Tag Archives: culture

If They Were Serious

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Callum Borchers, a self-identified DEI maven, ended his Wall Street Journal article with this bit:

To restore confidence in hiring fairness, companies should make clear that business goals come first and diversity is part of a strategy to recruit top talent, she [Ruth Villalonga, who advises companies on diversity messaging as senior vice president at Burson] says.

If these wonders were serious about diversity improving their bottom lines, though, and not just engaged in cynically rephrasing their DEI sewage to better message it, they would take concrete steps in that direction.

Those concrete steps would begin with the Critical Item of no longer lying to their prospective hires and those passed over for promotion. Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, as paraphrased by Borchers:

When a woman is promoted and a man was in the running, HR will often wink and say, “Maybe next time, guy.” Even when the woman is promoted because she’s better-qualified, it’s a way for the manager to get out of having a difficult conversation.

Here’s a carefully anonymous executive recruiter, whose level of integrity is illustrated by his cowering behind that anonymity:

[P]roviding honest feedback to unsuccessful job candidates is awkward and sometimes adversarial, so it is tempting to fudge the reason for rejection.
He offered a scenario: “How do you tell someone they had body odor or were weird? ‘Sorry, bud, DEI strikes again!'”

The answer to Anonymous One’s scenario is as straightforward as telling that person he has body odor, or is weird by the company’s standard. The truth may well be uncomfortable and awkward, but avoiding that in favor of lying both does a gross disservice to the one being rejected, denying him his opportunity understand where to improve, and it’s plain cowardly and dishonest. Who wants to work for a liar or a coward?

Those concrete steps would continue with another Critical Item: working from the ground up to help toddlers and pre-schoolers, and their parents, have actually equal opportunities at quality education so those children could develop their skills, their talents, their interests as they grow up and progress through K-12 and then trade school/community college or college and university.

Employers’ concrete steps would further include the Critical Item of pushing colleges and universities to eliminate DEI-related positions in school management and push STEM subjects in their school curricula, withholding recruiting efforts on their campuses and ignoring resumes with those schools’ degrees on them until they do.

Diversity—true, honestly built diversity—would flow out of that.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Identity Politics

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James Freeman had an interesting op-ed on this subject. At the end of his piece, he quoted Michael Baharaeen, who blogs at the Liberal Patriot [emphasis in the quote]:

One such risk [political…of focusing on identity politics] is coming to believe that the shared characteristic that binds a group of people together is the most important factor informing that group’s voting habits… conceiving of any group in monolithic terms risks missing meaningful differences within it. Even terms like “Latino” have limited utility, as they lump the very different life experiences of people with ancestry in, say, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia into one broad category….

Indeed. It might be more useful, instead, to focus on the differing positions, perspectives, ideas themselves without any regard for who, or which group, has them. Maybe Party would be better served, be more attuned to what makes us all Americans, to treat us all as the individual Americans that we are, rather than as this or that collected subset of us and then pretend to care about each group.

There is a Parallel

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Virginia Republican legislators are looking at updating and tightening Virginia law regarding fentanyl deaths.

Under current case law, it is difficult to charge a drug dealer with the murder of a user who died from fentanyl they had purchased unless they are in the proximity of that dealer, according to GOP legislators.

Thus:

State Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle, R-New Kent, told Fox News Digital on Tuesday that Virginia hopes to address that legislative insufficiency.
“This [new] [law] would say if you sell the drugs, it doesn’t matter if you’re in physical proximity,” he said.

When a person is killed in the course of a crime of which he’s a victim or bystander, all of the participants in that crime are as guilty of murder as is the one who did the actual killing. This is well established case law.

It’s eminently sensible that participants in a drug activity (and not just involving fentanyl) during the course of which or as a result of which a person is killed by the drug should all be guilty of the murder as is the individual who was proximately involved in that killing. Bullets and knives have, in the main, pretty prompt effects from having been delivered in the moment. Drugs, though, have prompt effects when taken, the taking often is delayed. Hence the need to expand that proximity to the dealer bit. The drugs the dealer delivered might well have their prompt effect later, when the addict takes the metaphorical bullet/knife stab.

Unfortunately, though, this law has little chance of passage in the current Virginia legislative session: the Progressive-Democratic Party will hold a one-seat majority after a pair of special elections are completed. Party has shown over the last four years that it has no stomach for punishing criminals, lacking even the stomach to hold them in jail pending trial, or even to bring them to trial at all.

Are They or Aren’t They?

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The McDonald’s burger chain now is claiming to be doing away with its DEI foolishness in its corporate hierarchy.

The company said it would phase out some diversity commitments among suppliers and said its diversity team would now be called the Global Inclusion Team. The name change, it said, was “more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work.”

Then the company said it would instead

focus on “continuing to embed inclusion practices that grow our business into our everyday process and operations.”

The name change and backhanded admission that it would continue doing precisely what it intimated it would stop doing insult the intelligence of us average Americans.

This sort of weasel wording is why we cannot trust business managers who claim to be doing away with the intrinsically racist and sexist DEI…foolishness. They aren’t. They’re just hiding it in their back rooms.

Woke-ism

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A Wall Street Journal article centered on Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau resigning (being updated, as this article was published very shortly afterward) closed with this:

Liberal lawmaker Wayne Long said the Liberal Party under Trudeau has swung too much to the left on the political spectrum, much like the Democrats in the US.
“I don’t want to use the word wokeism, but we’ve doubled down on things where we’ve come out as a moral authority,” said Long, who isn’t seeking re-election this year. “People are tired of it. It doesn’t mean that they’re right and we’re wrong, but reality bites, and reality sometimes sucks.”

The Liberals still are unable to recognize that their policies are plain wrong and destructive. They’re only willing to say they were unable to sell their stuff to the public. Much like the Progressive-Democratic Party at home.