted with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Cuban Missile crisis due to his stupidly aggressive stance of using depth charges on Soviet submarines, a thing that _objectively_ almost started a nuclear war. Two out of three people required people on that submarine voted to use nuclear weapons and the lowest-ranked, the executive officer, Vasily Arkhipov, voted no. So...yeah, Admiral Anderson guy got fired.
Admiral Carney seems to be before they decided on the four year thing. That doesn't seem like he was forced to retire, he was appointed for two years.
So, no, literally one person has ever been removed from their position as Chief of Naval Operations while the Joint Chiefs have existed. Obviously, that position has existed well before that, but huge amount of military policy and how it interacted with the civilian administration changed during and after WWII, and trying to compare before and after is very silly. Same with Spatz in the Air Force.
Now Air Force:
General Moseley was asked to resigned because, under his watch, the Air Force mishandled nuclear weapons, which caused huge amounts of outrage. That's it. That's the reason. It's very simple. You can ask if it was fair to blame him for that, it probably wasn't, but that was what it was for.
General Fogleman resign willingly, he was not asked to do so. That is a fairly complicated situation about military ethics and perceived influencing of judicial decisions that I don't really want to get into, but the relevant part is he literally was not asked to resign, he did it himself because he though this ethics required it. It sorta is political, but in the sense of 'I think I have accidentally become political so I will recuse myself entirely out of my position'.
General Dugan, and I cannot make this more clear, repeatedly disobeyed very direct orders to SHUT UP about the US trying to kill Saddam Hussein. Straight up insubordination, literally would not stop talking to journalists about this topic. And, as far as I can tell, him and Adminal Anderson are the only people in all of this who have actually been _fired_ instead of being asked to retire.
General Brown got prostate cancer and retired.
General LeMay was also asked to retire early (Barely early, like a few months) due to public disagreements with Defense Secretary McNamara.
If you actually want to know what happened between McNamara/Kennedy/Johnson and the Joint Chiefs, there are entire books written on it. The Vietnam war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all sorts of actual real conflict between the two groups, the civilians and the military, with the military repeatedly chaffing under the civilian control.
That was not a good situation to be in, and is actually one of the reasons the Joint Chiefs were restructured to no longer be in the chain of command.
And that is not the situation we have here, literally none of the fired people have ever argued at all with the civilians, as far as we are aware. Also, they are not in the chain of command, and cannot give orders to the rest of the military, so it doesn't really matter what they think.
THAT ISN'T WHAT THE JOINT CHIEFS DO.
"
Also, and this a somewhat minor detail, but the Joint Chiefs do not have operational control. They are literally not in the chain of command, the US military does not have a unified high command at all.
The chain of command is president -> secretary of defense -> secretary of various service branches -> service or joint commanders
The first three people in that chain are civilians. The Joint Chiefs also serve under the Secretary of their service branch, and report to those Secretaries. Trump already has the power to change out the Secretaries, and in fact did the moment he got elected, and no one has a problem with that. That's the civilian side, that's political, the president gets to control it.
That's the people who made any decisions about DEI, not the Joint Chiefs. The Joint Chiefs don't have anything to do with policy. They are, explicitly, not there for that sort of policy, just military readiness policy. And any policy they're supposed to doing is just done via advising the President or Secretary of Defense to do it, they don't have any ability to do it themselves.
The Joint Chiefs are supposed to be politically-neutral advisory body. They advise about tactics to accomplish goals, and they not only knows what the military is currently doing, but what it can do, including what is lawful and what isn't.
And that, right there, is the real problem, because they not only are allowed to advise leadership, but they are allowed to contact and advise _the service commanders_, or in fact anyone in the branch. They are the person that can call up a service commander and say 'As far as I understand the situation, your orders to detain that Congressman do not sound lawful'. It's not _binding_, they have no authority to actually make anything happen, but it is a hell of a defense at your court martial for disobeying orders, to say 'The highest ranking person in this service agreed with my decision'.
The only reason you care about replacing them is if you want people who have a very different understanding of what orders are lawful and what the military is allowed to do under US and international law.
"
The courts will punt on deciding the 28th's status unless it somehow hits the very narrow window of mattering, and probably even then.
"
Jaybird, why are you pretending that these people were not fired mid-term?
Why are you pretending it is common for them to fired mid-term, or in fact _ever_?
I went to the Commandant of the Coast Guard, to cite how long it has been since one of them was fired, and it turns out...literally never, apparently. Or at least, not before 1946, when they started serving out four year terms. All of them after served exactly four years, within two or three days. (Except for the second one, who served four years and five month and appears to have done that to move the schedule to June 1 instead of Jan 1) And looking at the ones before that, before four years became a standard, I don't think _any_ of them have been fired. Many of them left due to death or age-mandated requirement from the Coast Guard.
As for the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force: That also is a four year term, although there has been one that retired early due to what could be considered political reasons, General Fogleman, and of course General Dugan was fired for continuing to flap his lips at reporters after being told to stop by the president. So let's check _why_ General Charles Q. Brown Jr. was fired, according to the the person who fired him:
As has been pointed out by active-duty military, the only actual litmus test for top military leadership is following lawful orders given by the civilian chain of command. Asserting that military officials should be removed for not rejecting the _lawful orders_ of the previous civilian administration is flatly bonkers.
And note that 'lawful' means 'under the military code of justice and international law', not random civilian court decisions. None of which, incidentally, have involved the military _at all_, the military is generally not subject to that sort of constitutional scrutiny at all. There is absolutely no way to argue that 'what the military was doing' under Biden was unlawful in any sense.
So basically Hegseth's just arguing 'The military should have the right to disobey the civilian leadership, mostly because I am stupid enough to think it will only disobey the _liberals_ and it will love us conservatives.'
This is because Hegseth is, and this cannot be stressed enough, an extremely bad person who does not understand the military and how it exists within the government, and shouldn't be in charge of a tank, much less an entire armed force.
"
This is going to keep happening, folks. We've had decades of the American far-right inject the alt-right memes directly into their brain and merging into some sort of terminal online brain where Na.zi stuff is funny because it triggers the libs, but in Europe, far-right people have to distance themselves from the slightest hint of Na.zi _literally as fast as possible_.
Some of that is because, yes, there are legal implications for supporting Na.zis in a lot of European countries, but also, they have a functioning media and a population that, even at its far-righty-est, doesn't think _open_ Na.zis are funny or should be allowed in polite company.
As the US far-right goes completely masks off, Europe's far-right is going to keep backing away and crafting more and more elaborate masks and insisting they have nothing to do with that.
Which will actually be helpful in the recovery of this country.
"
Alright folks, we got Steve Bannon doing the Na.zi salute at CPAC. Any comments? Critiques on style? Any discussion about how we've openly moved into just straight up Na.zi symbolism with the current administration?
Don't worry, they're only doing it because the libs are _mistakening_ it for the Na.zi salute, it's not actually the real thing. [insert joke about having to be from Germany or it's just sparkling fascism] And, of course, pissing of the libs is more important not being mistaken for Na.zis...in fact, they don't really seem to mind being mistaken for Na.zis.
Europe, as always, does mind, and the French Na.zis-that-claim-they-are-not-Na.zis, who had a speaker named Jordan Bardella scheduled today to speak today, withdrew from his speech faster than [insert joke about France military here]
He said, I quote, "Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Na.zi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon", which is the sort of thing that normal people, or even far-right politicians like Jordan Bardella, do, after realizing they are about to stand on the same stage that a person who threw a Na.zi salute was standing on.
Edit: Ah, found the article: I don't know why he was startled, overt Na.zis were allowed last year, too: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nazis-mingle-openly-cpac-spreading-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335
Just no salutes from the stage
"
The completely self-destruction of the richest man in the world and his insane need for attention and for people to like him would be funny if he wasn't determined to do so much harm along the way.
"
Yeah, it is different from that, which is why almost no companies do that. In fact, the thing you're thinking of, the reason you picked the name Robin DiAngelo, is not an example of that.
Coca-Cola signed up for for something called LinkedIn Learning, a platform that has thousands of courses. They required a few of those courses to be taken by employees. They also, sorta randomly, selected some courses and put them in 'learning plans'. Robin DiAngelo's LinkedIn Learning webinar was one of those.
Was this a poor choice? Probably. Was it a deliberate attempt to create aggressive training materials? No.
In fact, _is_ that material aggressive? Not really. I really don't like the way it's using 'white', but the things she says are generally true and presented in a neutral manner, and it's somewhat ironic that she has consistent talked about how white men _constantly_ seem to take bald facts and very minor suggestions as direct attacks on them. She's written a book about it, in fact.
I mean, to quote her: "The number one most effective adaptation of racism over time, is the good/bad binary, this idea that a racist is a bad person and a good person is not racist. And so it’s about individuals who are either good or bad or who either do or don’t engage."
And because that quote is slightly confusing, she is saying that racism has basically adapted by making racism UTTERLY EVIL instead of normally a bunch of subconscious tendencies and assumptions that anyone can get (Which what 95% of racism actually is), so that anyone who gets any of their behavior pointed out, even the slightest hint of 'maybe don't say that' or 'we use this new term now' has to defend it to the death, or they are BAD PEOPLE.
"
He's actually not. He's talking about literally one example of DEI, a thing that Democrats did 50+ years ago and was just struck down by the courts.
And then a bunch of completely unrelated stuff. Defunding the police has nothing to do with DEI, regardless of how popular or not you think the policy is. (It also, notable, is not actually a Democratic position.)
Along with absolute nonsense like 'He noted how just about the only people he encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were...' Um...yeah, _all_ elected politicians went to college, statistically speaking.
Along with completely insane complaints like how David Hogg tweeted something about...who started gun control? It is a completely insane thing to say, not just because who started 'gun control' is pretty undefined, but also the American gun control movement certainly wasn't started 'centuries again', it was started after a number of high-profile assassinations in the 60s. So it is an extremely dumb thing to tweet, David Hogg is sorta a moron, but in what possible way is that tweak supposed to be causing people not to vote for Democrats? Also, how is that DEI?
What is actually happening in this discussion is summarized in the paragraph that starts with 'What worldview am I complaining about?', and then he proceeds to summarize a worldview that the Democrats absolutely _do not have_, but instead has been ascribed to them by Republicans and the media has happily gone along with.
The very next paragraph, for example, is 'Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, and so they try to stack the deck against them.', a thing that did not happen. Again, I will point out that Affirmative Action is _almost sixty years old_ and the idea of using race in the way that is something that high education just...decided to do back then, and is not some recent thing that Democrats have done.
"
It actually doesn't matter if 'distance' is possible, mostly because the Republicans will just overtly lie about things and the media will not bother to mention that while repeating their lies.
In fact, they already are massively lying about pretty much every aspect of this topic and built up a giant glob of nonsensical resentment about stuff that isn't actually true.
You actually can look at Jaybird, who has internalized all of this, and see how completely incoherent and angry he is about companies doing PR stuff and stuff like that.
I mean, this article itself is a good example. It claims to be about DEI, but here is the conclusion:
There is exactly one part of that that could be DEI, and that's affirmative action. And it's worth pointing out that that policy is _literally 50 years old_, created by executive order by JFK. Except not even that, the current system is basically just something education _invented_, it's not something directed from above. And it is now illegal.
Was there a big pushback by elected Dems when the court struck it down in 2023? I don't remember one. There were plenty of people going 'This will not have the effect that a lot of Asians have apparently been convinced it will' (and those people were right) and a lot of people, myself included, pointing out all the _other_ stuff that tilted the admissions process towards both white people and wealthy people, like legacy admissions and considering extracurriculars and other activities, things that often are completely inaccessible to the poor. (And the rich can literally just buy certificates saying their kids participated in those, as we've seen.)
But I don't remember anyone, and certainly no elected Dem, saying 'This is horrible! I approve of some sort of scoring system that explicitly includes race in it! We demand the courts allow this!' Maybe they did, maybe I missed it.
But I seem to recall a lot of people pointing out that colleges had mostly transitioned _away_ from doing that in favor of things that attempted to equalize things better, even if a few of them did include race as a pretty minor factor. And it wouldn't really matter if they couldn't do that anymore.
And, again...this isn't legal anymore. Are Democrats supposed to be running around yelling 'I am satisfied with how the courts ruled!' Do we think that would make the news? The news is barely covering Democrats at all.
"
It really is sorta gibberish, isn't it?
Jaybird really does assume that Democratic governors are all extremely far left, all occupying positions that almost no elected Democrats occupy at all.
"
I think she's waiting long enough to remove him that it doesn't create some special election that Cuomo is going to win...at least, people keep saying that, I have not actually gone and looked at the law and deadlines to understand exactly what they're talking about.
The absolute best case scenario is that Adams' prosecution is delayed, he toadies up to Trump, and then Hochul removes him for the very obvious cause of 'actual literal criminal everyone has been yelling at her to remove', and he gets prosecuted anyway. We're already halfway there.
Just making it blatantly obvious how corrupt Adams and the Trump DOJ is.
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Don't project how everyone else in the county thinks about mass transit to NYC...only _25%_ of the people who live in NYC have driver's licenses. A good chunk of the ones that do, keep their car outside the city, so even less of that 25% drive in the city. The amount of people who had to 'make the tradeoff' is nearly negligible, because the amount of New Yorkers who drive in and out of the city is negligible. (It's just that the city is so populated that 'negligible' still results in pretty bad traffic.)
I've heard from plenty of people who talk about how New York is literally now driveable, you can actually operate a motor vehicle in it and get places.
Several of them are people who do deliveries in Manhattan.
Even New Jersey, when attacking the program, attacked it on the grounds that NYC keeps all the money, not their population disliked it.
Like, everyone I hear talks about this doesn't quite understand the very unique situation of NYC WRT to cars. They absolutely do not think about mass transit in the way other people think about mass transit.
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
I didn't defend it. I defended my use of the term 'localization' to mean 'changing a conversation to something that the localizer thought was more relevant', a thing that is, indeed, called localization. As opposed to 'translation', which would not do that.
This incidentally was an incredibly weird thing for you to take issue with.
I have no idea what the hell you are talking about 'a power play'.
What the f*ck are you talking about?
The idea that the 'inclusivity people' said 'At least they tried' is hilariously wrong. You did notice me talking explicitly how there's a term for 'inclusion-washing', which you didn't know, because, uh, your people...I guess they're anti-inclusion by default...the anti-inclusion people literally do not care about any of this except to attack people over.
Whereas the 'inclusion people' have been calling out purely performative crap, where companies talk up inclusivity, do the vaguest handwave towards, but then are not actually inclusive. (Which, again, this wasn't. This was a studio with a license, they did not decide anything about Miles, they didn't make him Puerto Rican or decide his personality to score points. But I am not saying 'That cannot happen', I am saying 'This is not that'.)
You know, if we were actually having a discussion about _that_, how about talking about how Target was a _sponsor of various Prides_ and then immediately folded to Trump's executive orders about DEI and was kicked out of quite a lot of Pride sponsorships.
And a lot of queer people who have been pointing out just how much queer-washing there has been going over the years, where companies do extremely safe-looking things to promote gay rights and then fold immediately with the slightest pushback, were proven right. In fact, it's the second time Target's done it, when Trump's blacksuits attacked Pride displays in 2023 and Target removed them immediately, and there was discussion of kicking them out _then_ and everyone tried to justify it with 'Oh, they have to do that to keep their employees safe'.
But we aren't actually talking about how a lot of this is purely performative, we're talking about your grievance that 'Sometimes people screw up inclusion and that means inclusion is bad!' Mostly because the fact that so much of it is performative really would undercut the theme you're trying to push.
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"Annoyed by a term" and "offensive" are not the same thing.
I am annoyed when people confused couldn't care less with could care less.
And you operate in a place where academic types have some sort of control over your life? Or, at minimum, have some sort of influence over your friends and social situation?
Being pushed by _whom_? With _what_ repercussions to people who did not do them?
We had a discussion here, Jaybird, about whether or not a term, I thing it was 'dude', was gendered. You can probably pull it up. What were the repercussions for the people who did not agree that it was?
You are using language of oppression like 'policed' for things that absolutely, in no manner at all, harm you. You are upset when people with absolutely no power at all over you speak, not even specifically to you, but to the world at large and say 'This is what people should do'.
And I think you should ask yourself when it's only when _specific things_ are talked about like that you get upset? Do you get upset when some random fire-and-brimstone preacher insists that people living together should be married?
Why is this different?
Ah, yes, the vibes-based argument.
Yes, Jaybird, sometimes the examples used are real things. For example, sometime a bank is owned by a Jewish person.
That does not actually mean the version of events being built is important or relevant.
You have brought up two _examples of things in video games that literally could not have impacted you_ in this very discussion. And I mean could not have impacted you in even the most indirect way, it wasn't even something tell you what to do or disapproving of you or anything. One of them was a possibly inept discussion of something in a language of a game you do not play on a topic you really don't have a reason to have formed an opinion on at all, and the other was an error.
Your complaints are f*cking _wet tissue paper_, and part of a completely manufactured backlash against...well, not being racist, I guess.
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A discussion about the word Latine is, indeed, more relevant to Spanish speakers than English speakers, so, yes, that would be 'more relevant'. I have no idea if that was a particularly _reasonable_ thing to insert, I have no idea how dialogue in Spider-Man 2 normally goes and if that was a particularly clunky thing to bring up or not.
Most importantly, I don't care. And I bet you cannot explain why you care.
So, I'm going to pause the fact you're incorrect in this specific example and address what you are trying to talk about:
What you are referring to is called diversity-washing. Or inclusion-washing. There's a similar concept as queer-washing. It's when you make absolutely token efforts towards appearing inclusive, while changing basically nothing and not even doing any real research.
The normal reaction would be to laugh and say 'You are fooling no one'.
The political right's reaction is, instead 'How dare someone even _pretend_ to be inclusive!'. They're the same people who think 'virtue signaling' (Which this could be a subset of) is bad because people shouldn't have virtue, not the fact the virtue is false.
Inclusion is good. Faking inclusion is...not good. That's not the same as bad, and in fact it's arguable better than nothing at all, but it's not very good.
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That said, you are incorrect here: Miles Morales is half-Puerto Rican. Miles' heritage is very relevant to the character. He often speaks Spanish. Him having a flag on the wall is entirely in character, and probably straight from the comics, I don't know. But it certainly is something he could have on the wall. So Sony didn't just 'decide' to put the Puerto Rican flag on the wall. They made a licensed game that has a character that would logically have such a flag on the wall and (lazily tried to) put it in the background.
Actually, back up. What 'message' do you think the Puerto Rican flag is sending anyway? It is art, and I would agree that it does have a message beyond the actual object it is, a layer beyond the text, but that message is clearly 'This is someone who is proud of being part Puerto Rican, and that is important to him'.
That's a character trait, not a message of 'inclusion'.
Are you objecting perhaps to the inclusion of a half-Puerto Rican in the game _at all_?
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Why?
You don't really need to pay attention here, Jaybird. Eventually, enough people will be using whatever new term enough that it will seem normal, and you'll just start using it.
You might have noticed, or not, that African-American has sorta fallout of use in the past decade, and that's because a few people, specifically journalists, have started making the distinction of African-American being more an ethnic group that is 'descendants of US slaves', and Black for the race, and people are almost always talking about the race. (We can, perhaps, blame this on Obama? Who was the second but not the first.)
And this is so unimportant to the world at large that most people haven't noticed. Everyone started saying Black, so they said Black even if they used to say African-American.
I think you've confused what is happening here with Latinx with slurs or think a new term makes the old one immediately offensive or something. That's not how it works.
Because you...are not supposed to use Latino? Who has told you that? In what context are you using that term and people are disapproving? Or, alternately, what people with power have made it clear that using Latino is bad and that people who use it should be criticized for?
Or is perhaps what is happening not actual policing, but instead you being told you are being policed by groups that want you think people are trying to police your speech? Have ever experienced any negative consequences for using the word 'Latino'?
I haven't, and I'm pretty sure I hang around the sort of people who care about that a _lot_ more than the people around you. I have seen people's language policed, including using gendered terms. Just not that one.
What was the problem that the Na.zis, in 1930s German, were put in power to fix?
Just because some 'problem' gets people into office does not make it an actual problem. Sometimes it's a lie, and by lie I include 'taking singular examples of things that might offend people, of the sort that happen all the time in all sorts of context, and blowing them out of proportion'. Aka, listing the Jewish people who own banks.
Or that trans people get healthcare in prison, like literally everyone else.
And sometimes I just mean straight up lie, because that happens just as much. Right now large sections of the Federal government are being called 'DEI hires' with literally no evidence that their hiring had anything to do with DEI, and in fact the government does not and never has never considered race in hiring decisions.
There is a political party in this country that will make up gibberish about anything, and asserting the other party should agree and 'back off' not just cedes literally the entire argument to them, but it means they will pick some new thing to lie about.
The only way to solve that is to have a media that calls out these lies, and for people like you to stop falling for these lies. Which you are still doing!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.