One of the blessings of living in the year of our Lord 2018 is that the Left is letting masks drop. All the masks. And some of the masks they are dropping are things they’ve told us for years didn’t exist. Things they denied for decades that they did are now being brought forth as the greatest, highest good possible and flaunted about as a kind of precious jewel that makes them important.
This is good, not only because it reveals their past lies and their more or less secret modus operandi, but also the hollowness of their delusions.
Take “diversity.” For years those of us in publishing would observe (and sometimes say, in safe environments) that it was easier to break into writing if you were female, of an interesting color or had an interesting characteristic, of the sort the Left views as “diverse.” I.e. you were raised in another culture, you were not straight, you had anti-western political opinions.
This was strenuously denied by the establishment, who kept telling us that those people had a much, much harder time getting in (weirdly they’re still saying those people had a harder time getting in.) But it was nonsense. Those of us who weren’t enormous racists, sexists or homophobes knew the only reasons such people’s books were usually not quite… as mature as those of other people had to be that they were picked earlier in the process and often promoted well above the place they were at.
Of course, the establishment of publishing like most places dominated by the Left, are hotbeds of racism, sexism, and homophobia, though it’s disguised under the “soft discrimination of low expectations.” So they didn’t know what they were doing was obvious to all of us. Because they didn’t expect “those people” to be as good as white males.
Oh, and the interesting thing about this drive for “diversity” is that it was purely diversity of superficial characteristics. If you refused to be “authentic” that is, if you refused to write about victimhood and your unique culture’s victimhood, you were functionally a white male and didn’t count towards diversity. Which again shows the enormously racist/sexist/homophobic nature of the publishers’ culture, since they thought that those superficial characteristics should dictate how you think and feel.
Well, we should rejoice, because this craziness is out, and is displayed in its full contradictory glory.
“Trigglypuff”
Penguin Random House (or as authors who have worked for both of those clusters before they merged call it Random Penguin, or alternately Randy Penguin) got out front and proud with a new “diversity policy” which is the old diversity policy, but now with hobnail boots on and naked for all to see (it looks much like Trigglypuff.) What is it? Well… According to an internal policy email they want both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’
This would, of course, be excellent if they meant in opinions, ideas and interests, because then, well, they’d be a business aiming for the greatest number of clients, right?
Of course, that’s not what they mean, not even a little bit. This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility, and disability.
While the rest of us are nodding sagely and going “We told you they wanted a one-eyed one-horned flying purple writer, and never mind the actual writing.”
If it were just writers, though…
If it were just in the halls of my people, the ink-stained wretches who make up the stories that people read, it would be irrelevant. Look, guys, I’m not discounting our role in humanity. I wouldn’t. I was shaped by dreamers who dreamed in prose, and many of you were too. And those who weren’t were often shaped second hand through dreams and even songs of men long dead. We are important. But there is Indie. And all the publishing establishment is doing at this point is drinking the ink of its own crazy and poisoning itself. Its passing will not be mourned.
No.
Unfortunately, the diversity plague is attacking every single institution, every pillar of civilization.
We know about the crazy at Google and about how the cult of diversity there means diversity of everything but thought.
And there is more. They are now trying to invade science, the very thing that makes us prosperous enough for them to engage in this sort of idiotic diverse reindeer games.
An editorial in Science talked about the urgent need for “diversity.” Under the title Science benefits from diversity, they come up with the craziest meaning for that possible: Improving the participation of under-represented groups is not just fairer — it could produce better research.
Look, to understand what they mean, you have to understand they, like the publishers, are enormous racists, the sort of people who think Hitler was essentially right about races: that is, your racial makeup (or sexual, or orientation) determines everything about you. Why? Because they are taking “under-represented groups” to mean race sex and orientation. And the only way those would produce better research is if each of those groups, by virtue of their external characteristics, think so differently that it’s like getting a double-check on your thought process.
This is a bizarre thought for anyone who has an actual diverse group of friends, and who finds that often they all sit around discussing what type of vending machines nuclear missiles should be sold in, regardless of the speaker’s sex, orientation or skin color. (And okay, maybe that’s just my friends.)
This invasion of science, of scientific thought, of actual technical work by the ideas of faux-diversity (a million shades of tan, but the same indoctrination in every cranium) is actually civilizational suicide and madness.
Not only is there no inherent virtue in having a group composed of many, many different skin colors, sexes and orientations, it’s meaningless when the same companies and institutions enforce and police anti-scientific Marxism.
Science is the study of reality and reality is that what bites you in the *ss when you try to ignore you. We allow that to be corrupted at its own risk.
Worse, other than that vague “different points of view” which clearly aren’t allowed in modern – Left controlled – institutions, as the Damore suit shows, they still haven’t explained to us what diversity is supposed to do, or why we’re so obsessed with it.
Sure, hiring with a blind eye to race, sex or orientation is the right thing to do. It means that we’re hiring the best people possible, period. This is vital in science, in industry, in tech, in the military, but it’s also not a bad idea if “all” you want to do is sell books.
But hiring with a blind eye is not the same as looking for “diversity.”
Hiring with a blind eye might produce hard science environments biased towards males, and social work environments biased towards females. Germans might prefer chemistry and Englishmen biology. Translation might be dominated by those of Portuguese or Polish descent (it was in my day.)
And?
Yeah, okay “discouragement in childhood” and other theses can be adduced. They can even be tried out.
But provided no talented person is being excluded from a profession they are obviously suited for because of color, religion, sex or orientation (and yeah, equality before the law solves that) why do we care? Why do we as a society want to make sure there are the correct percentages of every possible group in every possible endeavor?
Humans are not widgets. They are not colored marbles that should be distributed correctly. There is no virtue in forcing women into hard sciences and boys into nursing. There is no virtue in having a stable of writers that mimics population percentages.
Sometimes I wonder if the Left has some dysfunction that makes them unable to understand the very concept of individuals. Why should individuals be forced to want things they don’t want and do things they don’t want to do just to fit some “percentage” in an accountants’ head.
The richness and the glory of humanity is that we’re not all the same and that there is room for the most unlikely life paths, as well as for the most likely ones.
We need to get the bureaucrats, the bean counters and the crazy leftists (but I repeat myself) to step back from the diversity madness.
There is no compelling reason to force diversity of anything. And if we continue, it will kill us and our civilization, and shove us back to barely-surviving tribalism and misery.
The Left has revealed the crazy face behind the mask. And it’s time for us to fight it.
A single question will suffice: “Why?”
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