When I was young I used to resent “skinny, well-put-together blondes” at first sight. Particularly if they were named Ashley. No. I don’t know why, but we lived in North Carolina at the time, and I swear they were cranking these girls out in a factory somewhere, and they were all named Ashley.
Why did I resent them? Stupid reasons. Mostly, they had this air of having been brought up to wealth and privilege, the kind that always told them what fork to use and what clothes to wear in all situations and– Well, in my twenties and having just changed culture/country/language, I felt like a complete mess, and like I was falling apart all the time, and never knew what to do, what to wear, when to speak and when to keep my mouth shut. (The last one might be incurable.)
So my perception is that these people had it too easy while I had it too hard. I think I was wrong on both counts. I mean, I’m not going to recommend moving across the world in your early twenties and invalidating both your professional credentials such as they were and your nascent ability to pass as an adult, but if you do and survive, and acclimate, you’re probably better able to make it in life than if you hadn’t. Not less.
And having met a few of these women over the intervening decades, some of them actually from the background I imagined from them, we’ll say they had their own challenges, and in the end I probably did better (maybe not monetarily, but in every way that counts than they did.)
So, what is this all about, other than confusing all my readers named Ashley? (No, I don’t hate the name.)
Well. It’s the whole Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bullshit. (They probably thought Liberty, Fraternity, Equality was too tainted.)
Today again I woke up to talk of “reparations” from people who never held slaves to people who were never slaves, which is this type of thinking all over.
Sure, some of us come from backgrounds that were less than ideal. As a friend told me recently, having come to the same conclusion I did a few decades ago, the Bible is right about sin marking a family for seven generations. Not because it’s a curse from above, but because it’s almost impossible to get past the echoes of bad thing in less time.
Thing is — think about it — you’re descended, proximally, (Those you might have met) from four individuals, the products of four different families. Now think about human families in general. If you’re descended from four families that within the last seven generations didn’t have a major trauma, you’re a rare unicorn and should register yourself as an endangered species.
And trauma passes on, and affects people. Then there are neurological conditions and physical conditions and–
Look, I hate the ‘neuro typical’ and ‘neuro atypical’ slang, because almost all of us are battling something, even if just minor sensory stuff. But then again, I’ve just recently convinced myself (kind of) that being ADD is NOT a MORAL failing.
I don’t know every one of you reading this, but I would bet almost everyone of you has something you battle with on the regular. Either illness, or a weird brain glitch, of the PTSD fall out of a less than sane family/growing up situation. Because we’re human. We’re broken.
“But Sarah,” you say. “The American revolution was based on equality.”
Kind of. It was based on equality before the law. You weren’t a nobleman and exempt in certain circumstances; you weren’t a peasant and able to be killed impunely, etc. etc. etc.
That’s fine. In fact that’s great, and if we could get back to that equality under the law, I’d be ecstatic. But that’s not what the Equity BS is about.
The Equity nonsense claims to look into your life, and see where you’re not on a par with those around you, and do something to compensate you. But before you get all excited about how they’re going to compensate you for ADHD, or because your parents had a messy divorce when you were five, or because your great grandfather was a murderous drunkard… yeah, no.
You see, even individuals can’t tell when others are being held back by something. We all tend to imagine anyone bluffing their way to life and presenting an “okay” face have it easy. Well, like anything like this administered by government, it’s all about punishing success. If you managed to get your ducks in a row (I’m fairly sure one of mine is a turkey) and make it, particularly monetarily, because that’s what government is best at measuring, then you must have had it easy, and people who didn’t make it must have stuff given to them.
It’s kind of like the whole slavery stuff. Oh, please. If you want to give someone compensation for stuff done to their ancestors, compensate people for their ancestors being forced onto welfare, and the perverse incentives of the same, but abolish welfare first. (First, do no harm.) Because that has had a far more permanent impoverish-and-destroy effect on the population.
People who came out of slavery were doing pretty well, despite legal hobbles and other issues, before the shackles of victimhood and welfare were dropped on them (and others.) Not saying slavery and transport across the ocean was good, right or something to repeat, but let’s face it, not many immigrants came to this shore under ideal conditions, and three? four generations later trauma is trauma is trauma and the fine lines worn out. And while the people actually enslaved deserved compensation, they are long dead, and what plagues their descendants is not even the ghost of slavery, just a society offering all sorts of perverse incentives (of which reparations would be another.)
Also, how are they going to determine this? by level of tan? Because a lot of darker-skinned people are descended from voluntary immigrants. Take Kamala Harris (Or don’t. Judging by the dead eyes, she’s been taken enough) she might tan, but she has no African ancestors and certainly no enslaved ancestors. Barrack Obama has African ancestors, but no traceable slave ancestry. Etc, etc, etc.
Why should the Obama daughters be entitled to “reparations” and my kids (whose family this side of the ocean never owned slaves, ever) have to pay them?
Well because government is not going to go over the ancestry of everyone in the US — and you’d be surprised how many “white” Americans are descended from enslaved Africans. Heck, so would a lot of them — and examine all claims. They’re going to assume you’re entitled to compensation if you tan. (And I look forward to a discussion of the levels of tan.)
Unfortunately that’s how the whole DEI thing is being administered. No, scrap that, it’s unfortunate the whole DEI project is being administered at all. I liked it better when they first came out calling it DIE before deciding it was too on the nose and changing it to DEI. Because there is no way way to do it ethically, rationally or even in a way that causes no harm.
First diversity. Diversity of what? Not of opinions. That’s anathema to the left who is in charge of this. There is only one set of beliefs. And yet “diversity” is somehow supposed to improve everything, by bringing in people who look different but think exactly the same. So, you know… multiple levels of tan, different genitalia (there are only two types), different types of sexual attraction, and let’s count the people who say they should have had different genitalia, and…. apparently now we’re supposed to include the people who can’t or won’t lose weight (as one of the can’t I still think this is stupid.)
Here’s the thing all these games are a problem, because hiring or promoting or giving privileges to anyone for any reason other than competence slowly degrades society. There is never “just as capable.” That’s not how people work. And if you’re hiring for anything but capable, you’ve got a really high chance you’re not hiring someone who is capable.
Take the whole “women” being a downtrodden minority and having to be preferentially hired for male dominated professions. Men and women are different. And no, we’re not going to play the games of ‘but the same nutrition’ because we know that’s not true. It’s not how any of this works. Hormones have consequences, and they have consequences before you are born. There is a long post coming on this, and I’ve pointed out I have a lot of sympathy for people who think they were born in the wrong body, and if they’re adults, it’s their decision to make whether living under the appearance of the other sex is better (the appearance because in current state of science you can’t really change) and I only get really upset at messing with kids or people too young to know better. HOWEVER hear me out: none of us knows what living as the other sex truly is. We are, however “non-conforming” we consider ourselves to be, all locked into being who we are well before we are born. Hormones form us before then. Not just in how our bodies grow and are arranged, but in our brains too.
Now I’m not going to say women can’t be almost as strong (or stronger than some) men, or that they can’t be good at visual and spacial reasoning, or even good in male professions. Human ability is a continuum and a few women make better engineers than even the best men. And some women are strong enough to be firefighters. And–
However, the women whose minds and bodies run that way, and who have an interest in the fields will find them, in a free society.
The fact is that for whatever reason most women prefer to work with people; most men prefer to work with things. (Note, most. Not all.)
Trying to do DEI and bring those numbers to parity ignores that people aren’t the same and even groups can’t be made the same. Forcing it just brings in people who don’t want to do the thing, and might in fact be incapable of doing the thing.
In the end it does nothing, except create very unhappy people and destroy society. It’s sort of like Liberty, equality and fraternity: Two things that can’t be enforced or even measured with any kind of general rule, and one that will destroy everything.
It’s a bad idea, instituted by people who act as if they’ve never met a living human, in the service of lies they were told as children, and which not even children should believe. And if continued (it’s been in place a long time, though not by that name) it will literally dismantle human civilization.
It’s time for DEI, but really DIE to die, die, die!
According To Hoyt 
DEI is yet another effort to do the whole Marxist thing of “we’ll make sure that only the right people get their correct rewards” thing from a top-down perspective. Because that gives these kinds of people power. The power that they want to have over everyone that they can get to.
Yep. Class warfare didn’t work in getting non-communist countries to turn communist so now they are simply replacing economic class with racial/ethnic membership and using that as the basis of their effort to impose communism.
Yep. It’s the Gramsci update to the Marxist virus.
The big problem is that going for racial and ethnic membership means that you’re going to create a whole bunch of people that have very few reasons WHY they should listen to their “betters” on command without a lot of people with guns.
I have a dream, that one day, we will have a Gramsci-negative society throughout all the world(s).
Well, some of them are doing it so they can play the victims when they are class enemies by actual Marxist standards.
They called it DIE from the get-go. I was there.
I have and will always honor their origin story.
And I’m about to run down a rabbit hole. Is it a female thing to want to work with our hands? Because that was my favorite part of electronics and microcircuitry has kind of taken that away from me because there’s no such thing as trouble shooting to the component level anymore.
Depends on the type of work. Electronics and microcicuitry doesn’t seem like a common female thing. BUT I’ve run in male circles most of my life for other reasons, so what do I know?
I doubt very much — having met you — that you’re standard issue either. BUT here’s the thing, NO ONE IS. Which is why trying to shove people into assigned slots is insane.
Crocheting, knitting, weaving, crafting, and other “distaff” professions need work done by hand. Working with electronics is similar, particularly if it is detail work. So yes, I think it is a female thing as much as a male thing. It just takes different forms for women than it does for men, for the most part.
When the Reader starting working at the Medium Sized Defense Contractor (later bought by the Great Big Defense Contractor over a Christmas holiday) the radar electronics were hand assembled. And virtually all of the assembly was done by women.
Makes sense. When I was working with hardware I had less difficult time with components. Two reasons. I couldn’t force anything. If it had to be forced, it was oriented wrong somehow. If forced it broke. Never broke anything. Know a few guys who did. Secondly, my hands are small. I could get hands and fingers where most guys couldn’t. And because I crochet, tat, knit, hand sew (quilt, embroidery), I had an easier time with more delicate installations. Working with hardware wasn’t my thing. Could do it, but really not my preference. The software puzzle OTOH, that was me.
Not because I’m particularly logical. Too many times it was “yes, correct, but how did you get here from there?” Answer was leaps of intuition. Answer was the only thing that made any sense.
Take a look at one of the shops that still does manual placement of components on PC boards and solder them on by hand (power electronics PC boards, for example, where you still have a lot of through-hole components), or at the stations in a surface-mount PCB factory where they do the manual rework of boards failing inspection. Women as far as the eye can see…..
The vast majority of the semiconductor fab operators were female. (As were the test operators.) This is over 27 years and roughly 3 companies. OTOH, the fab techs tended to be male (though the test area techs were more evenly split), though there was a fair amount of somewhat dangerous/heavy lifting/exotic plumbing that was part of the jobs.
I was at a Motorola plant/R&D center one summer, and AFAIK, most of the assemblers for the radios were women. The tiny lab I was working in was strictly male, though it was about 6 people, two to four with PhDs. (Also working with things that could cause major problems if not done right, said problems including injuries or fatalities.)
When I see pictures of the Chinese factories that assemble electronic components, the employees all seem to be female. The only males in sight are typically management.
But that might also be a cultural thing, possibly meaning that men are culturally expected to work other types of jobs.
Female assemblers was definitely true at HP for semiconductor component lines in the US. Second hand info said Korean assemblers were also mostly female. Where it’s not automated, there’s a lot of fine motor control needed. I could do it, sort of, but slowly. (The equipment had decent microscopes and micromanipulators–miniature versions of Heinlein’s Waldos.)
OTOH, line engineers were mixed, though the trend pushed more female engineers starting around the mid ’80s. By 2000, they started making inroads at the section manager level (managing teams of engineers). My last two bosses at HP/Agilent were women (ending 2001 with my layoff).
I think it’s a human thing. There are definitely male and female channels for it, and electronics is probably considered a male channel because it’s adjacent to working with things/machinery, which is very much a male channel. But there are female mechanics and woodworkers and males who love to knit and cook, so…
Back in the old day when electronics were assembled by hand at Hewlett Packard and NCR, the assembly plant was almost exclusively women, supposedly because they had more talent for close hand work. FWIW.
I had a powerplant instructor who had worked at Texas Instruments. He said they had a batch of cards that needed a weld fix. Out of several hundred people in the plant, only one woman and no men had the dexterity, fine motor skills, and focus ability needed to make the repairs. She was good for about 20 welds before she had to take a break and regroup, it was such delicate work.
Fine motor control is slightly preferentially selected for females, whereas gross motor control (such as distance throwing with accuracy) is somewhat preferentially selected for males. It’s the hunter/gatherer split, but the selection preference isn’t as strong as, say, overall body strength.
We tend to like to do things that we can do well, so women often like detail hand work because overall, we have a good chance of doing well at it.
Worked in semiconductor testing, (wafer level to packaged die), in the ’90s. Most of the really good operators and technicians were women. (Not counting the few that were clearly there due to Affirmative Action and played the race card all the time…)
I was one of the few males since I had the electronics background and the coordination to repair probe cards and wafer handlers. Also they needed some bodies to work third shift. (This worked for me, ’cause I could go to college during the day… )
I miss component level work, but there still are retro-projects and modern projects that require solder and small detail work. And usually interface to some sort of digital interface.
Check out SparkFun or AdaFruit.
I was in one of those forced DEI training sessions and they had the example of having a group of people go to the front and start in line. Then depending on a list of circumstances, if you had them you either took one step back or one step forward. These were things like two parents in the house, language barriers you name it. One person who did extremely well at the company was almost at the very back of the group because of a host of bad circumstances growing up, and everyone was astounded that this person was so far back when this person was also extremely capable.
That exercise was never used again in DEI training because it demonstrated the astounding nonsense of DEI.
And now we here ALL know how to sabotage it!
I was in a forced DEI training session, and in this session they had the visual example of having a group of volunteers stand in the front in a line. Then, the instructors read off a list of various attributes. If it was a positive life event, the person took a step forward, such as growing up a in a two-parent family. If it was a negative life event, such as losing a parent, you took a step back.
One person was almost at the very back of the pack, but this person was considered highly accomplished by the group and was astounded that the person was so far back. Said person had to justify being so far back and explain that yes, they had lost a parent and didn’t have any help in college and so on.
Needless to say, that exercise was never again used in DEI training. It demonstrated the absolute futility of the who process.
…typo correction: the whole process.
And here I was wondering whether you meant the band, or the Dr. Seuss characters. 😀
Or how DEI has ruined a perfectly good British sci-fi series …
Heh. I’m imaging what kind of process a Dr. Seuss Who would have.
[Tries to come up with a Seussian couplet including something that rhymes with Tardis. No particular success.]
For reasons, my last Doctor was Sylvester McCoy, so I escaped the wokification, but endured the Beeb doing all it could to kill the show.
Due to $SISTAUR lending DVD’s, I saw some of the new Who (several years back). But thing got to the point that even with the idea of Far Advanced Everything and “Sufficiently advanced, indistinguishable from magic” and all… it seemed to have Gone Too Dang Far. And that was years before the currently Wokesterfire.
I followed the first few seasons of New Who. Really liked Eccleston’s first season (he really sold the ‘tortured survivor’), and the Tennant era. Matt Smith was channeling a bit too much of Troughton for my taste, but it was the declining quality of the scripts that eventually got me to stop watching, so I missed the whole dumpster-fire era.
I am now imagining a Tardis as a flaming dumpster, making that “whaaaaaarp!’ noise endlessly but going nowhere.
The husband of a friend has to do these DIE sessions regularly. A while back he was asked to lead one of them.
He told the manager in question that they didn’t want him to do that, because he would tell the truth.
They never asked him again.
Now the big question: is he still employed?
Actually, yes.
Yes, he is still employed at the same company. He still has to attend the torture sessions.
The one and only session I was forced to participate in was a joke.
It sure didn’t help when I said family environment and family culture was a better indicator of success than skin color.
And the idiot “rules” keep changing.
Once Jews could be “disliked” for various reasons including “they’re too successful”.
Then Only Evil Right-Wingers “hated” Jews.
Now we’ve gotten “Jews Are White” and can be hated for that reason. On top of that Jews have too much “White Privilege” (ie they’re too successful) and they are Evil Capitalists.
And of course, all Jews who don’t hate Israel are “Evil Oppressors” because Israel “Oppresses” the poor-little Palestinians. 😡
Re Jews are white, here’s a screen cap from a Hebrew-language IDF music video:
I guess the black ones are white too.
Vid link:
Have you heard anything about the “Black Face of White Supremacy”? 😉
I first heard that one when Larry Elder was running for Governor of Kalifornia.
Yep, we were all White Supremacists! for trying to recall a rich entitled white dude and elect a black conservative.
And the woman wearing a gorilla mask who harassed Mr. Elder one day, and who definitely wasn’t a racist.
Just call it Democratic Party privilege.
Well, duh. Didn’t you know? Whiteness has nothing to do with skin colour…
True, Israel is MUCH more diverse than the Palestinian territories.
But we all know that the Israelis only keep the Ethiopian Jews and the Arabs around to act as token minorities. /rolleyes
If the rules kept the same, you could learn to conform to them. They have to keep changing so they can punish people.
It’s not that the rules actually change. They have contradictory rules that are valid at the same time, so they can pull up whichever they need to punish people.
One example is that a white person cannot write “colored” characters. BUT of they don’t they’re not being inclusive. The idiots can pull up whichever rule is convenient at the moment, and they see no contradiction.
That, too. But they also change them on the fly
which is what they actually want.
“Show me the person I will show you the crime” is an essential core part of the left’s method of tyranny.
Which explains bullshit like this:
“Smith wants to preclude the jury from hearing evidence about Jan 6 in his Jan 6 case:”
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1740025527614791871.html
There’s an image of the actual filing but it looks like it would break the blog.
It’s before a Democratic Party partisan judge who openly asked, while handling trespassing cases against J6 protestors which she treated as high treason, “why wasn’t Trump in jail yet”, and a DC Democratic Party-government worker jury. Smith knows he can get away this absurd nonsense because it is kangaroo court that has already made its decision.
If you destroy everything that isn’t “Communism”, as hard as possible, we achieve Communism and the Radiant Future.
Marx was a mentally defective Dalek.
STOP INSULTING DALEKS.
Yup very hard to follow Calvinball/Fizzbin( with apologies to Mr. Watterson and/or Messrs Harmon and Coon). As Ms. Catelli has noted the whole point of the shifting rules is to get the outcome the brahmandarins want. So who is in and who is out appear arbitrary until you realize the goal is control not “equity” or ” equality”.
Professor Carol Swain agrees with you. She was one of the authors whose work was lifted by Harvard’s diversity hire installed as president.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/25/opinion/a-can-do-attitude-is-more-important-than-race-or-social-class/
“…I believe that all DEI programs should be abolished and that we can achieve diversity without discrimination.”
Her initial response to the plagiarism revelations is a bit feistier.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/prominent-professor-whom-claudine-gay-allegedly-copied-calls-for-her-to-be-fired-says-harvard-needs-to-get-back-towards-sanity/ar-AA1lRFgn
I want reparations for being the descendant of a Union Civil War veteran. 🙂
But on a more serious note, when are they going to disband the party of Jefferson Davis? They say they’re trying to get rid of all vestiges of the Confederacy, so why not go there?
You mean like removing Lincoln from the ballot in 10 Southern states? Er Trump from….
Leftists, both the Democratic Party variety and those in the EU, abhor the general populace and do not trust them to elect the “right” people, thus requiring the leftists to decide for the people who should be elected whether or not the people being installed into power are desired by the people or not. They consider elections to only be free and fair when the leftists win, even if it takes massive fraud, disqualifying candidates and persecuting their political opponents to do so.
The last thing the leftists proclaiming that “democracy must be saved” want are genuinely free and fair elections because then leftists can (and usually do) lose.
Heck, I should demand some kind of consideration for having a great-great-grandfather who was a ferocious Abolitionist, and helped run a branch of the Underground Railway through his small Pennsylvania town. He was so enthusiastic about Mr. Lincoln’s war that he was read out of his local Quaker Meeting, and thereafter took his and his family’s religious custom to the nearest Lutheran church.
On a somewhat related note, some years ago I read an interview with Spike Lee, who was just suddenly famous for his first big movie – Do The Right Thing, if memory serves. It was kind of sad for me, because in the interview he seemed absolutely obsessed with the notion that white people were insanely obsessed with oppressing black people. No kidding; he seemed to believe that we lived all day long, considering the ways and means that we all could make black people’s condition so much crappier. I thought at the time how sad or even furious that it would make him, to realize that in actuality … we didn’t think of black people at all. Seriously – as a white person of certain age – I could bear witness that most of us didn’t think about blacks at all. Not malignity … but indifference. Couldn’t even be bothered to care.
If we ever do come to care, though – Katie bar the door.
Damn right. I really don’t care about black people or any particular racial group one way or the other, and except as a matter of family history, never have. Certainly not enough to hate any of them or spend time inventing ways to make them miserable.
Except that having spent plenty of time surrounded by DIE fanatics and having seen their cult for the evil it is, I hate them with all my heart. To the extent that the CRT/DEI flying monkeys have been able to make me care about any of this crap, I only care about making those sorry-ass sons-a-bitches wish they hadn’t.
Lee was looking at the Democrats. Which makes his support for the donks a) insane and b) “House Slave” level evil.
This is all you need to know about modern DIE and just how utterly screwed up it is.
I work for a Fortune 500 company with offices in various places around the US. I work, more precisely, on the tech side of the company in software testing. (We’re not a software company but we do a lot of developing our own custom systems for internal use.) My department full-time employees as of three years ago were about 50% Indian (almost all zeroth-generation immigrants who got green cards or were naturalized citizens). Our contract workforce was more like 80%+ Indian. At that time, we got an Indian-American senior VP from outside the company (again, zeroth-generation) as head of our department.
This year, she made a big to-do about hiring sixteen new full-time employees for the department in the spring. FIFTEEN of them were born in India (one was born in Indonesia). All nine manager slots that opened up were filled by new hires born in India instead of other hires or promotions from within. We have not hired a white, or black, native-born American in our department in at least two years, maybe three. As a result our department is now about 70% Indian, the management staff closer to 80% Indian.
From scuttlebutt and first-hand experience, all of the new manager hires manage identically in a classic Indian style…top-down, hierarchical, remote, pushing edicts and directives down while not listening to feedback coming back up from our longtime staff. I had one of these guys as a boss for four months and it was sheer hell. He made no effort to learn about the company he’d just hired into or our culture…it was “test automation uber alles” and screw your project work for our development partners. Metrics metrics metrics and more metrics, always delivered in a “drop what you’re doing and do this now” request. And he’s been caught protecting an Indian employee who has no clue what he’s doing from the consequences of his overinflating his resume to get hired.
Now…flip races. Imagine a White American manager of either sex hired fifteen White Americans and one Aussie to fill sixteen open positions, nine of them managers. All hell would break loose. Our company’s huge and growing DIE effort (it’s telling that the DIE effort is at the EVP level under an “EVP, Culture and Diversity”) would never stand for the percentages in the annual ESG Guide rolling backward. I expect the SVP would be shown the gate in short order no matter how good the new hires were. But this SVP can hire employees that look like her, almost 100%, and because it reduces the “White” number in that ESG guide, it is alllllll good.
When people start pooh-poohing the Great Replacement, I can look at them truthfully and say, “Bish, I’m LIVING it.”
I say we should just flip it around and call it IED. 😛
Because that’s what the Leftroids are using it for — a cheap nasty bomb to blow up our civilization.
———————————
Only idiots believe they know how other people should live their lives. The stupider they are, the more blindly they believe it.
Destroying the USA and Western Civilization are an explicit part of the left’s agenda:
https://www.breitbart.com/education/2023/12/23/university-of-minnesota-professor-calls-to-dismantle-the-u-s-to-fight-colonization-for-palestinians
“Death to the Jews” is just the start for the genocidal leftists; they have a whole bunch more of people they want to “decolonize” (those who call for genocide have a track record of coming up with euphemisms for their murderous goals).
Having spent 20 years in the university system (until I gained my freedom four years ago), I can tell you from experience that DEI absolutely is more accurately rendered DIE, and that American universities are in straits every bit as dire as you may have heard. The whole enterprise was riddled with marxoids long before I got there, but between 1998, when I decided I wanted to join academia (a bad idea, but I was ignorant and idealistic), and 2018, when I finally escaped the warped world of higher-ed, everything got so…much…worse.
This University of Minnesota professor is NOT an outlier. There are hundreds more exactly like her where she came from — and they’re the people in charge. There are still sane people in the system who are not on board with the DIE project, but they’ve learned to stay quiet.
My personal experience with it was that I stayed as quiet as I possibly could, but it wasn’t enough. It was generally known that I wasn’t really on board with the whole thing, and thus I was always on the outside looking in; other people got the “creative” assignments and the raises, while I got the grunt work and got no raises. That is, until a new director came in, who had no connection to the old guard. She and her team were every bit as “progressive” as the people they replaced, but I can only assume that when they discovered how underpaid I was and fixed it, they didn’t yet know why it was that way, or they might’ve continued it.
What the new directors did not do was change the hiring pattern: Find an energetic, late twenties/early thirties female to do the creative work; said female finds higher-paying job and leaves within 2 years or less; solid, “uncreative” white male employee (me) picks up the pieces and holds everything together until a new female is found; repeat, repeat, repeat.
We were on (iirc) the fourth or fifth cycle when I finally made my escape to an engineering & manufacturing company, which isn’t down with DIE and…imagine this…values me for my analytical nature and creativity, and pays me well for exercising both on their behalf.
As you can imagine, the only response I have to DEI is…die. In. A. Fire.
And no doubt when things inevitably could not be held together, or stopped working, or blowed right up, departed you was the recipient of all of the blame back where you were.
That’s what filtered out from my last gig in cubeland as the story my un-riffed boss was using, even though the things that blowed right up were actually stuff she retained in her direct purvue rather than what she had any of her all-layed-off minions working on.
Now to be fair, they did RIF all of her reports, so she really had no recourse but to use the blame card. But it was already a pattern before the RIF, which is one reason I was glad to get the separation package in the end.
Though somebody from there blackballed me at a different company for a position for which I was multiple-round-interviewing. Again in the end it turned out for the best, but that’s just bad practice.
Bravo. You discerned the point.
Destroy what exists so Communism can replace it.
Because, oddly, Communism cannot replace nor compete -anything- else existant. One must first persuade the rubes to destroy everything else, to enable it.
So DEI-IED-DIE indeed.
The Dalek Philosophy!
Not even as rational as Daleks (did I say that?) It is a variant on the underwear gnome strategy
1) Break everything
2)???
3) Communist/Marxist Utopia!!!
It is kind of sad when your whole eschatological worldview and would be hilarious, like some warped Monty Python skit, except the stupid Brahmandarins excel at breaking stuff (and I didn’t say stuff).
Marxists do not excel at breaking things. They are a lousy at such as everythign else. They simply are incapable of maintaining anything useful for any length of time. At least “inshallah” implies -something- might give a rats patootie about the outcome.
Alright admittedly the Brahamandarins fail at anything they actively attempt. As you note their ability is essentially an anti midas touch rather than a true skill of breaking things.
There are plenty of failed socialist states lying around where everything has already been destroyed, but communism hasn’t miraculously emerged to bestow salvation upon them.
Why don’t they rebuild one of those to demonstrate their Perfect Communist Society?
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Communism and socialism do not create, they only take, and they collapse when the kommissars run out of things to steal.
-Real- socialism/communism/fizzbinn has never been tried! They failed because they did it wrong!
Yeah, no.
So then, the Right People can fix them by doing it right! Why don’t they?
The good thing is they will destroy themselves and the false house of cards they have built first. I wonder what they will change DIEEIIE”s name to next?
On a side note, you can tell Biden is in trouble when he tells the lying whores in the Liberal press, (My Apologies to honest hard working whores for the comparison), that they are not lying enough about his Bidenomics, and that is why he is now losing. I wonder if they would shoot Biden to get sympathy votes for Kamaltoe? I honestly don’t want to be Hunter right now, if ole Joe will screw his own kids, he’d have one crack head son shoot for sympathy votes. A lot of phony baloney bullshit is on the line after all.
shot ya I am terrible at proff reedin
Orphangeorge- proofreading is a lost rat.
snicker
“Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging”
No, that’s is not a joke.
… any more than the entire concept is.
I call DIBS!
Eagle claw…lol
They replaced BLM at work with the term Allyship. I guess too many people started noticing that the BLM organization was a Marxist scam that never help anyone but the “founders”.
And there’s all sorts of Allyship emails and talks from corporate, which are mostly wasted since the majority of the company works remotely and has no time for non-mandatory fluff. That’s why rules in Outlook were created. 😉
It’s basically the executives checking a box for the clients and the college kids so real business doesn’t get disrupted.
Larry your statement here “the BLM organization was a Marxist scam ” is a half truth. It was pretty much always just a way to enrich its founders via a pyramid scam using gullible corporate managers (but I repeat myself) to provide the base of the pyramid and get the money flowing.
Here’s the comment I posted on Medium in response to a post titled “Why Some White People Treat Diversity Like an Evil Villain”:
“I always thought the rationale for diversity was to expose isolated groups to other groups in the hope that they would come to appreciate their different (diverse) perspectives, and we could all learn from each other and live better lives. Yet, the DEI establishment instead insists on recruiting underrepresented racial groups into white-run institutions and then establishing segregated curricula, segregated studies, and segregated social functions. How is this diversity?
You ask why some white people treat diversity like an evil villain. Ask yourself if the goal of DEI programs is to promote diversity and acceptance or actually to overturn the white patriarchal society and replace it with a society run exclusively by the white patriarchy’s victims. Are you in favor of enhancing Christian European culture with the perspectives of other cultures that they have ignored and abused so that they not only tolerate but learn to appreciate them, or do you consider Christian European culture to be an inherently evil thing that needs to be destroyed?
I mean that question seriously. Which goal does DEI really promote? After you answer that, you might have your answer why “some white people treat diversity like an evil villain”.
Thanks for reading.”
Needless to say, I don’t expect to be thanked for my perspective.
What’s interesting is that if you actually dig into historical sources, the more groups of people are exposed to each other in close forced proximity, the more rigid the divisions between them become. The book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shows that in excruciating detail. (Excruciating for people who still want to believe in the whole Conviviencia and “if we just knew each other better, we’d all get along” story.)
Thanks for pointing out this book! I had always considered the Andalusian Paradise to be a myth but had no concrete evidence for it. It just sounded too unbelievable to someone steeped in history.
Still, I’m not sure how it applies to communities that are less inimical to each other to start with. I guess what I’m saying is that if you start from tolerance (as our society was heading very much towards before DEI), then exposure to other’s experience and ideas can be enlightening. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking based on personal experience.
I know that I deeply resent being forced into close proximity with liberals.
Hi. I don’t think the white patriarchy (wtf is their definition of “white” even) has victims. I think there are people indoctrinated to be victims by the Marxists.
Since I was writing to someone and her audience that were obviously biased against my point of view, I thought I’d throw in some terms that match their preferred way of thinking. Also why I added, “Thanks for reading.”
Trying some rhetorical tricks to see if I can find the weak points in closed minds.
Colonizer. Get in the boxcar. The camps await.
[flips safety from “Safe” to “Semi”]
Make me.
Don’t invite them to try. They will. Meanwhile you are talking, not fighting. Remember the wisdom of Tuco:
“When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk.”
I have, on several occasions, baited an opponent into answering a question. It is hard for them to finish a sentence with a mouthful of fist.
Do not -confront- the Einsatzgruppen. -Ambush- them.
t we are trying to build here is not.
“Are you in favor of enhancing Christian European culture with the perspectives of other cultures that they have ignored and abused so that they not only tolerate but learn to appreciate them, or do you consider Christian European culture to be an inherently evil thing that needs to be destroyed?”
Double helping of squid ink. We were sold on the initial premise, that us provincial rubes could do with some broadening exposure to the European classics, and lately the Asian classics. The real reason they started that way was to get the wedges in and start banging away before we discovered that they consider Western civilization to be entirely evil and that they’re trying to destroy it.
You can tell the entire project is BS because now the same weenies are arguing that gender is a social construction. Which everyone who has ever owned a dog or a pony can tell you simply isn’t true. But there they are, still arguing. Squid ink, to disguise their movement.
This is the -real- reason Israel is always the Bad Guy in “international” affairs, they’re White Europeans and therefore must be destroyed. Also those f-ers just plain hate the Jews, so they get a two-fer.
Asian Classics — you mean like Dragon Ball, or High School DxD? 😀
High School DxD will live in fame forever! Or was it infamy? Anyway, a legend!
By the way, upcoming season has Season 2 of Moonlit Fantasy with my favorite dragon and spider girls, Tomoe and Mio. Also, out on Netflix right now, a quite acceptable live-action of Yu Yu Hakusho.
Bubblegum Crisis!
Gender is a social construct, unlike “race” which is inborn and unalterable.
Which is wrong on two counts.
Try not to slip and fall in all that dripping sarcasm….
OT: Evil villain is, I know, for emphasis, but it implies non-evil villains. And THAT is an interesting concept, innit?
Insert C. S. Lewis tyranny quote here.
I prefer “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity”. Makes for a more accurate TLA.
That’s not accurate at all!
“Division, Iniquity, Exclusion” comes much closer.
Both sides of my family arrived here in the early 20th century. We never killed an indigenous aborigine, and we never owned a slave. so my position on reparations is simple. Not a dime. Let VP Harris pay herself [her granddad was, according to what I’ve read a major slaver in Jamaica. Let Barry the Light bringer go f*ck himself. His OLD MAN was a Kenyan, not a descendant of slaves. As for our NY governor, Crusader Rabbit, she can pay Reverend Al, if she wants to. Me? I’ll withhold ANY payment to these grifters.
Or, I have a counter proposal. As a set off, charge for the pre-Civil War naval patrol we undertook with Great Britain to stop slaver ships. Set off the cost of the Civil War from January 1st, 1863 [the date the Emancipation Proclamation took effect] until the LAST Southern surrender in 1865. then there’s the cost of reconstruction, government programs to the present, etc. Adjust for 2023 and later dollars. Then tell me where to pick up my cash.Just sayin’.
> the LAST Southern surrender in 1865
That was Brigadier General Stand Watie, CSA. (also chief of the Cherokee Nation, a Confederate ally)
-a- chief, not -the-.
About half of the Cherokee went Confederate.
And many of the Cherokee owned African slaves. Go figure…
And about twelve-fifteen years ago, the Cherokee expelled the descendants of a number of those slaves from the tribal rolls. The federal courts spluttered, but precedent holds that tribes determine membership requirements, and that’s that.
Yes. The tribes did. Those descendants were welcome when their numbers were a determination on how much money the tribe gets from the federal government (and therefore, us). But the minute a tribe has to dole their money (be it oil reserves, or casino, money), those roles are purged. Also why north American tribes refuse DNA baselines. Which does bring up a point. Not all tribes have expelled these descendants. Guess which ones?
There is binding legal agreement by the surrendered folks to treat all as freedmen. Plus sundry post-surrender laws, not the least of which is the 14th Amendment. Net effect = they -are- members and its enforceable.
Plenty of examples of my distant Red kin weaseling out of agreements, or just outright breaking them when there seemed an advantage. They were no more saints than the newcomers.
Not only did the Cherokee, and other tribes, own slaves, they didn’t have to free their slaves on the conclusion of the civil war. Not only that, the slaves the natives had weren’t just descendants from African tribes. Some were. Some were from other tribes. Some were from European descendants. Enslaving those they raided was business as usual. Wasn’t until later that the tribes had to repatriate any non-tribal members, slaves or not. We hear about the European children, and others, taken and adopted by the tribes and their readjustment problems. We don’t hear about the non-tribal slaves released.
I have some friends who are registered Cherokee, and one of them did once quip “My ancestors would have enslaved your ancestors.” (Recipient of said quip was white.)
Yep.
Not just the Cherokee either. All the tribes did this.
Reparations should be paid for by the Democrat Party that supported slavery and instituted Jim Crow laws in the first place. Especially old Democrat Money, like Harvard or Yale. If they really believe the crap they are peddling take it from all the old Universities first.
Seems to me that by calling it DEI, they reveal their mentality. DEIty. It’s just another False God.
Superb and deeply thought out. I offer only three things today. FIRST- May the blessings of God come to and abide upon you and all here; SECOND- if you are reading this, you are a descendant of slaves. Period. Every race, nation, ethnic group throughout history has had some form of slavery and you and I are no more entitled to someone being robbed to give us free money, than we are to winning a lottery. THREE- I send my special love and prayers to all your little feline babies and hope for the best health and happiness for them.
of course we’re all descendants of slaves. We’re human.
Which is why I’m annoyed when the latest leftie pseudoscience claims that black people are uniquely special because their ancestors were enslaved and the trauma was somehow genetically transmitted down through the generations. If that’s the case for them, it’s the case for everybody. Quit dressing up racism in scientific garb.
Encouraging ethnic narcissism is evil and I’m so sick of them doing it.
We’re also all the children of rape, with foremothers who never even thought of “getting rid,” of their babies and men who accepted the children more or less willingly.
Yep. Of course.
I have Polish ancestry—you know, Slavic. As in the very word “slave.” 😀
“(Note, most. Not all.)”
Actually I find that to be the most important sentence you wrote in this post. Allow people to be individuals and pick what they want to do and, if they do it well appreciate what they do.
My wife was a Chemist and someone who was more comfortable around groups of men than around groups of women. She was no feminist, but still was annoyed by how a whole bunch of exceptionally talented women, like Marie Curie and Sofya Kovalevskaya had been treated shabbily just because they were women. She dealt with the casual sexism in her own field in her own way.
Don’t decide things by the tyranny of the Bell Curve. That’s just plain stupid!
One of the most common errors in thinking is trying to run statistics backwards. The fact that group X has trait A does not mean that every member of group X has trait A (unless, of course, you’re using trait A to define group X, but that isn’t statistics). Even if 99.99% of X has A, there’s still a chance that the one X in front of you is the one that doesn’t.
Statistics destroy information. That’s the entire point, to get rid of some information to bring other information we’re interested in into the forefront.
This may be the most sane thing anybody has ever said about statistics.
…or that owning a gun makes you 40 times more likely to be killed by a member of your family. They had to abuse statistics six different ways to manufacture that pile of bullshit.
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There’s statistically improbable, and then there’s ‘violates the fundamental principles of the universe’ improbable.
But don’t you dare list any detailed crime statistics at all. They are so tired of getting those numbers thrown up in their face, they are openly and blatantly corrupting the data at the origin.
There’s a reason why Twain put statistics as worse than damned lies.
I prefer the formulation “numbers are like people, torture them enough and they’ll tell you what you want to hear.”
Statistics as entropy. The Reader is going to have to spend some time thinking about that idea.
Not so much entropy, but winnowing away the information we don’t want so we can focus on what we do want.
It is entropy. The original information (data) cannot be recovered uniquely from the statistics. Whether it is a useful winnowing… See the (actually not from Mark Twain) comment about Statistics being worse than Damn Lies.
Since a certain part of the discussion has centered on statistics, I’d like to repeat something I’ve said before. Statistics are a useful investigative tool, but they are proof of nothing. Statistics is Semmelweis noting that washing his hands and instruments after surgery led to fewer deaths in his subsequent patients. Science is Pasteur proving how that happens.
Of course, since they are only an investigative tool, one has to use them only to bring up possibilities to investigate further with more rigorous methods.
Dont ask for whom the bell curve tolls, it tolls for thee.
You know, I might be convinced to consider reparations if it would get them to shut up about it. It would be worth it just for the quiet. But we all know that the ink wouldn’t be dry on the bill before folk started bitching about unfairness and making more demands.
You know. Something, something, danegeld.
Geld the dane [uncapitalized on purpose]. End the line of sheer utter stupidity.
One reparations check, then nothing else. No special scholarships to public colleges, no social benefits payments, no hiring set-asides, nada. One and done.
The only way the Reader would accept that notion is with an accompanying renouncing of citizenship and a 1 way ticket anywhere else.
That’ll shut them up for a little while. And they’ll never take you up on it.
True story: I went to school with a girl who was vehemently anti-American. Would go on and on about how evil America is, how much she hates living here, and how as soon as she graduated she was going to move to the Dominican Republic. I should note that a) this girl was born here, b) AFAIK came from a middle-class family, and c) is whiter than me, and I’m pasty enough that when I take my shirts off in public, hobbits start yelling about beacons being lit and Gondor calling or aid.
Anywho, eventually I got so fed up with her that I told her I would personally pay for a one-way ticket for her, first class airfare, on condition that she agreed to a) permanently renounced her citizenship and surrendered her passport, and b) refund the money in full if she ever returned to the U.S. for any length of time (short of a layover at an airport).
She found my offer incredibly insulting. And never went on another rant about how much she hated the U.S. and her plans to move to the DR (at least in my presence). And roundabout 15 years later, AFAIK she and her husband (who’s about as loony as she is) still live here in the horrible ol’ U. S. of Evil.
The U.S.A. – a country so amazingly great her detractors refuse to leave!
They keep promising to leave and then don’t actually leave. It is so disappointing, yet predictable.
A few did leave, but they came back because the places they escaped to were so much worse. 😦
That does not happen.No one and done in federal funding.
Probably ought to start with the “no special scholarships, no set-asides” etc, then come back in 10 years and see if the “one reparations check” is even needed at that point.
You cannot possible be that naive.
What they mean is “Just the tip.”
Short of time travel to prevent the transatlantic slave trade, nothing will ever satisfy them.
Oh, you sweet, summer child.
The money would disappear for the majority of the recipients in less than 3 months. There’s a couple of slang terms for that, but a more PC variation is “Payday Rich”.
I would consider reparations only if the Democrats be required to pay them from their own personal wealth after refunding all the recipients welfare and other benefits that have accumulated since LBJ decided he wanted blacks on the plantation for another hundred years. Plus a bill for the first US Civil War and the Japanese-American property losses during the WWII internment.
There’s close to 50 trillion in untaxed income sitting in offshore accounts, much which belongs to Democrats, RINOs or their ultimate masters.
Untaxed by the USA. There are taxes to the jurisdictions that money is earned in. The idea of not taxing offshore wealth has to do with preventing double taxation.
I’m talking about money that should be taxed if it wasn’t for some semi-illicit slight of hand not available to the general public. If you want the true lump sum of offshore wealth that hasn’t been more than sub-marginally taxed anywhere, you are looking at 90 to 120 trillion.
Not that I’m fond of taxes, it’s I hate to suffer the consequences of those elite that have no skin in game and think the masses are pawns in their games of godhood. A variation of the “You broke it, you pay for it” principle.
Paying 0% to 10% is smart, but it doesn’t endear you to the people paying 20% to 50% whose lives you are wrecking through funding social destruction.
Than again, what is money if the SHTF, other than a number in a computer?
. If you want the true lump sum of offshore wealth that hasn’t been more than sub-marginally taxed anywhere,
… you know, might want to check your assumptions about who is entitled to other folks’ money and at what rate.
Unpacking that might improve your stance.
The assumptions apparently are based on the premise that it is an outrage that people can make money with only minimal taxation of it; as if the money/wealth belong to The State.
Nothing against money earned. I have and still associate with many folks worth 7 to 9 figures that I’ve encountered in business, the gym, church or socially. Most have a decent set of morals/ethics. (The few 10 figure individuals I’ve spent any time with, including Mark Cuban and Hugh McColl, set off my slimy lizard radar…)
The problems I have are when rules that we mere mortals have to follow are bent in favor of corporations and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals. They have an inordinate amount of leverage and influence on legislation, especially tax laws and elections.
Most of the insane groups, (including Congress), and causes we recognize as being destructive to society, aren’t truly grass roots, but are directly or indirectly funded by corporations, UHNWI or their foundations.
It’s easy to see their influence, but harder to place the damage they cause on directly on their doorstep since the funds follow through networks of organizations and very few people follow the money or connections.
Hang out with a very good experienced forensic accountant that’s worked for corporations and UHNWIs for an evening and make sure you have a very strong stomach for some of the revelations if they talk shop. We don’t need books about vampires and boogeymen when there are true scary realities that remain in the dark to almost everyone.
Or you can analyze disparities in property tax rolls, election results, connections between local Antifa/Trans activists, or NGOs and it leads to wealthy funders. Or just check how many conspiracy theories aren’t theories any more…
In summary, income isn’t bad, but massive amounts of money have a gravity that fuels bad behavior. I’d be happy if some of the people that helped cause some of the “troubles” would have to pay to fix it… But then again I like tilting at windmills.
….you do realize that doesn’t justify what you said before, right?
So basically people only get to keep their money and wealth if they don’t set of your “slime” detector. Governments should never, ever, have the power to decide that income or wealth should be taxed based on whether those being taxed conform to the regimes desired ethics/morals, in other words, a social credit score system.
There is plenty of bad behavior by those without money and plenty of good behavior by those with it.
Coveting the money of others is what you are doing. Doesn’t matter if you say “taxes” or “unfair”. You are resentful they avoid your covetousness. Deal with -that-.
My beloved the accountant comments that if all the money in the country was evenly divided, within five years you would have rich and poor once more…mostly the same rich and the same poor.
I think your beloved the accountant is overly optimistic. I think 95% of the poor would be there again withing 6 months to a year. The self control and patience of much of the populace is far less than it used to be because everything is rewarded.
Much of the problem stems from the fact that the Brahmandarins are very poor at determining which is cause and which is effect. They noted that people with their own houses did better than those without. So they made it VERY easy to get housing loans so folks could have have loans and hoped that would make them more middle classish. Instead when the next mild downturn happened the folks with the mortgage had no savings (Being closer kin to the grasshopper than the ant in the fable) and voila we had a fairly major collapse instead of the constant moderate ups and downs.
Similarly they noted that those with college degrees did better on average than those without. So they made it possible for everyone to go to college through loans. So we have colleges wasting money on levels of administrators such that at some schools the number of administrators per undergrad (e.g. Yale) approaches 1-1. And we have lots of grumpy over credentialed baristas with immense loans all backed by the US government because the sane bankers looked at this and said nope nope nope and wanted some kind of surety for the loans.
Friday, by RAH. The Republic Of California granted everybody a college degree on their 21st birthdays, because it was unfair that people with college degrees were more successful than those without.
Most big lottery winners are poor again within a few years. ‘Reparations’ are just a thinly-disguised lottery.
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If the government sells millions of tickets and gives some of the money to a few randomly selected ticket buyers, they call it a State Lottery and say it’s a wunnerful way to raise money. If a few private citizens do the exact same thing, they call it a Numbers Racket and throw them in jail.
Three months.
The trend of “who is which” will start to show in about 3 hours. Most people have habits, not plans. Some habits are functional, and some are not.
Slavery has been universal for 300,000 years. Or more. All of us are descended from slaves, and slave owners. There is no branch, twig or leaf of the human family tree that is free from the legacy of slavery. Any ‘reparations’ are owed BY everybody, TO everybody.
But the Demokrats pretend that slavery only ever existed in one place and time — the southeastern part of America, from the 17th to the 19th century. They blame our Founders for slavery 180 years before they were born. (Hell, they blame us all for slavery 400 years before we were born!)
The Demokrats are the slavery party. They were the Confederacy. They were the KKK. They enacted the Jim Crow laws and enforced segregation. George Wallace was the Demokrat that ordered the Alabama National Guard to keep black children out of ‘white’ schools.
The Demokrats are as full of shit as an outhouse that hasn’t been moved in 50 years.
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There are forms of stupidity that businesses can’t indulge in. There are no such limitations on the stupidity of government.
Before you dive into the male/female physical differences, I’d recommend tracking down a pre-DEI revision of Mil-Std-1472 Human Factors. Rev F or rev G should do. The latest revision removed male/female physical limit distinction.
It’s the US Army’s study of human limits. The 5% male is as strong, or stronger than the 95% female in nearly every single lift. The ratio between a 5% and a 95% ranges from 1.5x to 2x. That’s actually common between both the male and the female ranges. Which also means in some lifts a 95% male can be 3-4x stronger than a 5% female.
It is also striking just howuch merging the male and female limits have lowered the overall limits. I expect that will have real consequences in unit casualties next major conflict we enter.
And the amazing (and pretty) Lise Meitner was shoved into the basement of the KWI so that male scientists wouldn’t be offended.
IN VICTORIAN TIMES? DUDE!
See, this is the left all over. They’re living somewhere in the late nineteenth century and TRYING to progress to the 1930s.
It’s stupid all the way down.
The period of the 1930s to 1945 is their ideal moment in time as shown by all the leftists supporting Hamas and its genocidal ambitions.
Also, that’s a unique take. Did I say women can’t or don’t want to be scientists? No. I said most women want to do people-oriented things. So?
Are you simple?
Rather, that women with the scientific and/or technical ability to excell in male-dominated arenas faced discrimination
In Victorian times. Yep. They sure did. That was almost almost 150 years ago.
Nowadays women get PUSHED into male fields, even if they’d rather do anything else.
NOTE I didn’t say we should discriminate against anyone. JUST that reverse discrimination is still discrimination.
You’re dismissed for lack of reading comprehension, knowledge of history, and lack of owning a calendar.
That one reads like Clamps. It seems Little Andrew got hold of Mom’s laptop again.
However it is worth pointing out that, as you say, this is all they’ve got. This is their go-to blather whenever somebody is getting close to a Forbidden Topic.
Which is why I’m having so much fun writing all the forbidden topics into my latest WIP. I want to see all the squids squirt ink at once.
An anecdotal observation of my wife over the last 15 years is that she would have kicked the hell out of me and most of the males in my chosen professions of electronics, computers, system administration, data analysis or programming.
But she’s not into that, even with all the opportunities she has been offered over the years. And I know many women like her, but only a few have gone down that path to their full potential.
I switched majors from engineering when I figured out I was hating it. At the time, I was pulling just below a B average, which is considered pretty good for that field.
My dad had mentioned that I didn’t seem to be enjoying myself, because if I had been, I would have been getting As.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you want to. (On the other hand, my eldest taught himself pre-calculus this summer, so engineering will probably be FUN for him.)
She became a department head at KWI. She worked in the basement because that’s where her collaboration partner had his workshop. Was HE discriminated against, too?
You could certainly argue that she should have shared in the Nobel Prize he eventually won, sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert that she wasn’t nominated because she, a Jewish scientist, had fled Germany in 1938, and her partner won in 1944. There might have been a little something more going on there than her simply being female.
… I am all for being generous, but this is the nicest looking picture I could find:
The lady wasn’t ugly, but she was NOT pretty, and if she still lived would be almost a hundred and fifty.
On top of that, by this point? I’m rather less than confident in the characterization of the motivation for ANYTHING that folks did a century or so back– too many cases where folks got caught making up bad motives when the evidence we have is good motives to flat out flattering.
What the hey?
I wonder, though, was it more that she was “just the mathematician” or that she was a she. Crook & Watson & ????. But Caroline Hershel wasn’t forgotten, nor Ada Lovelace. And the Curie-ous case of Pierre Curie…
I suspect that a truly deep investigation into history will reveal MANY people ‘ignored’ or ‘forgotten’… of all sorts.
(I’ve been dismissed, but…) the initial reply was fairly innocuous and an attempt to remind us that societal pressures have prevented worthy people from getting recognition. These societal (and historic) pressures can never, ever be resolved by legislation. The message in SAH’s post was DIE. DIE is a LIE. Its a legislated solution in search of a problem. Change (if any is needed) requires a slow shift over many generations.
First, was it societal pressures against women, or against Jews in Nazi Germany
My message was NOT DIE. What exactly is wrong with your reading comprehension? It was that DIE is bullshit.
Things change over generations, but not always — or even primarily — the way the glitteraty think they should change. They were all in on eugenics, for instance.
Yeah, in a post-industrial society the difference in strength between male and female matters more. that doens’t mean we have NO differences.
I think you mean in a post-industrial society the strength difference matters less. Unless by ‘post-industrial’ you mean after the communists have destroyed all the industry and we’re back to brute muscle power, supplemented by some giant pinwheels that work part of the time.
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The government can mandate stupidity, but they can’t make it not be stupid.
Yes. that’s what I meant. Sorry. I’m being distracted by things going on — mostly kittens. You are correct.
They still are all in on eugenics. They just obfuscate more.
Crick, Watson, and Sr. Miriam Michael Stimson O.P., who is even more obscured than Maurice Wilkins or Rosalind Franklin.
My father’s ancestry can be traced back to the Mayflower, and they were all of them staunch abolitionists and civil rights supporters. My Mom’s great-grandparents came over from Switzerland and Italy in the 1880s or 1890s, 20-30 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified.
If anything, I should be getting reparations because one great-grandmother (on my dad’s side) was Irish, and as we all know “Irish” is a word in most European languages for “subhuman filth that is to be sh*t on at every possible opportunity.” And Italians weren’t exactly welcome here in the States back then either.
But we know that won’t happen, because it’s not about reparations or justice: it’s just another tool for/excuse to tear down Western Civilization and establish a pseudo-Marxist feudalistic system in its place.
Dammit, “feudal” system. No idea where that “-istic” came from.
You’re probably related to husband, somehow.
Seriously, if we’re talking about ‘oppressed peoples’, my maternal line is Mayflower/Revolution stock from Appalachia, with a little Native for flavoring – my third-great grandmother escaped the Trail of Tears by being pale enough to pass for white. My father’s people were Cornish miners and British peasants, with some Scots-Irish lines, who came across the Plain as pioneers. I’m a mongrel whose ancestors escaped oppression of all kinds – religious, racial, etc.
But that doesn’t mean I’m owed anything; it just means I’m part of the human family, and that my ancestors valued freedom enough to make their way across oceans to get it.
I also have Mayflower ancestry. I wonder how many of us are related?
While knew not all the Applegates came west, just found out that there is another (there are at least 2, if not 3, in Oregon – Jesse and Charles, both in Yoncolla area, and Lindsey’s family, I think has one near the Modoc reservation, SE Oregon) historical cemetery on the NE coast that dates back to 1645 (ish).
Point. Waves. “Hi.” from another cousin, very distant cousin.
Johnny-come-latelies. (First settlers of New France, here.)
But all of us are related. Probably have common slave ancestors, too.
Try being half-Irish and half-Slavic. Plus being worked in the cotton fields as a youth…
😛
😉
Polish and Catholic, here. 😀
To quote Ron White the comedian:
I’ve gotten better at keeping my mouth shut. Just ask myself “Do I really care?” More and more recently the answer is “No.” Thus I keep my mouth shut. Still think whatever. But don’t say anything and just wander away.
“But we don’t know what you think!” <– This is bad? Why? Do they care? Nope. Why bother?
“Just ask myself “Do I really care?” More and more recently the answer is “No.””
Yes, by God, me too. So often now I’m “Whatever dude,” and wander off. I sometimes feel kinda bad about it, leaving the Stupid to their fate like that, but it isn’t like they thank me when I straighten them out.
The problem is when that attitude of “let the Ferrari hit the wall; maybe the survivors will be educable” bleeds over into every possible part of your life.
It doesn’t make me happy. Seriously, no. And yes, it does end up getting you everyplace you go.
But after 50 years of being told to shut the f- up and then watching the g@ddam Ferrari hit the wall, really, I’m picking my battles. Lately I only bother if I like the driver.
100% All of it.
Reminds me of the CEO in Silly Valley who made it big, bought a Ferrari and had his first and final drive with it the same day.
If I had to feel sorry for anybody, it was who had to clean up the messes. IIRC, the company didn’t survive either.
McLarens also seem to be good at cleaning out the driver pool. As we say in aviation, “A fool and his money are soon flying more airplane than he can handle.”
We seem to have a bunch of trust-fundees in the area that love racing their McLarens in traffic.
I’m like “Please don’t kill anyone else but yourself, you selfish bass-turds.”
Is that the Diamond corporate slogan?
Same here.
THIS.
Yeah. I don’t have the energy to fight them when they don’t care what I think.
How about the Brits getting some form of thank-you payment for the Royal Navy’s long, long campaign to wipe out the Atlantic slave trade, joined eventually by the US Navy? In the era when yellow fever and the other tropical diseases had neither prevention nor treatment, they paid in lives to blockade west Africa and interdict slavers, the Brits continuing for over 50 years.
Oh, wait, they were European colonialist oppressors. Nevermind.
Nope, they don’t deserve a farthing. Not after the way they chose to end slavery.
See, the British government borrowed 20 million pounds to buy the slaves from the rich slave owners, and then decreed that the Commons would have to pay off the debt. Which they just finished doing a few years ago.
At least Lincoln wasn’t that stupid. “The Southern slaves are free. What’s that? You paid a lot of money for them? Tough shit.”
Oh. Heck. What about the most of the US who apposed slavery? The ones, both north and south, who spilled their blood to end it? The families that sent husbands, sons, and brothers? Whether the civil war was about slavery or not, in the beginning, it was by the end.
None of my ancestors owned slaves. They fought in their respective legislatures to keep their states slavery free. Didn’t successfully fully succeed in negative outcomes for the former slaves (inability to own land, for one) and non whites (including natives). But they fought the fight. Paid consequences too.
To quote FM:
NO. They stole PEOPLE (committing slavery!) which was one cause of the (western) War of 1812.
Aside: Given certain words in the title, did anyone else read Sarah’s first words here “When I was young…” and get Paul McCartney in their heads signing “…and my heart was an open book…”?
Or even singing…
I know I did. I know I did. I know I diii–iiid.
Okay, I didn’t, but I couldn’t resist the punch line.
After the last month or so, people are trying so hard to get McCartney well and truly OUT of their heads! “Simply RUINING every Christmastime….”
I love Spotify. In my private soundscape there hasn’t been a -single- Christmas song since the day after Halloween.
Partner in Crime and I were driven forth from a sporting goods store 2 weeks ago by the unrelenting “Holiday Cheer” selection. If I never hear Harry Belafonte and the Tumbling Strings doing Rudolph the Red Deered Nose Rein again, it’ll be too soon.
The 1940’s radio channel (NOT unSerious/exM) I oft listen to had some Christmas tunes… BUT.. they were the 1940’s version and not bad covers with someone’s “spin” on things. I could deal with that. AND, the channel had the sense to NOT go 100% on Christmas music (maybe they did for 34ht/35th, but for various reasons I wasn’t listening then).
The unrelenting fakeness of it all is intolerable these days, for me anyway. Crappy 1980s re-dos of 1940s movie music. I can’t even.
Partner In Crime said “Get me the f- out of here, holy expletive deleted they’re killing me.” Usually I’m the one, but not that time. I think Harry Belafonte tipped her over the edge. ~:D
I can tolerate most Christmas music, but I dislike the secular to sacred ratio. Not nearly enough carols.
But if you want the chance to be driven batguano crazy, do a Christmas parade as Santa and Mrs. clause and sit behind a speaker playing, “Run, Run,Rudolf,” and, “Here Comes Santa Claus,” over and over and over again.
I’ll stick to the real classic Christmas music:
For a great performance, check this out:
I did notice the Muzak this year seemed to have more religious (though only instrumental) Christmas music. Still far more secular than that. But I think they either dropped ‘Last Christmas’ from the playlist or well and truly minimized its ‘airtime’… or else I’ve built up an immunity to where I don’t even hear/notice it. And I usually quip, “That’s what you get when you give it to a transplant surgeon, ghost.”
There can be advantages to being slightly deaf (right ear is so-so, left is horrible. OTOH, without the two prosthetic stapes, it would have been close to total by now.) The Christmas music in the stores didn’t bother me that much. The car audio is usually running my own MP3 selection. Had “Christmas from Motown” on the woodshop system, and some tunes were mightily improved with help from the table saw.
OTOH, I played relevant songs from a “Smoky Mountain Hymns” album on Christmas eve, and the arrangements they did with hammer dulcimer and such really worked. And no Brooooce Springsteen doing Santa Claus tunes.
I will say though that hearing Run Rudolph Run sung by Lemmy is real neat (It was Lemmy, Dave Grohl and a couple of others).
…I didn’t need an earworm companion.
Some of those dang earworm things come from Ceti Alpha Five.
Over half of my family is of Eastern European origin. The people generally referred to as Slavs or Slavic.
Anyone want to guess the root of that word?
Where do I pick up my check?
It’s not the root of “Slavs” that you want.
It’s the root of “slaves”.
We’ll put you in line behind us Irish-Slavs and in front of the Irish. 😀
On a loosely related note…
One of the local news channels mentioned Kwaanza today. The newscasters listed the “principles” behind Kwanzaa. There were several, and a couple of them were pretty blatantly communist. “Community income” sorts of things, though I can’t remember the exact phrasing.
On the positive side, they also mentioned that Kwaanza isn’t actually African, but was invented by an activist.
Marxism, Gramscian or otherwise was the normalization of envy.
Lust and gluttony are fun (while they last). Pride and wrath have a kind of horrible glory. But envy? The only more painful, pitiable, cringe-worthy to observe and experience vice is cowardice.
DIE tries to turn it into a virtue
It’s sick and wrong.
Yep.
Envy is the color of mistletoe for good reason.
Your last paragraph is a classic.
That’s last FULL paragraph.
Divisiveness, envy and exclusion, the Marxist M.O.; divide and conquer. The issue is never the issue, the issue is the revolution. Tear everything down, wreck it all, then build Socialism from the rubble. “Build back better!”
No thanks.
I’m descended from Eastern European Jews. There are MANY people in my family tree who were killed in the Holocaust. Where are my reparations?
Talk to George Soros. He observed that was the most awesome time of his life in an interview.
Michigan threw out an attempt to remove Trump from the ballot.
Not as big a win as it may sound like. The ruling only applied to the primary on the basis that nominees by political parties for primaries can’t be disqualified by the Secretary of State. That doesn’t mean that they won’t decide differently for the general election.
Had an interesting thought today in reference to the recent swatting’s going on around the holidays. Who better to do it than the people who are supposed to investigate it. In other words it’s more corruption from the FBI, yes the fibbies are doing it. Makes sense if you think about it. The FBI are that type of cowardly chickenshit whores, but I repeat myself and insult whores’ and chickenshits’ in the process, sorry.
There’s a flaw in your logic– the FBI doesn’t do SWATing investigation. At most, local/state law enforcement can call on them for specific assistance.
Cyber crimes division does when it can be shown to cross state lines.
That is an example of offering specific assistance at the request of the investigating body, yes.
HOWEVER hear me out: none of us knows what living as the other sex truly is.
I going to go a bit harder into the paint on this one. I don’t think any of us knows what living as our sex truly is.
We understanding living as us and, yes, that will have a lot of commonalities with others of the same sex. Some of it might even be true of a majority of the $SEX experience, but not even close to all of it.
What female friend understands the female experience of pregnancy: my friend who started kids at 35 and had such ease getting pregnant she said she couldn’t risk sex within 48 hours of thinking about wanting to be pregnant unless she was sure she wanted to be or my friend whose trials and tribulations with fertility treatments lead to a book about it called I Hear Some People Just Have Sex?
What male acquaintance understands the male hormone experience better: the guy I went to boot with who became a Seal (which is mostly about mental toughness but requires a certain baseline of male testosterone fitness) or the guy who ran miniatures events who had gynecomastia to the point he needed to wear a bra that was easily a C cup (might have been a D…I didn’t use field measuring tools).
Yes, men have enough commonalities that we should encourage men’s only spaces as much as we do female ones (for social health and safety of both men and women) but there are plenty of other things that can draw individual men and women closer than they are to their sex group and I’m not just talking married couples or siblings: cancer, being widowed, death of a child, rape victim, etc.
No, I’m not claiming trans$SEX know just as much about being $SEX as other people of that $SEX. I know more about being male than any transman, but the difference is a lot smaller than we want to admit (and that acknowledgement is probably harder today than six years ago).
I hate the ‘neuro typical’ and ‘neuro atypical’ slang
I hate them because they’re trying to take my personal issues, which aren’t their thing to worry about, and making it another “victim” identity to claim they represent.
The number of things in my life made worse (and fun things make unfun) by progtards needing to make everything an identity is growing exponentially.
And then they turn around and tell us we’re being wrong wrong.
If they can fit everyone into victim classes they can more easily manipulate and victimize those classes for their own ends.
“HOWEVER hear me out: none of us knows what living as the other sex truly is.”
This is something I have thought about for a very long time. I happen to be someone who wants to live as a woman — but I don’t want the pseudo “we’ll kindof make you a woman, but not really” surgery that’s offered today: I want to be born a girl, raised as a girl, go through adolescence as a girl, and become a woman who gets married, gets pregnant, has children, and raises them as a mother and a grandmother.
The surgical offerings available today are a mere mockery of my desires.
I have imagined, however, being offered at the end of my life, the opportunity to be born again, this time as a girl, even in my original family! And that girl happened to be my oldest sister, who never married, and died a couple of years ago from cancer … or maybe my youngest sister, who missed out on high school due to undiagnosed gallbladder problems, and had a psychotic episode shortly after getting her gallbladder removed. I also have a sister who is married, has children … and apparently has anxiety problems that need to be treated by medication … oh, heck, now that I think about it, I probably have anxiety problems, too, I just live with it?
But what does it mean to be a man? My brother was diagnosed a few years ago as autistic, and is now on disability because it’s severe enough he can’t really look for work. If I don’t have that experience for myself, am I any less (or more) of a man than anyone else?
And this is why I have concluded that the entire idea of “transgenderism” is hogwash: there have been approximately 50 billion women on this planet, and no one man can do anything but imagine what it may be like to be one; similarly, no one woman can really know what it’s like to be a man.
Overall there’s only one thing I can be sure about: I know what it’s like to be me. Even then, it’s still an open question: do I really know what it’s like to be me? Maybe, sortof, but even I can’t remember everything in my life! (Including what it’s like to be raised from a baby through toddlerhood to become a young boy.)
You’d have to emigrate to Beta Colony…