DEI

Ethics Quote of the Month: 2022 Nobel Prize Recipient Philip H. Dybvig

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Commenting on Harvard’s increasingly apparent appointment of an under-qualified, diversity hire as the university’s president, Dr. Dybvig, who was a co-winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for research on banks and financial crises,” said,

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.  Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

In related commentary, Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal in answer to the question of why Harvard can’t and won’t fire Gay, “To admit she has performed poorly is to raise basic questions about the entire ‘diversity’ enterprise.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds, commenting on both pieces, suggests that there are benefits “for her to remain as a lasting discredit to Harvard.” I agree with that as well. The mask has dropped, and all can see (who are willing to see) the ugliness beneath.

The DEI Debates: Appeals To Aristotle

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Recently, I read an argument from a conservative pundit that Aristotle perfectly summed up why the “diversity/equity/inclusion” movement (fad, cant, scheme) is foolish and destructive. Primarily the author’s approach was to appeal to the authority of the philosopher, who lived in ancient Greece about 2,500 years ago. Aristotle is one of handful of amazing human beings, like Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin, who seem to have been visitors from another planet, so freakishly talented and astute were they for their times, indeed any times. If you are going to use the Appeal to Authority fallacy as the foundation of your arguments, it is certainly an optimum strategy to employ an authority who was much smarter than you or anyone you could possibly argue with.

Indeed, Tottie (his friends called him “Tottie”) did warn about the perils of too much diversity of culture and language in a democracy like the one he lived in. The likely consequences of unassimilated immigration were, he concluded, dire:

“Heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction – at any rate until they have had time to assimilate. A city cannot be constituted from any chance collection of people, or in any chance period of time. Most of the cities which have admitted settlers, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by faction. For example, the Achaeans joined with settlers from Troezen in founding Sybaris, but expelled them when their own numbers increased; and this involved their city in a curse. At Thurii the Sybarites quarreled with the other settlers who had joined them in its colonization; they demanded special privileges, on the ground that they were the owners of the territory, and were driven out of the colony. At Byzantium the later settlers were detected in a conspiracy against the original colonists, and were expelled by force; and a similar expulsion befell the exiles from Chios who were admitted to Antissa by the original colonists. At Zancle, on the other hand, the original colonists were themselves expelled by the Samians whom they admitted. At Apollonia, on the Black Sea, factional conflict was caused by the introduction of new settlers; at Syracuse the conferring of civic rights on aliens and mercenaries, at the end of the period of the tyrants, led to sedition and civil war; and at Amphipolis the original citizens, after admitting Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by the colonists they had admitted….”

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I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!… To Learn That DEI Policies Harm Black And Hispanic Students!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back when the Great Stupid was really picking up steam in 2020, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest school district in California with over 106,000 students, announced that it would be overhauling how students will be evaluated as part of a larger “a larger effort to combat racism.” The school board voted unanimously to eliminate yearly grade averages. Meeting deadlines for assignments and classroom behavior would not affect academic grades. The district decided to de-emphasize discipline and penalties for cheating.

This crack-brain approach to education, essentially rejecting everything that had been learned over centuries about how students learn, was justified as way to eliminate the accumulated deficits of “systemic racism.” Soon “Diversity Equity Inclusion” budgets exploded and almost every school system jumped on board the latest fad. This was reparations, not education; no respectable research supported the theory that holding minority kids to lesser standards would help them succeed, but never mind: Fact Don’t Matter to ideologues and race-hustlers.

Now come Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Education Policy with a study suggesting that black and Hispanic students had “significantly greater learning loss during the pandemic in the school guided by diversity officers than those schooled in districts without one.” Minority students lost more ground than their white classmates, especially in math, the researchers found. “Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts.” Of course they did: having an official directing policy who insists that black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students—must combat that structural racism!—was guaranteed to undermine minority student success.

The news gets worse: nearly half of the school districts with at least 15,000 students employ a chief diversity or equity officer, and the number is 89% for districts with more than 100,000 students, the study found.

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Yes, This Goes In The EA “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files, But I’ll ‘Loquitur’ About It Anyway: Only 6% of New S&P Jobs Went to White Applicants After The George Floyd Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Bloomberg revealed this a couple of days ago. You missed it, as I did, because the mainstream media chose not to report it. It’s a separate issue, but gee, why do you think that would be? Because it isn’t news? Because the public doesn’t care if major corporations deliberately discriminated against the largest racial group in the nation? Because this is smoking gun evidence of woke-driven, illegal racial bias in the workplace supported by a political party that the news media is dedicated to supporting? Because the strategy of race-based threats, riots, violence, lies and extortion works?

Nah, it couldn’t be for any of those reasons. Maybe it’s because Biden’s dog bit its 11th victim: THAT made it into news headlines, but not this. But I digress…

Let me plug the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news source so derided that it seldom makes news aggregator sites with its headlines, which did report the Bloomberg revelations. It wrote in part,

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Insufficient Mockery Alert #1: The “Jewface” Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jonathan Turley likes to begin his posts on oft-visited topics (like speech suppression on progressive college campuses) by reviewing all of his past posts on the matter. If I started this post like that and listed all of the ridiculous, hypocritical, wokey, DEI-inspired casting ethics controversies EA has highlighted, there would be no room for the post itself. But I will supply a sampling…

Let’s see: a black actress can play Anne Boleyn, and James Earl Jones can play the Celtic King Lear, but a white actor is engaged in racism by playing Othello. Hmmm. Gay Hollywood actors (most of them are, after all) can play straight characters, but Tom Hanks apologized for playing a gay character (and winning an Oscar for it) in “Philadelphia.” Lou Diamond Phillips simultaneously asserted that as a Filipino actor he is entitled to play anyone—after all, he has made his living playing Hispanics, South Americans and Native Americans— then in the same interview said “I happen to agree that casting Caucasian people in what are supposed to be ethnic roles is not kosher.”

Yes, it’s Calvinball! The minority communities, supported by progressive DEI fanatics, make up the rules as they go along—whatever keeps whites, heterosexuals and non-disabled actors out of roles. Back in 2019, I designated this “the dumbest casting controversy yet”: that was when Bryan Cranston was criticized for playing a quadriplegic without being actually paralyzed from the neck down. Well, the DEI maniacs have gone way, way beyond that, and conveniently, the most recent ridiculous Calvinball installment is relevant to today’s nonsense.

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You Can Make Your Own Decision, But I Won’t Be Patronizing Best Buy From Now On…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A whistleblower revealed the above screen shot of an internal Best Buy company memo regarding “management leadership academy programs” with the O’Keefe Media Group. The programs are a partnership between Best Buy and global management consultant McKinsey & Company, and, as you can see in the third bullet point under “Candidates must meet the requirements below,” white employees need not apply.

That’s illegal and racially discriminatory, or course, But to be fair, this is “good racism” in Woke World.

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A “Great Stupid” Classic! Addressing Crash Dummy Employment Discrimination

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur.

The scary thing: nobody laughed.

Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well this clarifies things!

Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, currently on well-earned disciplinary leave after her revolting handling of a law student effort to use the “heckler’s veto” to silence a Federal court judge invited to speak to a student group, has decided to challenge the Stanford dean and the school’s president by claiming that she was right to side with the disruptive students. Her defense relies on the currently popular diversity/equity/inclusion cant that free speech can be harmful, and must be “balanced” with DEI objectives.

Her message was relayed in a defiant (and dishonest) op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ominously titled, “Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

The title itself signals Steinbach’s anti-speech point of view. The irritating metaphor “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” in this case means “Is freedom of speech worth the trouble?” That’s the calling card of an aspiring ideological censor and a totalitarian, giving off the stench of “safe spaces” and criminalized hate speech. She, and the op-ed that follows, advocates suppressing opinions and speech that she disagrees with, or in the world of the woke, that is “dangerous” and “wrong,” “wrong” meaning “not what we want to hear.”

First, however, Steinbach had to frame her argument in a lie. She describes the confrontation between Judge Duncan and an organized mob of protesters as merely a “heated exchange,” and “a verbal sparring match,” writing that “some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments” which the judge “answered in turn.” There is video of the event, and that’s not what was going on. Duncan was prevented from giving his prepared remarks, the students who came to hear them were prevented from doing so, and Duncan, far from answering questions, was reduced to calling out the students for their atrocious behavior.

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