This is so typical that it’s mordantly amusing.
The diversity, equity, inclusion fad arising for no coherent reason out of the death of an overdosing small time hood under the knee of a bad cop in Minneapolis has rapidly iembarrassed itself and its adherents. The discriminatory and intellectually indefensible movement still managed to be profitable for a lot of scam-artist consultants while screwing up too many organizations to list in the process (but Disney quickly comes to mind). It inflicted flagrant incompetents like Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, most of Biden’s Cabinet, deposed Harvard President Claudine Gay and so many more on our government and institutions. It produced absurd spectacles like the TV liquor commercial purporting to show a Boston bar’s patrons singing “Sweet Caroline,” the Boston Red Sox 7th inning anthem, with barely a white patron in sight. (When my family would go to Fenway Park, “Find a non-white fan” was a popular game, usually instigated by my mother.)
DEI is justly acquiring a toxic reputation, so the Left’s response is to change its name and start all over again. The plan is to use rhetorical deceit to disguise its intent and meaning while blurring the concept. Of course! DEI fouled itself faster than I expected, but sure, everyone should have seen this coming. Abortion is now “reproductive health.” Using drugs, surgery and indoctrination to turn biological boys into sort-of girls and biological girls into kind-of boys is now “gender-reaffirming care. The cover-word for illegal alaines became “undocumented workers,” then became “migrants,” and now it’s “visitors.” Now the acronym DEI is on the way out. Anti-DEI legislation is gaining traction in several states, and the racial, ethnic and gender preference industry is getting the message. No, it won’t stop advocating and facilitating discrimination against whites and males. The plan is to call the practice something else. After all, the trick has worked before.
Amid growing legal, social and political backlash, American businesses, industry groups and employment professionals are quietly scrubbing DEI from public view — though not necessarily abandoning its practice…Dozens of anti-DEI bills are being considered by state legislatures across the country, and DEI looks poised to become a wedge issue in this year’s presidential election. This shifting landscape is forcing companies and consultants to adapt on the fly, with many acting preemptively to guard against the legal threats that have led some firms to recast or discard race-based initiatives. They’re renaming diversity programs, overhauling internal DEI teams and working closely with lawyers…. the DEI industry — which was worth an estimated $9 billion in 2023, according to market researcher Fact.MR — is also rethinking its public face, consultants say…A growing number of companies — including language app Duolingo, JetBlue and Molson Coors — are either listing DEI as a “risk factor” in shareholder reports or removing mentions of diversity goals outright. A Bloomberg Law analysis found that two dozen public companies have incorporated similar risk-factor language into their filings. And several companies, including Kohls, Salesforce and Workday, have dropped references to diversity goals in regulatory filings, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Example: SHRM, the human resources association, changed the name of its annual DEI conference to “Inclusion 2023.” See, “inclusion” just seems kind and harmless, right? Nobody wants to be excluded! The fact that these “new” inclusion programs are designed to exclude certain groups might not dawn on the public for a while. Then a new name will be concocted that hasn’t acquired baggage yet. (Another example just leaped to mind: the Association of Trial Lawyer of America–ATLA—where I labored for seven years, found that trial lawyers had a bad reputation, so the association changed its name to the deliberately vague “The Association for Justice.” ) More from the Post:
Eric Ellis, CEO of Integrity Development, a DEI consultancy, said …[h]e expects the language to keep changing in response to public attacks, especially those by high-profile figures like Elon Musk, who in January wrote on his social media platform X that “DEI is just another word for racism.”
Which, of course, it is. And that’s why the “It isn’t what it is” (Rationalization #64) response by progressives is such a natural one. One of the rebranding tricks being tried is to reverse the letters in the acronym and call the movement “IED.” That should fool ’em! Ann Althouse wrote, “Switching DEI to IED… brilliant. Either you’re proud of what you’re doing or you’re trying to hide it.”
Ethics Alarms 
You left out my personal fave: Pedophiles. They are now referred to as MAPS (Minor Attracted Persons), you know, so as not to hurt their feelings.
I had not heard that one. I’m not sure I’m glad that I finally did.
Oh yeah, that is everywhere. The LGBTQ++ crowd is falling over themselves to indoctrinate people in the idea that pedophilia (MAP) is a sexual orientation, like being a homosexual. As such, just like you can call homosexuality bad, you can’t call this bad. The problem is, in a world without an absolute morality, they are correct. If that is ‘just they way they are’, you can’t blame them for it. So disapproving of it is bigotry.
MAPs are far more vonmon than we would like to admit.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2016/05/02/yecchh-the-daily-caller-and-its-commenters-cheer-on-sexual-predator-teachers/
MAPs are adults attracted to minors. Pedophiles, as the term is generally employed, are adults who act on that impulse. The argument is that we can’t control what we think, but we can control what we do. All pedophiles are MAPs, but not all MAPs are pedophiles.
This strikes me as the ‘gender is different from sex and you can’t change your sex’ which quickly became ‘sex doesn’t exist, only gender exists ‘. Pedophile is the term that has been used for a long time. MAP is the new term inserted to get societal approval for pedophilia (after the ‘righteous pedophile’ movement didn’t get traction), just as gender was the term used to get approval for child sex change operations. Also, don’t forget that the gender movement was used to normalize sexualizing children with library drag queen shows, teachers talking about sex with small children, etc. Don’t forget that Money’s subjects accused him of molesting them. He denied it, but did admit that he had the siblings ‘simulate’ sex with each other starting at age 7, so that’s OK, right. He is just a MAP, not a pedophile because he just like to watch.
The New York Times thinks the story of a 13-year old homeless girl ‘befriended’ by a group of transwomen who teach her how to sell sex is uplifting. Professors talk about the need to expose children to naked men in pride parades, GQ ran a article promoting ‘porn for children’, the push for pedophilia acceptance in the mainstream ‘elite’ society has been going on for at least a decade.. The spread of the catphrase ‘love is love’ to endorse adult-child sexual relationships is another indicator of the spread of pedophilia.
The way I always understood it, “child molester” was the old term for someone who acted on such impulses, “pedophile” was the term for someone who experienced such attraction, whether or not they acted upon it.
As Michael alludes to, there seems to be a bit of a bait-and-switch going on here. With trans ideology, we were first told that gender was no longer synonymous with sex, that gender was merely the social conventions in terms of dress, names, roles, and preferences that sprang up around sex, therefore a person’s “gender” is whatever they choose it to be, having nothing to do with genitalia or chromosomes. But then, having gained acceptance for that proposition, they immediately went back to “gender-affirmation” surgery and hormone treatments, as if medical intervention were necessary to wear high heels or watch sports. And of course, they demanded trans “girls” compete with biological females, even though sports segregation has always been by sex and never by “gender”, unless you admit the two are in fact one and the same.
All I see there is a wedge being driven between impulse and action, with the end goal of creating empathy for individuals with the impulse. It’s not their fault, they were born that way – or else warped that way by outside influences as they developed. Either way, they are a victim class, and need to be protected and nurtured. Meanwhile, all social disapproval for the act itself will have disappeared, which will suit people who yearn to indulge, but fear the social disapproval. M will show up in the acronym, being a MAP will become a point of differentiation and easy ‘respect’, and Epstein will come to be regarded as ahead of his time, helping those poor MAPS in a dark time when the bigotry of the world caused so many to fear and hate them for who they authentically were.
Yeah, I’m prognosticating. But it’s easy to do so, because we’ve been down this same road 4 or 5 times now.
There’s just no winning with an attraction to kids. I’m sure if there were a drug that killed that impulse a LOT of people would be on it.
To be identified as a MAP one must have acted on the impulse otherwise no one would know of that proclivity. MAP designation been used to defend people in possession of child pornography. The topic of possession of child porn as a crime has been discussed settled here several times.
Or, of course, MAPs may, and apparently often do, self-identify and seek guidance as to how to deal with their attraction without physically acting upon it.
The term came into my world when it was reported that a teacher admonished a student to not to call someone a child molester but instead to refer to him as a Minor Attracted Person.
I do not doubt that there are those who self identify for counseling services but the issue at hand is the use of euphemisms to describe aberrant or illegal behaviors to make the individual or behavior more socially acceptable.
It’s an interesting issue. From an ethics perspective in American culture, what someone thinks or believes is secondary or even irrelevant to what people do. What difference does it make if someone has racist beliefs if they do not act in a racist fashion in any way? our founding documents say we can think anything we want to. A child predator and a Minor Attracted Person are distinct: the latter is harmless. You can be attracted to serial killers, dolphins, furries, paper clips or little girls. I don’t care, and the law shouldn’t care. Acting on the “minor attraction,” however, as with purchasing child porn or actual molestation, should mean that the kinder, gentler description no longer applies.
In a nutshell, children are too young for their consent to be presumably informed.
Plenty of 14-year-old girls (and boys!) would pose in sexually explicit photographs in exchange for twenty bucks. This is why we have these laws.
So, they abandoned the initial letter organization (diversity, inclusion, and equity — DIE) because it looked bad. They don’t think equating these concepts with improvised explosive devices wouldn’t be just as bad? Or are we hoping that no one knows what IEDs are anymore? Or do they think IEDs are good things?
Well, the only other option left was “EID”, like the Islamic holiday…not very inclusive. And come to think of it, not that far removed from “IED” associations itself.
Ryan and Willem have pointed out the essential stupidity of the name. DEI, DIE, IED, and EID.
Here is a term my son just learning in business management: ”Race-norming, more formally called within-group score conversion and score adjustment strategy, is the practice of adjusting test scores to account for the race or ethnicity of the test-taker.”
jvb
Race norming is the manifestation of racism. To believe that it is necessary to adjust a score up or down based on the racial characteristics of a group is evidence of some feeling of intellectual superiority over another race.
IED? Is that a joke? IED, like that thing terrorists buried next to the road that took your buddy’s leg off?
I haven’t heard a worse re-branding since the 90s, when Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party joined the Reform Party to create the Conservative Reform Alliance Party.
As Richard Dreyfus says in “Jaws,” “I’ve got that beat.” Three years ago I posted about some nuns trying to “re-brand” “The Rape Song” in “The Fantasticks.” {Skip to the last long paragraph. One of my favorite stories ever!)
What the hell… I clicked the link, found it interesting, and discovered that I had actually commented. I remembered zero of the entire post. I smiled at my own comment though…
It’s happened more than once on this blog, and I have a lot of sympathy for people who are confronted with decade old tweets that they don’t remember writing.
Welcome to my world. i always have to check to see if I’ve written about a topic before and what it was that I wrote. It’s amazing how often my own work seems completely new to me.
Don’t forget how “gun violence prevention” and “gun safety” used to be “gun control”. Isn’t it strange how they keep having to shed their skin once the public learns their scent, when they insist almost all of the public, and certainly all decent people, support them and their agenda?
“sensible gun regulation.”
“Affirmative action” was the cover-term for “Racial quotas.”
The first round of this phenomenon had a much catchier acronym: IDEA. The “A” was for “accessibility.” I could never figure out why this got replaced by DEI.
Too much like IKEA.
IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is also a statute that did away with teachers being able to simply put kids on the short bus that they didn’t want to deal with. It’s sort of an ancestral cousin of the ADA.
They’ve tried to rebrand for years. IDEA, DEIA, DEIB (though not DEBI), JEDI, DEIJ, and recently BRIDGE, which is DEI hiding under surveys and metrics that a consultancy company conducted to keep alive the DEI push. One wonders why they chose to devote their energies to devising new titles, instead of at least tweaking their policies, when they’re shown to fail.
Glass half full?
A recent (April 16-19, 2024) CBS/YouGov Poll found Race-n-Diversity concerns come in the lowest in the Most Important category…and the second highest (just above Climate Change) in the Not Very/Not Important category.
MONEY QUOTE: “Compare that with the list-toppers: the economy (82 percent), inflation (79 percent), and crime (65 percent). WHEN REAL PROBLEMS ARISE, THE FAKE ONES TEND TO FADE.” (bolds/caps/italics mine)
PWS
Based on what I heard from my college’s president after the Supreme Court ruled on the Harvard and North Carolina case, colleges simply hired a squadron of lawyers to come up with a way for colleges to continue discriminating in the same way while calling it something else. It was such a blatant admission, it was hard to believe he’s a lawyer by training and a former law school administrator. As a lawyer classmate remarked at the time, “You’d think he’d know better than to make that kind of record for the plaintiffs in the next lawsuit.”
It doesn’t matter. That is the standard approach now, because all the Supreme Court can do is say ‘Don’t do it again’. All the free speech cases that the plaintiffs won just resulted in the school doing the same thing under a different name. They get sued…lose…rinse and repeat. Look at the 2nd Amendment cases. The Supreme Court tells NY they can’t do something, so NY does it EVEN MORE, gets sued…rinse and repeat. The Supreme Court keeps pretending the states and lower courts are acting in good faith. Look how that turned out for Michael Flynn. Supreme Court rulings against Democratic states are almost universally ignored. Remember, there is no civil or criminal penalty for violating the rights of millions of people. Just don’t trespass or you will be thrown in the gulag.
The Supreme Court is almost irrelevant for Democratic states. The Republican states need to start ignoring them too, but the DOJ is willing to act against them.
The rules have changed.
Do you remember Maraxus?
Because I will never forget Maraxus.
https://www.quora.com/Is-Trump-correct-when-he-said-that-The-answer-is-you-have-no-choice-because-they-re-doing-it-to-us-in-response-to-an-interviewers-question-about-locking-up-his-enemies-Will-Americas-prisons-become-Trumps-Gulags-of/answer/Michael-Ejercito
***START QUOTE***
You’ve asserted that public officials must be held to a higher moral standard than the rest of humanity. First, I’d like to know why that is the case.
She did uphold the law. She was arrested, went to court, pled guilty to the charges (i.e. she accepted responsibility for her actions), and was punished accordingly. She could have pulled a Perry and attempted to use her position to get out of the DUI charge, but instead she had enough integrity to accept responsility for her actions.
See, when we elect a district attorney, we trust them to do one thing: prosecute crimes. So long as they prosecute crimes, and do that properly and well, they’re doing what we asked them to. They are doing the bare minimum of what we expect from them- correctly using the powers of their office to perform the assigned duty. Driving drunk may reflect poorly on the DA’s character and mean they should not have been elected… but it doesn’t mean they have failed to do the actual job the public trusted them to do. We didn’t elect this DA to be sober, we elected them to prosecute cases.
Seriously, she made a bad decision and followed it up by doing the right thing. What’s blowing my fucking mind is apparently we have shitheads on this board that are attempting to justify Rick “The Dick” Perry making a blatant attempt to shove a shill appointee into one of the few effective anti-corruption enforcement agencies in the state of Texas.
Plus, if you actually read my arguments (which I doubt), you would have to notice that IT DOES NOT MATTER whether Lehmberg has lots of integrity or no integrity. Perry is not being charged with “thinking Lehmberg has no integrity.” He is being charged with misusing the power of his office and threatening to misuse taxpayer money, in order to coerce an elected official into acting in a certain way.
It DOES NOT MATTER that you think Perry was justified in doing so because this particular elected official was dishonorable and inferior. It is not Perry’s place to hire or fire Lehmberg, and it is not his place to threaten to defund a law enforcement operation in an attempt to blackmail her into resigning against her will.
Your appeals to “common sense” do not impress me. Give me a good reason why a moral failing, which incidentally has nothing to do with investigating corruption, should automatically disqualify a person from holding office. You assert without cause that this is the case. Please provide evidence that Lehmberg’s DUI has harmed the PIU’s integrity in any way. If you can’t do this without repeating some version of your “DUIs are rly bad guys” silliness, then maybe you should just go away.
And as for The Hammer, that’s true. He did get his conviction overturned by the Texas Supreme Court, an elected body that consists almost entirely of conservative Republicans. They didn’t think DeLay actually did all that stuff, and Texas doesn’t really have much in the way of campaign finance laws anyway. It makes no matter, though. He was still a cancerous growth on Congress’ asscheek, begging for a public fall from grace. And when he got convicted the first time around, we as a nation are better off for it. Ronnie Earle did humanity a favor when he realized that DeLay broke campaign finance laws, and he did us an even greater one when he got DeLay convicted. Whether or not “justice” was actually served against him isn’t so important. The fact that he no longer holds office though? That’s very important.
Of course! And the people on the Travis Commissioner’s Court would have tossed Lehmberg out on her ass a long time ago. They’re not doing it because there are, frankly, more important things at stake. In a state like Texas where the GOP has historically run roughshod over the Dems, they cannot afford to lose powerful positions like this. Considering the number of cases coming out of the PIU, including, incidentally, a Perry-allied ex-official who channeled millions of dollars to some of his big contributors, the Travis DA’s office has more influence than just about any Democrat in the state. If Perry didn’t have the right to appoint her replacement, and he almost assuredly would have appointed a fairly right-wing replacement, I’m sure the Travis County Dems would like to tell Lehmberg to take a short walk off a long pier. Unhappily, there are more important considerations at hand.
***END QUOTE***
Back in 2014, this was an extremely fringe belief. There was no way Maraxus’s ideals could become mainstream.
Now it is clear that the Democratic Party adopted Maraxus’s ideals.
The Democratic Party is the party of Maraxus, now.
In the animated series Gargoyles, there is a character called Demona, whose schtick was vengeance against those who hurt her and her kind.
To deal with Maraxus, we must become the party of Demona!