I appreciate your efforts to try to convince people that the last 10 or 12 years of escalating craziness around identity issues was all a figment of their imagination. When it comes to me I'd say save the pixels.

Saul, many of the people claiming there is a problem voted for Harris. I know I did.

I agree with a lot of your big picture analysis of why Harris lost. What I don't get is why your reaction to other Democrats saying we have a major branding problem is to call them all secret racists and sad pathetic little men.

At a certain point the goal of the party isn't just to narrowly win the presidency it's to get a sizeable enough senate and house majorities to actually do things. Yes Trump is a really big threat right now but the best thing that can be done to check him outside of using the courts is to thump the GOP in the midterms. Are you sure your approach to this subject helps?

Interestingly the modern DEI kayfabe has IMO actually increased risk, especially in an environment with a conservative federal judiciary that one assumes is very ready and willing to hold against companies for discrimination and/or hostile work environment for white people.

I've been in-house long enough to watch the evolution. Back in the day instead of "DEI" it was typical to have something that might be called 'Compliance' or 'Code of Conduct' training. This would include insights like 'don't sing rap lyrics with profanity or racial slurs in the break room' and 'do not offer members of your staff a promotion in exchange for sexual favors' kind of stuff. People would often groan about this too for various reasons but it was all generally consistent with what the law is. While stuff like this was never going to be determinative in a lawsuit the consensus was its better to have it than not for CYA purposes. At a certain point a lot of the risk conversation ends up being about not wanting to be seen as an outlier when the inevitable claim occurs.

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.

From a risk perspective it's gone from mild CYA to just begging to be sued.

I wish it was that easy.

A good HR department can have useful compliance and administrative functions (think benefit management). I think what happens in a lot of places is they assume a 'create the culture' kind of function and do a bunch of stuff antithetical to their actual mission, which is protect the business.

What is the mission, or the vision or what have you?

Stop Trump for sure. But what else?

I am sure everyone is tired of my opinion on the subject but whatever.

To me a lot of this circles back to the mission of the Democratic party. Does anyone know what it is anymore? Historically I always thought of it as stuff like protecting the commons, standing up for the rights of the little guy against larger social and economic forces, and ensuring the state acts as a check against poverty and inequality through various social democratic lite programs and entitlements.* Oh and usually an overall more sensible foreign and fiscal policy, at least over the lasf 25-30 years.

The question moving forward is whether that stuff (maybe modified for the 21st century) still matters or if it's endlessly indulging and implementing the sensibilities of people deeply ensconsed in academic and NGO culture. I'd like to recover something like the former, but I suppose time will tell.

*Obviously there have always been tensions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy, that just makes them a normal American political party.

If Angela Merkel were still chancellor the whole thing would solve itself.

Yea, it is definitely not for everyone. Which is maybe good or maybe just also consistent with the dystopian implications of such a business.

Heh, sanctimonious rage? The tone was intended as constructive and friendly.
Anyway accusing anyone of sanctimony is pretty rich coming from a guy who down below is speaking approvingly about the Pope just because of a single point you agree with, as if you actually care what the Holy See says about anything generally.

Also not sure what you mean by 'gain advantage.' Maybe you'll be more specific. But the reality is that women now outnumber men in college by about 10%, and are outpacing them on virtually every educational achievement metric. Plenty of high earning, high prestige professions like medicine and law (my profession) are close to female dominated and based on pipeline will be even moreso over the next generation or two. I don't have any problem with this in principle. So rest assured, all the opportunity is there for them, and there's no need for these official anf quasi official discrimination games.

I was going to make a joke about trying to fit a halberd in an SUV but according to Wikipedia sig sauer firearms would be a fully authentic representation.

I don't think any of is likely to turn out well. I've never voted for Trump or any Republican for president. If I have to cop to anything it's voting for Larry Hogan twice for governor in a context where Democrats would hold legislative super majorities.

Here is what I'd offer as food for thought from someone who still votes D but probably has some big disagreements on a handful of cultural issues.

1. I think the ability to do the kinds of really good things the government can do rests in large part on the government being, on balance, effective and responsible. Not perfect mind you, because nothing is perfect. But it does need to operate from an understanding that it's going to have to work really hard, and be really good, to get credit, and that a relatively small amount of idiocy is going to be weighed (at times grossly) disproportionately against it.

2. I think the Democratic party and the progressive permanent bureaucracy, and its auxillaries in education, corporate HR, and influential NGO spaces, desperately want to be able to discriminate against my sons based on race and sex. Your own comments here at times suggest you'd be comfortable with that too. I don't think any progeny of mine ought to be given unfair advantage (as if my glorious genes aren't enough- kidding) but I'm never going to be on board with a system like that. Neither are a lot of people, including, increasingly, the people who are nominally supposed to benefit from it.

Now at the end of the day I vote based on the fact that I think the greater evil is, for example, to (pretend to but not actually) balance the federal budget on the backs of health insurance that mainly helps poor women and children. And thats to say nothing of putting ignorant yahoos in charge. It's like trying to solve a problem by giving a monkey a hand grenade. However as long as the Democrats and progressive bureaucracies are steeped in this stuff it will be asking for many, many people ro swallow a bitter and bordering on poisonous pill.

Hungary is a unitary parliament system which makes it a lot easier to totally take over. I think Trump is going to leave a mess of smoking craters and ruins, kind of like a half-as*ed renovation job that never got passed or even completed the demolition stage.

Unlike you I wouldn't call myself an internationalist but I am a kind of realist that sees the upside to self interested noblesse oblige and non-zero sum thinking where the opportunities present themselves.

It seems to me that the core failure is that of America's outward looking organizations, from the aid agencies, to the spooks, to even the military itself to exercise some basic judgment and self auditing. It's clear to me that DOGE (to say nothing of Trump himself) is completely Twitter brained. The reason this stuff is on the radar is because it's become so easy to meme-ify the various idiotic-to-disastrous things these organizations do. Bottom line is if we want PEPFAR (and to be clear, I want PEPFAR) we need to be able to say no to DEI in Serbia or promoting gay or trans or whatever comic book characters for Peru's department of education, and wherever else.

Autocorrect fail. Obviously I meant NYP but know better than go edit a comment with a link.

All paths lead to someone in prison, just a question of how much excitement we have along the way.

NYT has more details.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/new-app-offers-personal-bodyguards-and-private-motorcades-on-demand-in-nyc/

Apparently you can specify your security details style of attire. Options include 'business tactical.'

The name for it is DEI.

I think this is all fair enough but a credible conversation is only possible when it excludes tax cuts.

DOGE is fairly criticized as unserious until such time as Trump/the GOP drop those from the budget proposal.

Cowabunga.

Yea I think the US press is way too cozy with power.

Not just that, but they operate from a space of seemingly studied incuriosity about the status quo. For example, as I understand it, Musk and his dorks have been given control of US Data Services which was set up by the Obama admin to conduct audits and similar stuff not that far removed from the steel-manned version of what Trump (and Musk) say they want to do.

I am sure Musk and co. are making a total hash of this, operating in a manner of total incompetence and corruption. But it all begs questions like 'what was US Data Services doing before January of 2025? Did they ever uncover waste or abuse? Is every penny the federal government is spending truly beyond reproach? What about the inspector generals? Do we know they were all doing a good job?'

The WaPo is fundamentally incapable of asking questions like that, everyone knows it, and the result isn't even the view from nowhere, it's the view from a presumption of authority no one actually recognizes.

I don't think it's whataboutism. I think that media outlets like WaPo have either decided not to, or their worldview simply precludes, the ability to interrogate the assertions of particular officials and institutions. This causes a lot of their criticism of Trump, much of which is warranted, to fall flat.

My understanding is that the launch codes were always in Moscow and that while the weapons were stationed in Ukraine the Ukrainian state never had the ability to use or maintain them.

I think what we're seeing now is the testing of those agreements that from Russia's perspective were made under duress. Some level of revanchism was probably inevitable even after nominal independence. Our own wasn't totally secure for decades and decades after we had it on paper.

This is the claim.

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-has-received-less-than-half-of-us-assistance-allocated-during-full-scale-war-zelensky-says/

I haven't seen anything with better context but I read it as being about shortcomings in either US logistics or procurement, not necessarily corruption.

I'm not quite sure that's right. I would say we had something like 50 years of nationalistic expansionism and consolidation followed by another 50 years of tense mostly peace underwritten by coherent mutual defense alliances and mutually assured destruction. We then had about 20 years of US unipolarity. Now we have to figure out what comes next.

I think the natural first order results of a sphere of influence approach is that a dozen or more countries immediately develop nuclear weapons as their only guarantee of continued sovereignty and a couple dozen more involved in some low intensity ethnic and/or territorial conflict or another rationally conclude this is their moment to strike so they'd better take it. If that's what we're nevertheless going to say is the best option then we need to be really, really confident we've thought through how all of that plays out. I am not convinced anyone has.