It might be easier for motivated politicians to seriously undermine the woke agenda through policy rather than changing the culture. If you see wokeness as a hugely cultural phenomenon, it might be difficult to defeat especially if people are timid because of targeted harassment campaigns.
Also worth mentioning, what the culture actually is might be hard to determine when you can’t speak your mind at work, which also extends to online under your real name because your work might fire you. Many are even nervous about pseudonyms. If businesses face no legal threat by employing “bigots” then maybe they would stop caving to the online outrage mobs.
We like to view the the US as having free speech but restrictions on speech through regulation and possible legal action against employers is an indirect legal restriction on free speech.
If we can’t get this done away with then I like Caplan’s idea of exceptions for jokes and political speech. Legal protection for conservatives as a class might be a possible approach but I think people might argue “he’s not a conservative, he’s a neo-Nazi/alt-right/etc.” Not really sure how that would work out.
Agreed. I rather wish something regarding this would actually get taken to court, so we could find out what exact regulations or legislations the state would use to punish a company for not being inclusive enough. The reason being that we could then target that set of rules in particular to abolish. I have some guesses, but I think we would need to see exactly what an actual lawyer (as opposed to simply legislative bully hearing) would bring before a court to use to punish a company. Culture is the root problem, but removing the mechanism to enforce cultural preferences on others is probably the easiest first step for politicians.
The first sentence of the Wikipedia page on "Confessional state":
"A confessional state is a state which officially recognises and practices a particular religion, usually accompanied by a public cultus, and at least encourages its citizens to do likewise."
Characteristic of a confessional state is that one must conform to serve in government.
Leftists are trying to impose a confessional state and, in a sense, a return to feudalism.
Having grown up in the 1930s, I enjoyed all the ethnic jokes--even the ones about my own ancestors. They provided humor, a good laugh, and a lesson about people---their short-comings, as well as their endearing characteristics. What bothers me is that I had many favorite jokes--( like the one about the Swede, the Italian, and the Frenchman) and today I dare not tell any of them!!
And, those jokes were totally diverse and inclusive--there was not a single nationality, religion, sex, or race that was not included in my repertoire of jokes. How inclusive is that??
I definitely don’t think that the solution to the problem is any sort of ban on such workshops or insistence that they not be mandatory for employees
---
Civil Rights Law mandates that you not provide a "hostile work environment". A hostile work environment is subjective to the judge. One way to convince the judge you don't have a hostile work environment is to have DEI.
But of course, you need to have more DEI than everyone else, of every more intensity, else how do we know you aren't super secret racists who aren't doing enough to prevent a "hostile work environment".
I think it is highly unlikely that you are going to be able to overturn laws against a hostile work environment. Someone somewhere will dig up some story or statistic or whatever, and then your basically Bull Connor. After all, a generation of diversity training has beat that sentiment into everyones head.
It seems more likely that you could declare that openly hostile struggle sessions and policies demonizing whites or men or whatever create a hostile work environment for them, and punish the companies under existing civil rights law. Once a parity of fear exists, companies will no longer have an incentive to try and avoid hostile work environments allegations by shifting more and more in favor of one group and against another. They will want to wash their hands of it and get back to business.
That's how they do it in Singapore for instance, and they seem to have achieved a pretty workable peace.
Why shouldn't it impact hiring, firing, and promotion (it already does)?
Why shouldn't is effect policy (my company alters its coverage decisions to meet woke objectives, there are equivalents for other industries)?
Famously during the pandemic DEI concerns drastically impacted when you were eligible to get the vaccine. My high risk father has to wait months longer then he should have while others were prioritized higher than him for "equity" reasons.
Others have posted countless other examples.
Why shouldn't it become big enough to effect profitability and functioning (lots of institutions self sabotage into failure modes)?
If increasing 61% YoY is good, and if the relevant comparison is always "more then everyone else is doing", why shouldn't it just compound into infinity? There is no shortage of people that would like six figure DEI make-work jobs.
In general I'm of the opinion that if the internal logic necessitates it, and there is no obvious end point or countervailing force, that a force will continue its momentum until something comes along to stop it. If you can't see what that something is on the horizon, buckle up.
"In this case, the government should just leave companies alone and stop intimidating them in the first place."
Why would it do that? Has the government been punished for the civil rights shakedown? If not, why would it stop?
DEI will end when companies are more afraid of spending too much on DEI than spending too little. That will only happen if people who oppose DEI take control of the government and convince corporations that DEI is bad for them by punishing them (it is, after all, illegal in an objective sense already).
One way to check this hypothesis is to see how many government workers have to sit through DEI. I bet it’s rare, although I don’t know for sure. The reason I suspect it’s rare is that any large government agency has a few senior employees who know they’re not going to get promoted or fired. All you need is one or two of them to mouth off in a DEI session. Human Resources offices are not going to want the headache. Up to this point, governments haven’t been setting budgets based on what agency does DEI. That may change, but my experience is that moral crusades in the government tend to be short-lived and ineffective.
Yeah, *this* is the biggest challenge facing the world right now. Good you are spending your prodigious talents working to alter the worst aspects of our society.
Just a bit of advice: your bio says you are the cofounder of an organization. I checked out the organization and it seems really nice, useful, and important.
Comments like this one that seem unnecessarily antagonistic are less likely to draw others towards your message and work.
Actually understanding others' perspectives on their own terms is not easy, but it opens the door towards productive engagement. Lashing out at others over their perceived motivation or character is more likely to alienate them than to change their minds about the topic at hand, let alone endear you to them personally to open them up to be receptive to your message.
To quote a wise man: "I wanted to “win an argument with a meat eater.” I wanted to ridicule meat eaters. I wasn’t focused on actually changing the world...I wanted to fight with meat eaters – attack and mock them...Now, however, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem – well, to put it kindly, silly."
Really great email.
It might be easier for motivated politicians to seriously undermine the woke agenda through policy rather than changing the culture. If you see wokeness as a hugely cultural phenomenon, it might be difficult to defeat especially if people are timid because of targeted harassment campaigns.
Also worth mentioning, what the culture actually is might be hard to determine when you can’t speak your mind at work, which also extends to online under your real name because your work might fire you. Many are even nervous about pseudonyms. If businesses face no legal threat by employing “bigots” then maybe they would stop caving to the online outrage mobs.
We like to view the the US as having free speech but restrictions on speech through regulation and possible legal action against employers is an indirect legal restriction on free speech.
If we can’t get this done away with then I like Caplan’s idea of exceptions for jokes and political speech. Legal protection for conservatives as a class might be a possible approach but I think people might argue “he’s not a conservative, he’s a neo-Nazi/alt-right/etc.” Not really sure how that would work out.
Agreed. I rather wish something regarding this would actually get taken to court, so we could find out what exact regulations or legislations the state would use to punish a company for not being inclusive enough. The reason being that we could then target that set of rules in particular to abolish. I have some guesses, but I think we would need to see exactly what an actual lawyer (as opposed to simply legislative bully hearing) would bring before a court to use to punish a company. Culture is the root problem, but removing the mechanism to enforce cultural preferences on others is probably the easiest first step for politicians.
Gail L. Heriot makes a strong case that 1991 civil rights act fuel much of it:
Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal
14 N.Y.U. J. L. & Liberty 1 (2020)
170 Pages Posted: 8 Nov 2019 Last revised: 7 Oct 2022
Gail L. Heriot
American Civil Rights Project; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; Manhattan Institute
Date Written: 2019
The first sentence of the Wikipedia page on "Confessional state":
"A confessional state is a state which officially recognises and practices a particular religion, usually accompanied by a public cultus, and at least encourages its citizens to do likewise."
Characteristic of a confessional state is that one must conform to serve in government.
Leftists are trying to impose a confessional state and, in a sense, a return to feudalism.
Here is the link for the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessional_state
Gail Heriot makes the case that much of it was caused by the 1991 civil rights act.
<a href=https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3482015>Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal</a>
14 N.Y.U. J. L. & Liberty 1 (2020)
170 Pages Posted: 8 Nov 2019 Last revised: 7 Oct 2022
Gail L. Heriot
American Civil Rights Project; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; Manhattan Institute
Date Written: 2019
Having grown up in the 1930s, I enjoyed all the ethnic jokes--even the ones about my own ancestors. They provided humor, a good laugh, and a lesson about people---their short-comings, as well as their endearing characteristics. What bothers me is that I had many favorite jokes--( like the one about the Swede, the Italian, and the Frenchman) and today I dare not tell any of them!!
And, those jokes were totally diverse and inclusive--there was not a single nationality, religion, sex, or race that was not included in my repertoire of jokes. How inclusive is that??
---
I definitely don’t think that the solution to the problem is any sort of ban on such workshops or insistence that they not be mandatory for employees
---
Civil Rights Law mandates that you not provide a "hostile work environment". A hostile work environment is subjective to the judge. One way to convince the judge you don't have a hostile work environment is to have DEI.
But of course, you need to have more DEI than everyone else, of every more intensity, else how do we know you aren't super secret racists who aren't doing enough to prevent a "hostile work environment".
I think it is highly unlikely that you are going to be able to overturn laws against a hostile work environment. Someone somewhere will dig up some story or statistic or whatever, and then your basically Bull Connor. After all, a generation of diversity training has beat that sentiment into everyones head.
It seems more likely that you could declare that openly hostile struggle sessions and policies demonizing whites or men or whatever create a hostile work environment for them, and punish the companies under existing civil rights law. Once a parity of fear exists, companies will no longer have an incentive to try and avoid hostile work environments allegations by shifting more and more in favor of one group and against another. They will want to wash their hands of it and get back to business.
That's how they do it in Singapore for instance, and they seem to have achieved a pretty workable peace.
Is there any logical endpoint for DEI?
Why should it stop with struggle sessions?
Why shouldn't it impact hiring, firing, and promotion (it already does)?
Why shouldn't is effect policy (my company alters its coverage decisions to meet woke objectives, there are equivalents for other industries)?
Famously during the pandemic DEI concerns drastically impacted when you were eligible to get the vaccine. My high risk father has to wait months longer then he should have while others were prioritized higher than him for "equity" reasons.
Others have posted countless other examples.
Why shouldn't it become big enough to effect profitability and functioning (lots of institutions self sabotage into failure modes)?
If increasing 61% YoY is good, and if the relevant comparison is always "more then everyone else is doing", why shouldn't it just compound into infinity? There is no shortage of people that would like six figure DEI make-work jobs.
In general I'm of the opinion that if the internal logic necessitates it, and there is no obvious end point or countervailing force, that a force will continue its momentum until something comes along to stop it. If you can't see what that something is on the horizon, buckle up.
"In this case, the government should just leave companies alone and stop intimidating them in the first place."
Why would it do that? Has the government been punished for the civil rights shakedown? If not, why would it stop?
DEI will end when companies are more afraid of spending too much on DEI than spending too little. That will only happen if people who oppose DEI take control of the government and convince corporations that DEI is bad for them by punishing them (it is, after all, illegal in an objective sense already).
One way to check this hypothesis is to see how many government workers have to sit through DEI. I bet it’s rare, although I don’t know for sure. The reason I suspect it’s rare is that any large government agency has a few senior employees who know they’re not going to get promoted or fired. All you need is one or two of them to mouth off in a DEI session. Human Resources offices are not going to want the headache. Up to this point, governments haven’t been setting budgets based on what agency does DEI. That may change, but my experience is that moral crusades in the government tend to be short-lived and ineffective.
Yeah, *this* is the biggest challenge facing the world right now. Good you are spending your prodigious talents working to alter the worst aspects of our society.
:-P
If this post is unimportant, your comment is an even worse waste of time.
Just a bit of advice: your bio says you are the cofounder of an organization. I checked out the organization and it seems really nice, useful, and important.
Comments like this one that seem unnecessarily antagonistic are less likely to draw others towards your message and work.
The same goes for this comment: https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-function-of-privilege/comment/9961204.
You also don't seem to do a great job passing the ideological Turing test, e.g. here: https://betonit.substack.com/p/aaronson-on-feminism-my-reply/comment/9534668.
And here: https://betonit.substack.com/p/tyler-on-feminism-my-reply/comment/9211819.
Actually understanding others' perspectives on their own terms is not easy, but it opens the door towards productive engagement. Lashing out at others over their perceived motivation or character is more likely to alienate them than to change their minds about the topic at hand, let alone endear you to them personally to open them up to be receptive to your message.
To quote a wise man: "I wanted to “win an argument with a meat eater.” I wanted to ridicule meat eaters. I wasn’t focused on actually changing the world...I wanted to fight with meat eaters – attack and mock them...Now, however, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem – well, to put it kindly, silly."
And that man's name...Matt Ball: https://www.mattball.org/2016/06/can-our-choices-make-difference.html.
Best of luck with your organization!