I'm following the hearing about the EOs barring trans people from the military live on Blue Sky, they are going _exceptionally_ poorly for the government.
Things like the judge asking 'Can you explain how pronoun usage harms military preparedness', and she tore into them when they could not answer. And asking if the EO saying that an entire group of people are 'dishonest, undisciplined, and lack integrity' is 'expressing animus', a thing that is pretty important to the suit, and that the government lawyer was unwilling to confirm (Because it would be disastrous for the case) or deny (Because, you know, pesky legal ethics.) that.
So is there a term for this sort of Derpily Earnest Inclusion?
It's weird how you've included two different things that are not related, and asked if there is a term for it.
The term for 'People saying different things in different language version of a game' is just called localization, which often includes not just direct language translation, but altering things to be more relevant to the target audience, usually stuff that is not particularly plot-relevant.
As for the second, that is commonly called a mistake, which is defined as an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. It was probably the last two, as it seems unlikely to have been done on purpose.
The problem *IS* the stuff that we still don’t seem to have a term for, now that we’ve hammered out that CRT is an obscure academic theory and DEI refers solely to HR at work.
Why, it's almost as if what other people saying things that people think are wrong is not a thing that generally has a term. And the only reason it _needs_ a term is so that politicians can rail against it.
And there was a serious push by “the media” to get the terms to change. Seriously.
It's hilarious how you like to an article talking about how much a new term is catching on or not among the people it describes as 'a push'.
Either it catches on or not. Language changes, and sometimes it changes deliberately, and sometimes more organically. And to the point, almost all terms that minority groups use to describe themselves are very deliberate terms.
For example, did you know the reason that L is first in LGBT is in recognition of the hospice work that a lot of lesbians did for dying gay men during the AIDS crisis. The term, when gay right started, was just 'gay and lesbian', and when they added more letters, they very deliberately put lesbians first, to thank them.
Latino people will eventually either accept or reject the term Latinx.
Are you annoyed because they are not asking _you_ for permission?
Or have you imagined that someone is attacking you because you're not personally used it?
Okay. Given that, from my point of view, one of the big problems was that DEI means “similar faff” as often, if not more often, than the corporate stuff where people sit through some powerpoint slides before signing the paper, we’re going to need a term for the similar faff because the similar faff is, in my view, the problem.
Yes, we understand that you think 'the problem' is the thing that does not impact anyone in any manner whatsoever.
DEI is, again, an organizational framework, an organization (Which can be corporate, government, or non-profit, or even things like social clubs, I guess) saying 'We are going to do these goals and here is the team to do that' or 'Here is the initiative we have created to accomplish these goals'.
Like organizations frameworks, this is a thing that gets discussed outside of corporations and things that sorta look like standards are invented as 'the norm' and corporations tend to do them.
Pretending DEI is some abstract thing that exists independent of the implementation is like pretending Public Relations or Quality Assurance is some abstract thing that can exist independent of the implementation. Not...really. They are fields with some level of shared knowledge, yes, and consultants and all sorts of things, but the actual implementations are per-rgroup and vary wildly.
And just like PR and QA, sometimes DEI does something that is _manifestly_ not helpful and possibly even harmful to the stated goals of that entity exists within the corporation. A corporation announcing 'We haven't killed as many people this month as last month' would be an example of bad PR. A corporation asking people to use a stupid term to refer to a group of people that don't like or use it would be bad DEI. A corporation that assumes that large changes to the codebase do not require more testing is doing bad QA. Etc, etc.
I called that 'incorrect'. A better term might be 'incompetent'. The reason I used 'incorrect' is that DEI literally includes 'listening to the people you are trying to help', that's what equity is, so failing to do that and screwing up because of that is not just normal incompetent, it's almost incompetent at a meta level. It's like if PR started sending death threats to journalists, that is a level past any normal incompetence.
Okay. Can we shorten this to “bad DEI”?
If you mean 'bad' in the sense 'The thing being done here under the banner of DEI in this corporation is not accomplishing the stated goals of DEI', yes.
Or even 'This thing that DEI experts and consultants are passing around as a recommendation is does not accomplish the stated goals of DEI', yes. (This, incidentally, accurately describes 75% of what they do.)
Not 'bad' as in some sort of moral judgement.
I mean, if the argument is that it’s not DEI because DEI can only come from the Southern region of France, we’re going to need a term for the thing that used to be called CRT, then was called bad DEI, and now is wandering around with only a referent but no reference.
Why do you think there's some sort of blanket term for 'people saying random and disconnected dumb things about a vague topic'? The closest you will find is 'a term for people saying a very specific dumb thing', like anti-vaxers. But that's an very specific set of beliefs.
People saying to their employees 'You should use this term to talk about a group that we have not bothered to check if actual members of the group use' is completely unrelated to, for example, the image you posted talking about white culture. There's not some shared beliefs behind them.
Or, if there is, it's just vague anti-racism. I guess you could just call it that.
The DOJ is now arguing that Elon Musk does not run DOGE or work for them at all, and is merely a special advisor to the President: https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-house-claims-elon-musk-doesnt-run-doge/story?id=118913206
The lawyers did not bother to specify who _does_ run it, which one would assume that government lawyers would do almost automatically when presented with 'lawsuit that targets targets a governmental agency and names the head of the agency but names the wrong person as the head'. It is utterly surreal not to say 'X is not in charge, Y is, here is the documentation' as a response to that. It is blatant deliberate stalling to try to force the opposing side to file a motion demanding to know who is is in charge, a thing that they should not have to do and the judge isn't going to put up with them having to do...who runs governmental agencies is not secret and doesn't need to be requested in court. If I was the judge this filing was given to, I'd say 'Well, you have ten minutes to tell me who is in charge or I'm issuing an temporary restraining for the entire agency to stop what they are doing until someone is officially in charge.'
Anyway, lawyers doing things that will make judges very angry aside: Not only is this obvious nonsense, as both Trump and Elon have presented themselves in charge of DOGE many time, but it really feels like this means the entire DOGE scam is unraveling and Elon is trying to get out from under it.
Sadly, because Elon is a complete and total moron (Seriously, this cannot be stressed enough) and has admitted repeatedly he has access to restricted information that DOGE has accessed, making him not part of DOGE actually makes the situation for him worse, not better.
The lawyers trying to stop DOGE just claimed he wasn't in charge because the specific lawsuit pointed out that Elon had not been confirmed by the Senate, so decided to retcon him into a mere Presidential advisor, which might, in theory, make that lawsuit a little weaker, while making everything else so much stupider because this claim can be used in _other_ court filings about how DOGE should not be accessing things it is accessing, because now they can prove people outside DOGE have access to it!
Hell, it doesn't even actually help this lawsuit! This lawsuit is about how DOGE is out of control and operating outside Federal Regulations without Congressional Authorization or Senate Confirmation, and lawyers saying 'The person who has been claiming to run it is not actually running it, and we're not going to say who is, and in fact might not be sure' does not, uh, disprove that premise.
Okay, I guess I need to clarify a tiny bit more: DEI is an _organizational framework_. It is a thing that exists within an organization to achieve a certain goal within that organization. It is not some amorphous blob that can exist floating in the world. And more important to this question, it isn't an advocacy group telling _other people_ what to do.
So the question I would ask is: Who is insisting in this hypothetical? Is it some advocacy group saying it? Then no.
Is a business insisting on this terminology used within itself? Then the answer is yes. An organization defining what terms should be used is, indeed, DEI.
This example is an example of _incorrect_ DEI. But there's plenty of example just like this that you wouldn't disagree with, like a policy of referring to Black employees as Black instead 'colored'. No one thinks that's unreasonable. The problem with LatinX is it was made up by idiots.
So I guess what that actually shows is that DEI should listen to the people it is supposed to be helping...which oddly is already a principle of DEI, the one called equity, the one _no one does_ except as required by law.
Instead, often they hire idiotic consultants who charge too much for utterly useless nonsense, while ignoring actual problems they could be solving.
I fear at some point the people here have gotten the idea I like DEI in general. No. I do not. It's a usually a combination of the bare minimum to look like you're diverse, the literal minimum of equity required by law and that used to be done other places in the corporation, and a bunch of positive PR for being inclusive. I thought my dislike was implied in my post, but let me make that explicit.
But you do see that 'equity required by law'? Well, as I said, some of that law doesn't actually apply to the Federal government, so getting rid of DEIA is, for example, getting rid of accessibility for handicapped people. And Trump getting rid of it in the way he is sending a message that discrimination is fine, especially with the claim that huge chunks of the Federal government are DEI hires and do not deserve their positions, which is just a flat lie.
After we establish that the core of CRT is nonsense I’m not sure why there’s the need to justify just tossing the entire thing out.
I have read enough about string theory, and people critical of string theory, to form an opinion that string theory is nonsense and that science should probably move past it. It seems to be 'Let us create a theory broad enough that it could describe anything, and then plug in random numbers with no justification to make it work'. I'm not making up an example, I legitimately think this.
What I don't do is build entire conspiracy theories about kids being taught string theory (And people having to point out they are not) and then demand that string theory be removed from schools and then go on the internet and talk about how the criticism of it is very damning and that we should toss the entire thing.
Because, notable, I don't really have a say in what theories that physics chooses to pay attention to. Or college courses choose to teach...I guess theoretically I could, at least for public colleges, but I think physics should probably figure that out itself.
Likewise, we don't really have a say in what theories sociological and political scientists pay attention to. However...they do not actually pay attention to critical race theory, they barely pay attention to critical theory at all.
I’m sure there are some “good” aspects, but those can be redone under a sane ideology.
There are plenty of 'sane ideologies' in various race theories. You would probably reject them all, because almost all of them, looking at the data, assert that prejudice is best understood systemically, and [their theory] is how.
LOL. Why would I defend things I think are insane?
"I cannot think of any insane thing done in the name of DEI, so I'm demanding you do it!"
Since it's sitting right there, and you seem to think I will always defend anything anyone is calling 'DEI', let me talk about some of the bad things in the picture above.
For the record, there are several things I disagree with. But possibly for the opposite reason others do...I don't disagree that everything in that list varies by culture, but I would argue there are several things in that list that 'White Culture' does not actually believe, like 'Intent Counts', and that children should 'be independent'. (That is, notable, something that has changed to the opposite end incredibly fast in this culture.)
And some of them are almost gibberish. Like, all cultures agree on 'Be polite', they just disagree on the rules of politeness. Likewise, I have no idea what 'Must always "do something" about a situation' is supposed to mean.
Frankly, I find the entire thing very simplified and trite, and parts very confusing, but I will admit I don't know the target. Feel free to comment on the parts you disagree with.
--
Perhaps more to the point, why are we talking about 'things done in the name of DEI' instead of 'normal DEI behavior in corporations' or 'things that the government has done for DEI'.
No one can stop things 'being done in the name of DEI'. We are not talking about 'things done in the name of DEI' being removed, we're talking about actual government offices being removed.
Why don't we try that the other direction:
I’m not sure whether you’re in denial about the insane stuff done in the name of fiscal responsibility, or are actually in favor of it. What are the three most controversial things done explicitly under a fiscal responsibility banner that you’re willing to defend?
A very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about:
Critical Race Theory: If it is not taught, it cannot be CRT, period, as CRT is a sociological and political theory, not any form of action. Moreover, as the name suggests, it is a _critical_ theory. Critical theory is Marxism-based, as in, it critiquing (Hence the name) power structures. It's not the same thing as postmodernism (Which is a different theory) or social justice (Yet a different theory)
And it is at this point I'll admit that I don't fully understand the theory or care that much about this academic sociological theories. Literally nothing about it is important unless you need to learn it for a sociology class or are a practicing sociologist writing papers.
But to be clear, just because something is taught doesn't make it CRT either. A lot of people decided that what was being taught to kids was CRT because it pointed out racism was a systemic problem. Which is something CRT asserts, yes. And...so does everyone else. That's pretty much agreed by all people who study the issue. Doing otherwise is sorta like trying to discribe a gas by looking at the movement of individual gas molucules and how they bounce of each other. I'm not here to argue that, just to say 'This is generally accepted by people who study it'
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Affirmative action: This is generally used to mean quotas and reduced standards for minorities and women, a thing that really never caught on anywhere except higher education.
It hasn't been legal in colleges since 2023, and has been on pretty shaky legal ground for corporations for a while, despite the Supreme Court explicitly saying it was legal back in 91. And, of course, 'standards' is incredibly nebulous when hiring, so about the only thing anyone could _maybe_ in trouble for would be explicit quotas.
Referring to this as DEI is...just misleading. I'm not saying it wouldn't be under that if it was being done today, but it's simply not a thing that's done anywhere, and really wasn't done anywhere except colleges after the 90s. (This is what Starbucks is alleged have done, and denies.)
The Federal government, notable, has _never_ done this with employees. With the sole exception, which was much debated, of reduced physical standards of women in the military. And I'm not taking a position on that, but regardless, it is a unique thing done in that one instance. So anyone who thinks that what we're talking about WRT removing governmental DEI programs is misinformed.
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Now stuff that does fit under the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion umbrella and is done in the modern world. I'll give them names so people can talk about them. First, job stuff, aka, 'diversity':
DEI-Job Applications: This is a company (And schools often do it.) being willing to spend extra time and effort to get minority and female job applicants, while not preferring them in the hiring. For example, a company might make a specific recruitment brochure that has Black people on it, and send Black recruiters to a job fair in a specific place they know there will be Black people at, with the intent of increasing the amount of Black applicants.
Now, you might be thinking 'If they're willing to do that for applicants, to spend extra effort to find Black people to hire, they surely are willing to hire them over equally qualified white people', but the joke is on you (Well, really the joke is more on the Black applicants), because studies show this does not actually change the racial makeup who is hired, and is, indeed, nearly completely useless for race except you can list it as part of your company's DEI program. yay?
But I used a minority as an example because this does work, to some level, for women. Companies that actively try to hire women do get more female applicants but _do_ start hiring more of them, although the field is still tilted towards men. My theory is because women are more likely to be closer to the right social networks to get hired and often just need to be made aware a job is possible, whereas minorities often are not. But that's just my theory.
DEI-Changing requirements: Job requirements are, to put it bluntly, an incoherent mess. I think we all agree. They often requires degrees for no reason at all, a thing that doesn't actually help anything. And is a requirement that can easily can harm minorities, may of which lag behind whites in education. So some companies have just...changed the requirements for everyone.
This is, frankly, something more companies should do anyway, not because of DEI, just because those requirements are stupid.
Theoretically, you can call these two things Affirmative Action too, because they were sometimes done with that name also, but in reality they're more 'alternatives to Affirmative Action'
DEI-Blind hiring: Actually hiring based on literal written requirements and testing, instead of dumbass social networks that require you have personal connections and hiring managers that are weird bigots. This is how the Civil Service and Post Office hires people, and almost no one else. You'd be startled at how well this alone results in the hiring of more women and minorities, it's also as if there is some sort of systemic discrimination against them during hiring, _even when_ they have identical qualifications as white men.
I'm lying, that isn't really called DEI. This is just actually an efficient way to get diversity, and incidentally has resulted in a government that _liars are asserting is full of incompetent DEI hires_.
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And now we're at the stuff that isn't to do with hiring, but is under DEI. First, equity:
DEI-Harrassment: Yeah, so it turns out that there's a fairly small but significant portion of the population that will sexually harass others in the workplace, and it turns out that the courts frown on that. Some people will even coerce people into sex or relationships using the relative power they have in the company, and courts _really_ frown on that. I cannot stress how much they frown on that. And HR departments, since prehistoric times, have introduced training to make sure that, when this happens, the company isn't legally liable. Sorry, I mean to make sure it doesn't happen. Same with harassment based on race. And religion. And national origin. *keeps reading list* Wow, there a _lot_ of ways to harass a protected class. All of which will get us sued. Okay, so...let's there's this list of videos you are going to need to watch.
DEI-Accessibility: Yes, often this is under DEI, and sometimes it's even called DEIA, like it is in the government. (Weird how everyone kept talking about how Trump was removing DEI programs instead of DEIA. It's almost as if removing protections form handicapped workers would be massively unpopular. Please note the ADA does not _cover_ the executive branch.) I don't think I have to explain what this is.
And last, and certainly least, inclusion:
DEI-Weird employee celebration: Basically, have odd celebrations of...um, non-mainstream stuff. I don't really know how to describe this, it's a very broad umbrella. It can cover everything from celebrating Pride to having a Hispanic Employee Day to the military showing a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in training.
DEI-The same, but outwardly facing: Aka, having a booth at Pride. Having a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in recruitment. Some of this overlaps with 'DEI-Job Applications', and weird 'trying to get applications from minorities' can loop back and be a thing to brag about to potential customers.
Basically, this is sorta saying 'These sort of people belong here'.
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Now, I have sat down and explained what some of this stuff is. I've probably explained it badly, and I've probably completely forgotten something, but I have at least _vaguely_ explained it and presented actual terms that people can use to talk it.
Note that this is all extremely watered down from DEI, as as a theory, wants. For example, no one does actual equity. Everything they do in that regard is basically required by law, or at least risking lawsuits if they don't. I'm not talking about some ideal form of DEI, I'm talking about what exists.
Whatever the heck it is that the Smithsonian was doing, it wasn’t that.
The Smithsonian wasn't doing anything except making a museum exhibit. There's not some magical name for 'museum exhibits that say kinda silly things'.
No, I’m pretty sure that what is being fought is “quit talking about race in ways that cost us votes”.
And once again, we are in the 'Are Democrats _actually_ talking about this in any perceivable way, or are Republicans just claiming that?'
Because it's pretty easy to notice the stuff you are talking about is not, uh, anything Democrats are doing, or even anything the government is doing. (No, the Smithsonian is not part of the government, and isn't controlled by the government, although the government provides so much funding for it that if the government wants to force something to happen, it can by threatening purse strings. But the government doesn't control the leadership in any direct way, and there's no indication that it was told to make an exhibit in that way.)
OMG! That’s part of the name of the essay I wrote way back when!
And yet this site has learned nothing, apparently.
You mean stuff like Kendi’s thing at Boston University? Was that really DEI? Was it CRT?
I like how you are just pretending these are things we cannot know. I think I'll give a very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about. *proceeds to spend an hour on it*.
We hammered out that everybody who was complaining about CRT was not, in fact, complaining about what CRT actually was but they were, instead, complaining about bad DEI.
I honestly have ignored 90% of what this site talks about as CRT because it is all so stupid it risks making people near it stupid by proxy. If that's the conclusion you all came to, okay. I can see how that makes sense, and it's not 100% wrong. (I mean, teaching kids stuff in school isn't CRT, but isn't DEI either.)
My argument is that the Smithsonian was right to pull it and a *LOT* of the DEI folks out there should have followed the lead of the Smithsonian and, had they done so, we wouldn’t be here talking about how even freakin’ Vox is talking about the importance of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater now.
So now the thing that is being fought is 'talking about race in stupid ways'? (To be clear, talking about the Tuskegee Airmen is talking about race in _good_ ways, right?) I could have _sworn_ the suppose problem with DEI was racial determination in hiring that discriminated against certain people. That's the reason the Republicans want to get rid of it, right?
If we were having this discussion on this site, and were smart people, we'd be talking about motte-and-bailey. Oh, wait, we are having it here. I cannot emphasis how incredibly fishing stupid this entire decade-long conversation has been, at every level, from the national to this exact site.
Perhaps most importantly: DEI programs in the government literally exist in real life, and have actually done things in real life, they are not _assumptions_ we cobble together out of _other places_ like 'Museum exhibit' and 'article in magazine' and 'What someone who writes on DEI has said'. These programs are not some hypothetical we are debating, where we try to prove what is 'really DEI'.
Those programs LITERALLY EXIST AND DO THINGS. WE CAN KNOW WHAT THOSE THINGS ARE. WE DO NOT HAVE TO GUESS.
Haven't we _always_ had to defend the world against aggressive countries indefinitely? Was there some timeline we were going to stop?
And I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of that, but the option to doing it is...not doing it, and watching the world get conquered by whoever.
And even if we don't care about that for some reason (Pretty sure we should), that already threatens our allies, so are we going to stop having allies?
And...won't that eventually that threaten us? There's not some imaginary world where we live safely with a nation that makes it clear it wants to conquer the world. You can't give people 11 inches and expect them not to take the entire foot.
Of course, the ideal situation is that no country wants to behave that way, then we don't have to defend anyone, and that _used_ to be the ultimate policy goal of the US, which we did with soft power and the little bit of threat of hard power.
...well, until very recently, where Trump has made it clear that expansionism was good, actually.
"Hey, look, isn't it funny that this person was so worried about the health risks of unintended pregnancy under this administration's attack on reproductive rights that they had to take a permanent option there. Ha ha, what a loser!"
Wait, so they have to send out a letter that says “you have grounds to sue us”?
That's what the lawsuit wants, yeah. They want Starbucks to send out a letter _notifying_ employees and potential employees that their rights might have been violated by Starbucks.
To be clear, requiring this sort of notification isn't super-uncommon in actual real employment discrimination cases that companies lose in court. But it's not something that tends to be part of a _settlement_, even in, again, real cases that can show real harm. Which this...isn't. Which is why I am pretty sure that Starbucks is going go hire every lawyer that exists to fight this.
What I'm unsure about is if Missouri put that in there to play hardball as something they can take out later, have Starbucks settles for a trivial fine and policy changes they don't care about...or if Missouri is doing this entire thing as a political stunt and doesn't not actually care about the outcome.
Honestly, both ways it is a political stunt, but the question is really 'Does Missouri want to win a weak victory, or do they want to string this out and run it as a long-term attack?'
The first would be the obvious answer if I believed that Missouri understood how weak their case was. Throw a bunch of stuff at Starbucks, hand Starbucks a deal that requires them to change policies and pay a fine that _sounds_ big to the rubes that do not understand quite how rich Starbucks is, declare victory, and go home.
But we are now at the point where it makes sense to assume that anyone doing any sort of lawyering on conservative sides could be a raving lunatic 10 seconds from disbarment and 30 seconds from being arrested for fraud, so I really don't know if they understand that.
(Oh, speaking of people being disbarred...Bove has stepped into the Eric Adams case and signed the dismissal of the case herself. Hey, hint: When a bunch of your subordinates resign rather than do something that could get them disbarred, _don't do it yourself_. And...you do understand the judge can _refuse_ to let you dismiss the case, right? And after this clown-show, will do exactly that?)
I went to look at Jacobin and The Nation and they don’t have any articles about the importance of a Steelmanned DEI instead of a Strawmanned one.
Saying 'This particular person's slideshow that goes along with training is being misrepresented and lies are being told about what the training is actually teaching' is not 'steelmanning'.
The actual things that is being said in those courses is not some position being taken in a debate. It is a pretty objective fact, it is a knowable thing that can be known by observing reality. We have records of these courses being taught, we have material that explains what a _slideshow_ means.
Or we can read some extremely short text on a slideshow out of context and conclude whatever makes the slideshow sound the worst. Or, even better, we can just somehow absorb from the air that DEI training generally includes this.
Are there no objective opinion writers out there?
Eric Levitz isn't 'unobjective', whatever that is supposed to mean in an opinion writer. He's just fallen for a particular conservative lie without looking into it much. It's pretty easy to do, conservative lies permeate the very air that political writers breathe.
And his job at Vox is basically to write articles that lean left while nominally throwing a few bones to conservatives. As it says in his bio before the article, 'He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right.'. In Vox-speak, that means 'Write like normal but say something nice about the right'.
And I now notice we've gotten into a discussion abouce this guy, _instead of_ his opinion piece or the specific claims about Tema Okum, which is the part of the article you quoted and it appeared you wanted to talk about.
Do you want to talk about the _other_ parts of the article now? We could do that instead. I mean, this part seems pretty important to me:
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie deems that last argument dangerously naive. Bouie grants some of Sunkara’s premises: He concedes that DEI programs often serve little purpose beyond corporate PR. But he contends that the Trump administration’s war on DEI is not narrowly targeted at frivolous multicultural messaging or diversity workshops. Rather, the administration is rolling back civil rights enforcement, denigrating nonwhite and female federal workers, and restricting the recruitment of Black professionals. All this is more likely to yield something approaching “segregation” than a renewal of class solidarity, in Bouie’s estimation. “To concede that this administration has a point about DEI,” he writes, “is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law.”
But, hey, why don't you lead the discussion here. What part of this article are we talking about? I'll let you choose.
Or are we having a discussion about Eric Levitz, a person I don't think anyone particularly cares about and I'd barely heard of before?
I think the 'if they end up sending out notices about how the were possibly unlawfully discriminatory to employees and former employees as the AG wants, making it both easier and likely for someone to sue them' is The Line there.
Both because settling without that is likely to be trivial (Fines are never at even vaguely harmful levels.) and will be a result of Missouri trying to back down without losing face, and also because it might be hard to judge other parts of the settlements. But either the letters go out or they do not, that's something that will be known.
And I am willing to bet that Starbucks is very unwilling to send out those letters, whereas they will be perfectly willing to pay trivial amounts of money or even change policies. In fact, they _already_ changed policies to some extent back in 2023.
I'm actually a little baffled as to why we care what the 'official' outcome is? My claim is that Missouri has a crap case, not that Starbucks is some morally upright corporation that will never cave. Starbucks has no morals, it's a sociopath, like most corporations. It has no problem with paying a fine and changing whatever, it's not going to 'protect' anyone.
The reason they won't cave is the Missouri AG is trying to set up a situation where they have to admit guilt and notify people of said 'guilt', opening them up to tons more lawsuits. (In other words, settling does the exact opposite of what it normally does, aka 'end this'.) And they have more money than Missouri and can pay more lawyers.
What fits under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is _huge_.
It's like railing against 'Public Relations', claiming it's some sort of evil entity that denies real life dangers of products. A statement that has,, in fact, been true about the public relations of, for example, cigarette companies back in the 60. But it's not a generally true statement.
What’s worse, certain diversity trainings promote ideas that are at once arguably racist and organizationally unhealthy. For instance, one of the most influential equity gurus, Tema Okun, argues in her trainings that “objectivity,” “a sense of urgency,” and thinking in binaries such as “good or bad” and “right or wrong” are defining characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” She therefore advises organizations to be on guard against these exclusionary tendencies.
Oh, and the article is straight-up lying about this, repeating falsehoods from conservatives.
Yes, Tema Okum does point out that thinking in binaries is bad. Thinking in binaries is incredibly reductive and not at all good approach to manage people. Conservatives lie about this point, trying to imply that this is saying that right and wrong don't exist, which is an entirely different idea. She doesn't say that. She merely says 'Do not run around classifying everything you see as X or Y', and one of the things she lists is right or wrong, a perfectly normal lesson to teach people and not controversial except among lunatics. You should not run around classifying all human behavior as good or bad.
In fact, this is _literally_ how you behave here, Jaybird: Talking about Team Good and Team Bad in sarcastic ways, trying to make the point that people have picked sides and see every thing that anyone on their side does through that lens. I disagree with a lot of the point you think you're making there because the two sides do not behave identically at all, but the actual concept holds, and you can see how that would be a bad _management_ style to do that, right?
Or to put it in management terms: You don't need to classify any employee's request for accommodations as right or wrong. You can just do it if it's possible, or not if it is not. You don't need to make a _moral_ decision about it. Likewise, you don't need to have an opinion if an employee's boyfriend is 'good for her'. Or judge their lunch. That's not actually within your remit.
What has happened here is the same thing that has always happened: Conservatives have tracked down a single example of something that they can remove all context from and invent distortions about, and then repeat it over and over as if their distortion not only is true, but the entirety of the thing. So suddenly DEI becomes teaching 'there is no such thing as right or wrong', instead of the actual thing it's teaching, which is 'Why are you trying to judge if this disabled person 'needs' his wheelchair?'
And even that 3.75% is misleadingly high. That number is, statistically, _below_ 0%.
How? They got 3.75% retirement in a workforce, over a span of 75% of the year (From now until September), that has a yearly turnover of 6%.
To repeat, they just had 3.75% of the workforce resign in a way that gets them paid until September, a time period over which 4.5% of them were going to resign anyway.
And those people, uh, wouldn't have gotten paid for several months after resigning. Or would have worked for several more months. One or the other.
This has produced _negative_ savings.
(Presumably, that last 0.75% just haven't _decided_ they are resigning yet.)
Well, if you read the lawsuit, there are changes to policy that the AG wants to happen. (Any fines, as I said, are completely pointless for a corporation their size.)
So, it would seem like that's the logical victory condition, objectively speaking. Whether Starbucks makes those changes or not. I suspect that if Starbucks asserted it would make those changes, the lawsuit would be settled with no money tomorrow.
The problem is that Starbuck has claimed that some of the stuff being alleged _isn't_ their policy. It's easy to say 'Oh, they agreed to these changes that are not in fact changes'.
And I don't think they're going to put up with this, and aren't going to settle. I think they realize what's going to happen if they do, because part of the setup is to try to get them to admit something to make it easy for people to sue them.
Starbucks earns almost thrice the yearly revenue as Missouri. And unlike Missouri, they aren't about to have government aid to them crash into the ground and set their budget on fire. They can fight this.
Okay, yes, I will admit would actually be a violation of Federal law to take out those ads, but I am fairly certain that is dead letter thanks to the corporations getting first amendment rights.
I guess we'll see, and we'll also see if what Starbucks has done qualifies as that. That law actually is about _printing advertisements_, not internal policy.
No judge is going to allow discovery for whatever this is.
Anti-discrimation lawsuits, and in fact all lawsuits, need _victims_. Victims that were harmed by some tort. There are no victims listed in the lawsuit besides a handwave at 'non-BIPOC Missourians'. That is...not how the law works.
If you could just handwave at a class of people as possible victims, civil rights court cases would have been _so much easier_. We wouldn't need cases like Loving vs. Virginia, organizations not harmed by the law could have just sued over the law directly.
It's actually amazing how much of this lawsuit is complete gibberish that exists to sound important but completely fails to lay out the legal theory it is working under.
No. It is perfectly legal for a business to have a overtly discriminatory employment policy. It is entirely legal for a business to assert, publicly, that they only hire white people. They can take out ads saying that.
To quote: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including transgender status, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business.
You see where it says 'have a disproportionately negative effect'? It doesn't mean 'Logically will have an effect', or even 'is explicitly stated to do that exact effect'. It means have. It requires a thing that has actually happened. The negative effects must have happened, and must be disproportionately happening to one group.
Aka, there has to be a victim. A possible employee who applied and can prove they were denied. Or an employee who tried to get the mentorship program and was denied it. (For the record, Starbucks has denied that was only available to BIPOC, so _someone_ is lying.) And not only do they have to prove not only was it denied to them _for_ that reason, but that it happens enough to be 'disproportionate'
And at that point, that individual victim could recover damages, the company would also get fined, and the court could issue an order barring future behavior like that. It's not going to be a big fine.
And they better find such a victim quickly, the status of limitations for filing such a claim is 180 days, which can be extended to 300 days if certain things are true, which I do not believe they are here but I could be wrong. Either way, the stuff the talk about in the suit about the policy in 2023 is overt nonsense, no employment discrimination that happened in 2023 can be sued over.
And that's not even getting into the stuff the _courts_ make people jump through. That's just the text of the law.
So anyway, yeah, conservatives have basically completely defanged any sort of anti-discrimination employment law...have fun trying to sue anyone under it, LOL.
When I say 'conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection', I do not mean 'people wrote articles'.
I mean 'Conservatives group got cases put before courts and conservative judges set precedents in both those cases and other cases'.
It is incredibly hard to prove discrimination in employment, even with a very specific case, aka, a specific _person_ who got harmed, even with tons of documentation that they were harmed because they were in a protected class.
Here, there literally doesn't appear to be a specific case, no actual person being harmed, and I'm not even sure how the lawsuit is supposed to _work_.
Reading the lawsuit, it really does look like he's vaguely handwaving at the Missouri population and asserting 'Starbucks could operate cheaper and faster if they hired the best person for the job instead of minorities, and that harms residents', but how poorly a company is operating and supposed bad choices they are making is literally not something you can sue over, at least not under _antidiscrimination_ law. (I guess shareholders could sue over that, but that's not what is happening.)
Or to put it simplier terms: A lot of proving discrimination is demonstrating _patterns_, and not only is there not a pattern here, there isn't even an incident. Instead, there's a lot of quoting their web page. Do you know what web pages talking about the behavior of yourself are called in court?
HEARSAY
You have to prove it actually happened, and _then_ you can quote them talking about their own motives. You can't just quote them.
LOL, in fact, the article goes into the percentage, I had forgotten. So, uh, looks like 46.5% of Starbucks is BIPOC, and the current population is 41.6%, which not only is essentially even, but also fails to account for the fact that Starbucks generally exist in cities, which statistically have a higher percentage of BIPOC than the nation, so it's entirely possible Starbucks is under the percentage of people who could plausibly be working at any particular Starbucks. Regardless, they are extremely close.
Good luck proving that, even pretending the statistics were on their side, which even in a company like Starbucks is not true. The odds are that Starbucks has no more minorities working for it than exist in the general population, and in fact probably less.
Hey, remember all that arguing about how the reason that certain industries had more men in them than women is that women didn't want to do those jobs as much?
None of you understand quite how much conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection, and making it harder and harder to prove discrimination based on race and sex.
And their statement about diversity may sound statement that they're going to hire minorities instead of white people, but the court isn't going to treat them that way, because conservatives argue for years that the opposite isn't true, or at least isn't inherently true, victims still have to prove that they were personally discriminated against, and there aren't even any victims here!
This is why, incidentally, these lawsuits instead have a weird basis in the idea that these hiring decisions are costing customers time and money, a thing that Starbucks is legally 100% allowed to do. They are allowed to actually have as written policy that all coffee orders take an hour
These lawsuits are going to be hilarious.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
I'm following the hearing about the EOs barring trans people from the military live on Blue Sky, they are going _exceptionally_ poorly for the government.
Things like the judge asking 'Can you explain how pronoun usage harms military preparedness', and she tore into them when they could not answer. And asking if the EO saying that an entire group of people are 'dishonest, undisciplined, and lack integrity' is 'expressing animus', a thing that is pretty important to the suit, and that the government lawyer was unwilling to confirm (Because it would be disastrous for the case) or deny (Because, you know, pesky legal ethics.) that.
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
It's weird how you've included two different things that are not related, and asked if there is a term for it.
The term for 'People saying different things in different language version of a game' is just called localization, which often includes not just direct language translation, but altering things to be more relevant to the target audience, usually stuff that is not particularly plot-relevant.
As for the second, that is commonly called a mistake, which is defined as an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. It was probably the last two, as it seems unlikely to have been done on purpose.
I'm glad we can answer these questions for you.
"
Why, it's almost as if what other people saying things that people think are wrong is not a thing that generally has a term. And the only reason it _needs_ a term is so that politicians can rail against it.
It's hilarious how you like to an article talking about how much a new term is catching on or not among the people it describes as 'a push'.
Either it catches on or not. Language changes, and sometimes it changes deliberately, and sometimes more organically. And to the point, almost all terms that minority groups use to describe themselves are very deliberate terms.
For example, did you know the reason that L is first in LGBT is in recognition of the hospice work that a lot of lesbians did for dying gay men during the AIDS crisis. The term, when gay right started, was just 'gay and lesbian', and when they added more letters, they very deliberately put lesbians first, to thank them.
Latino people will eventually either accept or reject the term Latinx.
Are you annoyed because they are not asking _you_ for permission?
Or have you imagined that someone is attacking you because you're not personally used it?
Okay. Given that, from my point of view, one of the big problems was that DEI means “similar faff” as often, if not more often, than the corporate stuff where people sit through some powerpoint slides before signing the paper, we’re going to need a term for the similar faff because the similar faff is, in my view, the problem.
Yes, we understand that you think 'the problem' is the thing that does not impact anyone in any manner whatsoever.
The question is why you think that's the problem.
"
DEI is, again, an organizational framework, an organization (Which can be corporate, government, or non-profit, or even things like social clubs, I guess) saying 'We are going to do these goals and here is the team to do that' or 'Here is the initiative we have created to accomplish these goals'.
Like organizations frameworks, this is a thing that gets discussed outside of corporations and things that sorta look like standards are invented as 'the norm' and corporations tend to do them.
Pretending DEI is some abstract thing that exists independent of the implementation is like pretending Public Relations or Quality Assurance is some abstract thing that can exist independent of the implementation. Not...really. They are fields with some level of shared knowledge, yes, and consultants and all sorts of things, but the actual implementations are per-rgroup and vary wildly.
And just like PR and QA, sometimes DEI does something that is _manifestly_ not helpful and possibly even harmful to the stated goals of that entity exists within the corporation. A corporation announcing 'We haven't killed as many people this month as last month' would be an example of bad PR. A corporation asking people to use a stupid term to refer to a group of people that don't like or use it would be bad DEI. A corporation that assumes that large changes to the codebase do not require more testing is doing bad QA. Etc, etc.
I called that 'incorrect'. A better term might be 'incompetent'. The reason I used 'incorrect' is that DEI literally includes 'listening to the people you are trying to help', that's what equity is, so failing to do that and screwing up because of that is not just normal incompetent, it's almost incompetent at a meta level. It's like if PR started sending death threats to journalists, that is a level past any normal incompetence.
If you mean 'bad' in the sense 'The thing being done here under the banner of DEI in this corporation is not accomplishing the stated goals of DEI', yes.
Or even 'This thing that DEI experts and consultants are passing around as a recommendation is does not accomplish the stated goals of DEI', yes. (This, incidentally, accurately describes 75% of what they do.)
Not 'bad' as in some sort of moral judgement.
Why do you think there's some sort of blanket term for 'people saying random and disconnected dumb things about a vague topic'? The closest you will find is 'a term for people saying a very specific dumb thing', like anti-vaxers. But that's an very specific set of beliefs.
People saying to their employees 'You should use this term to talk about a group that we have not bothered to check if actual members of the group use' is completely unrelated to, for example, the image you posted talking about white culture. There's not some shared beliefs behind them.
Or, if there is, it's just vague anti-racism. I guess you could just call it that.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
The DOJ is now arguing that Elon Musk does not run DOGE or work for them at all, and is merely a special advisor to the President: https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-house-claims-elon-musk-doesnt-run-doge/story?id=118913206
The lawyers did not bother to specify who _does_ run it, which one would assume that government lawyers would do almost automatically when presented with 'lawsuit that targets targets a governmental agency and names the head of the agency but names the wrong person as the head'. It is utterly surreal not to say 'X is not in charge, Y is, here is the documentation' as a response to that. It is blatant deliberate stalling to try to force the opposing side to file a motion demanding to know who is is in charge, a thing that they should not have to do and the judge isn't going to put up with them having to do...who runs governmental agencies is not secret and doesn't need to be requested in court. If I was the judge this filing was given to, I'd say 'Well, you have ten minutes to tell me who is in charge or I'm issuing an temporary restraining for the entire agency to stop what they are doing until someone is officially in charge.'
Anyway, lawyers doing things that will make judges very angry aside: Not only is this obvious nonsense, as both Trump and Elon have presented themselves in charge of DOGE many time, but it really feels like this means the entire DOGE scam is unraveling and Elon is trying to get out from under it.
Sadly, because Elon is a complete and total moron (Seriously, this cannot be stressed enough) and has admitted repeatedly he has access to restricted information that DOGE has accessed, making him not part of DOGE actually makes the situation for him worse, not better.
The lawyers trying to stop DOGE just claimed he wasn't in charge because the specific lawsuit pointed out that Elon had not been confirmed by the Senate, so decided to retcon him into a mere Presidential advisor, which might, in theory, make that lawsuit a little weaker, while making everything else so much stupider because this claim can be used in _other_ court filings about how DOGE should not be accessing things it is accessing, because now they can prove people outside DOGE have access to it!
Hell, it doesn't even actually help this lawsuit! This lawsuit is about how DOGE is out of control and operating outside Federal Regulations without Congressional Authorization or Senate Confirmation, and lawyers saying 'The person who has been claiming to run it is not actually running it, and we're not going to say who is, and in fact might not be sure' does not, uh, disprove that premise.
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
Okay, I guess I need to clarify a tiny bit more: DEI is an _organizational framework_. It is a thing that exists within an organization to achieve a certain goal within that organization. It is not some amorphous blob that can exist floating in the world. And more important to this question, it isn't an advocacy group telling _other people_ what to do.
So the question I would ask is: Who is insisting in this hypothetical? Is it some advocacy group saying it? Then no.
Is a business insisting on this terminology used within itself? Then the answer is yes. An organization defining what terms should be used is, indeed, DEI.
This example is an example of _incorrect_ DEI. But there's plenty of example just like this that you wouldn't disagree with, like a policy of referring to Black employees as Black instead 'colored'. No one thinks that's unreasonable. The problem with LatinX is it was made up by idiots.
So I guess what that actually shows is that DEI should listen to the people it is supposed to be helping...which oddly is already a principle of DEI, the one called equity, the one _no one does_ except as required by law.
Instead, often they hire idiotic consultants who charge too much for utterly useless nonsense, while ignoring actual problems they could be solving.
I fear at some point the people here have gotten the idea I like DEI in general. No. I do not. It's a usually a combination of the bare minimum to look like you're diverse, the literal minimum of equity required by law and that used to be done other places in the corporation, and a bunch of positive PR for being inclusive. I thought my dislike was implied in my post, but let me make that explicit.
But you do see that 'equity required by law'? Well, as I said, some of that law doesn't actually apply to the Federal government, so getting rid of DEIA is, for example, getting rid of accessibility for handicapped people. And Trump getting rid of it in the way he is sending a message that discrimination is fine, especially with the claim that huge chunks of the Federal government are DEI hires and do not deserve their positions, which is just a flat lie.
"
I have read enough about string theory, and people critical of string theory, to form an opinion that string theory is nonsense and that science should probably move past it. It seems to be 'Let us create a theory broad enough that it could describe anything, and then plug in random numbers with no justification to make it work'. I'm not making up an example, I legitimately think this.
What I don't do is build entire conspiracy theories about kids being taught string theory (And people having to point out they are not) and then demand that string theory be removed from schools and then go on the internet and talk about how the criticism of it is very damning and that we should toss the entire thing.
Because, notable, I don't really have a say in what theories that physics chooses to pay attention to. Or college courses choose to teach...I guess theoretically I could, at least for public colleges, but I think physics should probably figure that out itself.
Likewise, we don't really have a say in what theories sociological and political scientists pay attention to. However...they do not actually pay attention to critical race theory, they barely pay attention to critical theory at all.
There are plenty of 'sane ideologies' in various race theories. You would probably reject them all, because almost all of them, looking at the data, assert that prejudice is best understood systemically, and [their theory] is how.
"
LOL. Why would I defend things I think are insane?
"I cannot think of any insane thing done in the name of DEI, so I'm demanding you do it!"
Since it's sitting right there, and you seem to think I will always defend anything anyone is calling 'DEI', let me talk about some of the bad things in the picture above.
For the record, there are several things I disagree with. But possibly for the opposite reason others do...I don't disagree that everything in that list varies by culture, but I would argue there are several things in that list that 'White Culture' does not actually believe, like 'Intent Counts', and that children should 'be independent'. (That is, notable, something that has changed to the opposite end incredibly fast in this culture.)
And some of them are almost gibberish. Like, all cultures agree on 'Be polite', they just disagree on the rules of politeness. Likewise, I have no idea what 'Must always "do something" about a situation' is supposed to mean.
Frankly, I find the entire thing very simplified and trite, and parts very confusing, but I will admit I don't know the target. Feel free to comment on the parts you disagree with.
--
Perhaps more to the point, why are we talking about 'things done in the name of DEI' instead of 'normal DEI behavior in corporations' or 'things that the government has done for DEI'.
No one can stop things 'being done in the name of DEI'. We are not talking about 'things done in the name of DEI' being removed, we're talking about actual government offices being removed.
Why don't we try that the other direction:
I’m not sure whether you’re in denial about the insane stuff done in the name of fiscal responsibility, or are actually in favor of it. What are the three most controversial things done explicitly under a fiscal responsibility banner that you’re willing to defend?
"
A very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about:
Critical Race Theory: If it is not taught, it cannot be CRT, period, as CRT is a sociological and political theory, not any form of action. Moreover, as the name suggests, it is a _critical_ theory. Critical theory is Marxism-based, as in, it critiquing (Hence the name) power structures. It's not the same thing as postmodernism (Which is a different theory) or social justice (Yet a different theory)
And it is at this point I'll admit that I don't fully understand the theory or care that much about this academic sociological theories. Literally nothing about it is important unless you need to learn it for a sociology class or are a practicing sociologist writing papers.
But to be clear, just because something is taught doesn't make it CRT either. A lot of people decided that what was being taught to kids was CRT because it pointed out racism was a systemic problem. Which is something CRT asserts, yes. And...so does everyone else. That's pretty much agreed by all people who study the issue. Doing otherwise is sorta like trying to discribe a gas by looking at the movement of individual gas molucules and how they bounce of each other. I'm not here to argue that, just to say 'This is generally accepted by people who study it'
--
Affirmative action: This is generally used to mean quotas and reduced standards for minorities and women, a thing that really never caught on anywhere except higher education.
It hasn't been legal in colleges since 2023, and has been on pretty shaky legal ground for corporations for a while, despite the Supreme Court explicitly saying it was legal back in 91. And, of course, 'standards' is incredibly nebulous when hiring, so about the only thing anyone could _maybe_ in trouble for would be explicit quotas.
Referring to this as DEI is...just misleading. I'm not saying it wouldn't be under that if it was being done today, but it's simply not a thing that's done anywhere, and really wasn't done anywhere except colleges after the 90s. (This is what Starbucks is alleged have done, and denies.)
The Federal government, notable, has _never_ done this with employees. With the sole exception, which was much debated, of reduced physical standards of women in the military. And I'm not taking a position on that, but regardless, it is a unique thing done in that one instance. So anyone who thinks that what we're talking about WRT removing governmental DEI programs is misinformed.
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Now stuff that does fit under the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion umbrella and is done in the modern world. I'll give them names so people can talk about them. First, job stuff, aka, 'diversity':
DEI-Job Applications: This is a company (And schools often do it.) being willing to spend extra time and effort to get minority and female job applicants, while not preferring them in the hiring. For example, a company might make a specific recruitment brochure that has Black people on it, and send Black recruiters to a job fair in a specific place they know there will be Black people at, with the intent of increasing the amount of Black applicants.
Now, you might be thinking 'If they're willing to do that for applicants, to spend extra effort to find Black people to hire, they surely are willing to hire them over equally qualified white people', but the joke is on you (Well, really the joke is more on the Black applicants), because studies show this does not actually change the racial makeup who is hired, and is, indeed, nearly completely useless for race except you can list it as part of your company's DEI program. yay?
But I used a minority as an example because this does work, to some level, for women. Companies that actively try to hire women do get more female applicants but _do_ start hiring more of them, although the field is still tilted towards men. My theory is because women are more likely to be closer to the right social networks to get hired and often just need to be made aware a job is possible, whereas minorities often are not. But that's just my theory.
DEI-Changing requirements: Job requirements are, to put it bluntly, an incoherent mess. I think we all agree. They often requires degrees for no reason at all, a thing that doesn't actually help anything. And is a requirement that can easily can harm minorities, may of which lag behind whites in education. So some companies have just...changed the requirements for everyone.
This is, frankly, something more companies should do anyway, not because of DEI, just because those requirements are stupid.
Theoretically, you can call these two things Affirmative Action too, because they were sometimes done with that name also, but in reality they're more 'alternatives to Affirmative Action'
DEI-Blind hiring: Actually hiring based on literal written requirements and testing, instead of dumbass social networks that require you have personal connections and hiring managers that are weird bigots. This is how the Civil Service and Post Office hires people, and almost no one else. You'd be startled at how well this alone results in the hiring of more women and minorities, it's also as if there is some sort of systemic discrimination against them during hiring, _even when_ they have identical qualifications as white men.
I'm lying, that isn't really called DEI. This is just actually an efficient way to get diversity, and incidentally has resulted in a government that _liars are asserting is full of incompetent DEI hires_.
--
And now we're at the stuff that isn't to do with hiring, but is under DEI. First, equity:
DEI-Harrassment: Yeah, so it turns out that there's a fairly small but significant portion of the population that will sexually harass others in the workplace, and it turns out that the courts frown on that. Some people will even coerce people into sex or relationships using the relative power they have in the company, and courts _really_ frown on that. I cannot stress how much they frown on that. And HR departments, since prehistoric times, have introduced training to make sure that, when this happens, the company isn't legally liable. Sorry, I mean to make sure it doesn't happen. Same with harassment based on race. And religion. And national origin. *keeps reading list* Wow, there a _lot_ of ways to harass a protected class. All of which will get us sued. Okay, so...let's there's this list of videos you are going to need to watch.
DEI-Accessibility: Yes, often this is under DEI, and sometimes it's even called DEIA, like it is in the government. (Weird how everyone kept talking about how Trump was removing DEI programs instead of DEIA. It's almost as if removing protections form handicapped workers would be massively unpopular. Please note the ADA does not _cover_ the executive branch.) I don't think I have to explain what this is.
And last, and certainly least, inclusion:
DEI-Weird employee celebration: Basically, have odd celebrations of...um, non-mainstream stuff. I don't really know how to describe this, it's a very broad umbrella. It can cover everything from celebrating Pride to having a Hispanic Employee Day to the military showing a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in training.
DEI-The same, but outwardly facing: Aka, having a booth at Pride. Having a video about the Tuskegee Airmen and using it in recruitment. Some of this overlaps with 'DEI-Job Applications', and weird 'trying to get applications from minorities' can loop back and be a thing to brag about to potential customers.
Basically, this is sorta saying 'These sort of people belong here'.
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Now, I have sat down and explained what some of this stuff is. I've probably explained it badly, and I've probably completely forgotten something, but I have at least _vaguely_ explained it and presented actual terms that people can use to talk it.
Note that this is all extremely watered down from DEI, as as a theory, wants. For example, no one does actual equity. Everything they do in that regard is basically required by law, or at least risking lawsuits if they don't. I'm not talking about some ideal form of DEI, I'm talking about what exists.
"
The Smithsonian wasn't doing anything except making a museum exhibit. There's not some magical name for 'museum exhibits that say kinda silly things'.
And once again, we are in the 'Are Democrats _actually_ talking about this in any perceivable way, or are Republicans just claiming that?'
Because it's pretty easy to notice the stuff you are talking about is not, uh, anything Democrats are doing, or even anything the government is doing. (No, the Smithsonian is not part of the government, and isn't controlled by the government, although the government provides so much funding for it that if the government wants to force something to happen, it can by threatening purse strings. But the government doesn't control the leadership in any direct way, and there's no indication that it was told to make an exhibit in that way.)
And yet this site has learned nothing, apparently.
I like how you are just pretending these are things we cannot know. I think I'll give a very basic explainer for stuff everyone has talked for a decade without apparently knowing anything about. *proceeds to spend an hour on it*.
"
I honestly have ignored 90% of what this site talks about as CRT because it is all so stupid it risks making people near it stupid by proxy. If that's the conclusion you all came to, okay. I can see how that makes sense, and it's not 100% wrong. (I mean, teaching kids stuff in school isn't CRT, but isn't DEI either.)
So now the thing that is being fought is 'talking about race in stupid ways'? (To be clear, talking about the Tuskegee Airmen is talking about race in _good_ ways, right?) I could have _sworn_ the suppose problem with DEI was racial determination in hiring that discriminated against certain people. That's the reason the Republicans want to get rid of it, right?
If we were having this discussion on this site, and were smart people, we'd be talking about motte-and-bailey. Oh, wait, we are having it here. I cannot emphasis how incredibly fishing stupid this entire decade-long conversation has been, at every level, from the national to this exact site.
Perhaps most importantly: DEI programs in the government literally exist in real life, and have actually done things in real life, they are not _assumptions_ we cobble together out of _other places_ like 'Museum exhibit' and 'article in magazine' and 'What someone who writes on DEI has said'. These programs are not some hypothetical we are debating, where we try to prove what is 'really DEI'.
Those programs LITERALLY EXIST AND DO THINGS. WE CAN KNOW WHAT THOSE THINGS ARE. WE DO NOT HAVE TO GUESS.
A lot of you are _really_ bad guessers.
On “Beware: Promises Being Kept”
Haven't we _always_ had to defend the world against aggressive countries indefinitely? Was there some timeline we were going to stop?
And I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of that, but the option to doing it is...not doing it, and watching the world get conquered by whoever.
And even if we don't care about that for some reason (Pretty sure we should), that already threatens our allies, so are we going to stop having allies?
And...won't that eventually that threaten us? There's not some imaginary world where we live safely with a nation that makes it clear it wants to conquer the world. You can't give people 11 inches and expect them not to take the entire foot.
Of course, the ideal situation is that no country wants to behave that way, then we don't have to defend anyone, and that _used_ to be the ultimate policy goal of the US, which we did with soft power and the little bit of threat of hard power.
...well, until very recently, where Trump has made it clear that expansionism was good, actually.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
"Hey, look, isn't it funny that this person was so worried about the health risks of unintended pregnancy under this administration's attack on reproductive rights that they had to take a permanent option there. Ha ha, what a loser!"
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That's what the lawsuit wants, yeah. They want Starbucks to send out a letter _notifying_ employees and potential employees that their rights might have been violated by Starbucks.
To be clear, requiring this sort of notification isn't super-uncommon in actual real employment discrimination cases that companies lose in court. But it's not something that tends to be part of a _settlement_, even in, again, real cases that can show real harm. Which this...isn't. Which is why I am pretty sure that Starbucks is going go hire every lawyer that exists to fight this.
What I'm unsure about is if Missouri put that in there to play hardball as something they can take out later, have Starbucks settles for a trivial fine and policy changes they don't care about...or if Missouri is doing this entire thing as a political stunt and doesn't not actually care about the outcome.
Honestly, both ways it is a political stunt, but the question is really 'Does Missouri want to win a weak victory, or do they want to string this out and run it as a long-term attack?'
The first would be the obvious answer if I believed that Missouri understood how weak their case was. Throw a bunch of stuff at Starbucks, hand Starbucks a deal that requires them to change policies and pay a fine that _sounds_ big to the rubes that do not understand quite how rich Starbucks is, declare victory, and go home.
But we are now at the point where it makes sense to assume that anyone doing any sort of lawyering on conservative sides could be a raving lunatic 10 seconds from disbarment and 30 seconds from being arrested for fraud, so I really don't know if they understand that.
(Oh, speaking of people being disbarred...Bove has stepped into the Eric Adams case and signed the dismissal of the case herself. Hey, hint: When a bunch of your subordinates resign rather than do something that could get them disbarred, _don't do it yourself_. And...you do understand the judge can _refuse_ to let you dismiss the case, right? And after this clown-show, will do exactly that?)
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
Saying 'This particular person's slideshow that goes along with training is being misrepresented and lies are being told about what the training is actually teaching' is not 'steelmanning'.
The actual things that is being said in those courses is not some position being taken in a debate. It is a pretty objective fact, it is a knowable thing that can be known by observing reality. We have records of these courses being taught, we have material that explains what a _slideshow_ means.
Or we can read some extremely short text on a slideshow out of context and conclude whatever makes the slideshow sound the worst. Or, even better, we can just somehow absorb from the air that DEI training generally includes this.
Eric Levitz isn't 'unobjective', whatever that is supposed to mean in an opinion writer. He's just fallen for a particular conservative lie without looking into it much. It's pretty easy to do, conservative lies permeate the very air that political writers breathe.
And his job at Vox is basically to write articles that lean left while nominally throwing a few bones to conservatives. As it says in his bio before the article, 'He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right.'. In Vox-speak, that means 'Write like normal but say something nice about the right'.
And I now notice we've gotten into a discussion abouce this guy, _instead of_ his opinion piece or the specific claims about Tema Okum, which is the part of the article you quoted and it appeared you wanted to talk about.
Do you want to talk about the _other_ parts of the article now? We could do that instead. I mean, this part seems pretty important to me:
But, hey, why don't you lead the discussion here. What part of this article are we talking about? I'll let you choose.
Or are we having a discussion about Eric Levitz, a person I don't think anyone particularly cares about and I'd barely heard of before?
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
I think the 'if they end up sending out notices about how the were possibly unlawfully discriminatory to employees and former employees as the AG wants, making it both easier and likely for someone to sue them' is The Line there.
Both because settling without that is likely to be trivial (Fines are never at even vaguely harmful levels.) and will be a result of Missouri trying to back down without losing face, and also because it might be hard to judge other parts of the settlements. But either the letters go out or they do not, that's something that will be known.
And I am willing to bet that Starbucks is very unwilling to send out those letters, whereas they will be perfectly willing to pay trivial amounts of money or even change policies. In fact, they _already_ changed policies to some extent back in 2023.
I'm actually a little baffled as to why we care what the 'official' outcome is? My claim is that Missouri has a crap case, not that Starbucks is some morally upright corporation that will never cave. Starbucks has no morals, it's a sociopath, like most corporations. It has no problem with paying a fine and changing whatever, it's not going to 'protect' anyone.
The reason they won't cave is the Missouri AG is trying to set up a situation where they have to admit guilt and notify people of said 'guilt', opening them up to tons more lawsuits. (In other words, settling does the exact opposite of what it normally does, aka 'end this'.) And they have more money than Missouri and can pay more lawyers.
On “From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI”
This is literally the point I've been making.
What fits under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is _huge_.
It's like railing against 'Public Relations', claiming it's some sort of evil entity that denies real life dangers of products. A statement that has,, in fact, been true about the public relations of, for example, cigarette companies back in the 60. But it's not a generally true statement.
Oh, and the article is straight-up lying about this, repeating falsehoods from conservatives.
Yes, Tema Okum does point out that thinking in binaries is bad. Thinking in binaries is incredibly reductive and not at all good approach to manage people. Conservatives lie about this point, trying to imply that this is saying that right and wrong don't exist, which is an entirely different idea. She doesn't say that. She merely says 'Do not run around classifying everything you see as X or Y', and one of the things she lists is right or wrong, a perfectly normal lesson to teach people and not controversial except among lunatics. You should not run around classifying all human behavior as good or bad.
In fact, this is _literally_ how you behave here, Jaybird: Talking about Team Good and Team Bad in sarcastic ways, trying to make the point that people have picked sides and see every thing that anyone on their side does through that lens. I disagree with a lot of the point you think you're making there because the two sides do not behave identically at all, but the actual concept holds, and you can see how that would be a bad _management_ style to do that, right?
Or to put it in management terms: You don't need to classify any employee's request for accommodations as right or wrong. You can just do it if it's possible, or not if it is not. You don't need to make a _moral_ decision about it. Likewise, you don't need to have an opinion if an employee's boyfriend is 'good for her'. Or judge their lunch. That's not actually within your remit.
What has happened here is the same thing that has always happened: Conservatives have tracked down a single example of something that they can remove all context from and invent distortions about, and then repeat it over and over as if their distortion not only is true, but the entirety of the thing. So suddenly DEI becomes teaching 'there is no such thing as right or wrong', instead of the actual thing it's teaching, which is 'Why are you trying to judge if this disabled person 'needs' his wheelchair?'
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
And even that 3.75% is misleadingly high. That number is, statistically, _below_ 0%.
How? They got 3.75% retirement in a workforce, over a span of 75% of the year (From now until September), that has a yearly turnover of 6%.
To repeat, they just had 3.75% of the workforce resign in a way that gets them paid until September, a time period over which 4.5% of them were going to resign anyway.
And those people, uh, wouldn't have gotten paid for several months after resigning. Or would have worked for several more months. One or the other.
This has produced _negative_ savings.
(Presumably, that last 0.75% just haven't _decided_ they are resigning yet.)
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Well, if you read the lawsuit, there are changes to policy that the AG wants to happen. (Any fines, as I said, are completely pointless for a corporation their size.)
So, it would seem like that's the logical victory condition, objectively speaking. Whether Starbucks makes those changes or not. I suspect that if Starbucks asserted it would make those changes, the lawsuit would be settled with no money tomorrow.
The problem is that Starbuck has claimed that some of the stuff being alleged _isn't_ their policy. It's easy to say 'Oh, they agreed to these changes that are not in fact changes'.
And I don't think they're going to put up with this, and aren't going to settle. I think they realize what's going to happen if they do, because part of the setup is to try to get them to admit something to make it easy for people to sue them.
Starbucks earns almost thrice the yearly revenue as Missouri. And unlike Missouri, they aren't about to have government aid to them crash into the ground and set their budget on fire. They can fight this.
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Okay, yes, I will admit would actually be a violation of Federal law to take out those ads, but I am fairly certain that is dead letter thanks to the corporations getting first amendment rights.
I guess we'll see, and we'll also see if what Starbucks has done qualifies as that. That law actually is about _printing advertisements_, not internal policy.
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No judge is going to allow discovery for whatever this is.
Anti-discrimation lawsuits, and in fact all lawsuits, need _victims_. Victims that were harmed by some tort. There are no victims listed in the lawsuit besides a handwave at 'non-BIPOC Missourians'. That is...not how the law works.
If you could just handwave at a class of people as possible victims, civil rights court cases would have been _so much easier_. We wouldn't need cases like Loving vs. Virginia, organizations not harmed by the law could have just sued over the law directly.
It's actually amazing how much of this lawsuit is complete gibberish that exists to sound important but completely fails to lay out the legal theory it is working under.
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No. It is perfectly legal for a business to have a overtly discriminatory employment policy. It is entirely legal for a business to assert, publicly, that they only hire white people. They can take out ads saying that.
To quote: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
You see where it says 'have a disproportionately negative effect'? It doesn't mean 'Logically will have an effect', or even 'is explicitly stated to do that exact effect'. It means have. It requires a thing that has actually happened. The negative effects must have happened, and must be disproportionately happening to one group.
Aka, there has to be a victim. A possible employee who applied and can prove they were denied. Or an employee who tried to get the mentorship program and was denied it. (For the record, Starbucks has denied that was only available to BIPOC, so _someone_ is lying.) And not only do they have to prove not only was it denied to them _for_ that reason, but that it happens enough to be 'disproportionate'
And at that point, that individual victim could recover damages, the company would also get fined, and the court could issue an order barring future behavior like that. It's not going to be a big fine.
And they better find such a victim quickly, the status of limitations for filing such a claim is 180 days, which can be extended to 300 days if certain things are true, which I do not believe they are here but I could be wrong. Either way, the stuff the talk about in the suit about the policy in 2023 is overt nonsense, no employment discrimination that happened in 2023 can be sued over.
And that's not even getting into the stuff the _courts_ make people jump through. That's just the text of the law.
So anyway, yeah, conservatives have basically completely defanged any sort of anti-discrimination employment law...have fun trying to sue anyone under it, LOL.
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When I say 'conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection', I do not mean 'people wrote articles'.
I mean 'Conservatives group got cases put before courts and conservative judges set precedents in both those cases and other cases'.
It is incredibly hard to prove discrimination in employment, even with a very specific case, aka, a specific _person_ who got harmed, even with tons of documentation that they were harmed because they were in a protected class.
Here, there literally doesn't appear to be a specific case, no actual person being harmed, and I'm not even sure how the lawsuit is supposed to _work_.
Reading the lawsuit, it really does look like he's vaguely handwaving at the Missouri population and asserting 'Starbucks could operate cheaper and faster if they hired the best person for the job instead of minorities, and that harms residents', but how poorly a company is operating and supposed bad choices they are making is literally not something you can sue over, at least not under _antidiscrimination_ law. (I guess shareholders could sue over that, but that's not what is happening.)
Or to put it simplier terms: A lot of proving discrimination is demonstrating _patterns_, and not only is there not a pattern here, there isn't even an incident. Instead, there's a lot of quoting their web page. Do you know what web pages talking about the behavior of yourself are called in court?
HEARSAY
You have to prove it actually happened, and _then_ you can quote them talking about their own motives. You can't just quote them.
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LOL, in fact, the article goes into the percentage, I had forgotten. So, uh, looks like 46.5% of Starbucks is BIPOC, and the current population is 41.6%, which not only is essentially even, but also fails to account for the fact that Starbucks generally exist in cities, which statistically have a higher percentage of BIPOC than the nation, so it's entirely possible Starbucks is under the percentage of people who could plausibly be working at any particular Starbucks. Regardless, they are extremely close.
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Good luck proving that, even pretending the statistics were on their side, which even in a company like Starbucks is not true. The odds are that Starbucks has no more minorities working for it than exist in the general population, and in fact probably less.
Hey, remember all that arguing about how the reason that certain industries had more men in them than women is that women didn't want to do those jobs as much?
None of you understand quite how much conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection, and making it harder and harder to prove discrimination based on race and sex.
And their statement about diversity may sound statement that they're going to hire minorities instead of white people, but the court isn't going to treat them that way, because conservatives argue for years that the opposite isn't true, or at least isn't inherently true, victims still have to prove that they were personally discriminated against, and there aren't even any victims here!
This is why, incidentally, these lawsuits instead have a weird basis in the idea that these hiring decisions are costing customers time and money, a thing that Starbucks is legally 100% allowed to do. They are allowed to actually have as written policy that all coffee orders take an hour
These lawsuits are going to be hilarious.
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