Yes, I’m still exercised about “diversity” and the demands for “diversity” (of external characteristics, never, ever of thought) in everything from science to advertising.
I’m obsessing about it because this is bad crazy, the sort of crazy that can destroy civilization and all we’ve built up.
To the extent “diversity” is important, it’s a diversity of ideas and points of view, not of incidentals like orientation, or color, or sex. Do those influence opinion? Less than you think when the subject is science or economics or other indisputable facts.
Talents, or even the desire or the ability to do a job aren’t evenly distributed, you see. No one gets the “standard packet” of talents at birth. And there are things even the best of us can’t do.
I’m not the best of us, but I do have a modicum of talent with language and with telling stories, both the real ones and the imaginary ones. However, if you tried to make me fulfill even a more or less average job that demanded coordination or fine motor control, you’d probably think I was impaired.
Truth is I am impaired, part of it being the result of having been born very prematurely. The other part is probably hereditary. But whatever the reason I was once the despair of gym teachers who thought I should be in basketball (for my generation in Portugal I’m freakishly tall) but couldn’t teach me to dribble a ball. And they tried. Oh, boy, they tried.
The diversity crowd assumes that all humans are widgets with precisely the same interests, abilities and desires, and so if your company/department/organization doesn’t have precisely the same proportions as the population at large, this is prima facie evidence of discrimination.
This is crazy. Bad crazy. And the implementation of it will put people in jobs they can’t do, even if they try really hard, or worse, put people in jobs they can sort of do but not do well enough to keep civilization going.
I don’t know what the margin is on civilization or Western civilization at least. I don’t know what tolerance we have for jobs “done really badly” before the wheels come off.
We’ve seen in my field (and others) that the SJWs take over and destroy the organization. What was a thriving business becomes a hollow shell; products that used to sell stop selling; systems that used to work stop working.
But the fields I know intimately are almost by definition subjective. I can tell you that someone is a bad novelist. I can’t tell you that he is objectively a bad novelist. (One of the funniest things was when an SJW said something like, “I’ve never read them, but I know that Sarah Hoyt and John Ringo are objectively bad writers. Run-on sentences and comma splices all over the place.” This showed the person confused good writing with good grammar. For fiction writing, this is not even close. Good writing is that which takes you along for a ride and makes you live things you didn’t experience. Grammar? That’s the job of the copyeditors, and irrelevant in most cases.) I can tell you about the technical errors made, but those can and often are overcome by a strong narrative voice. I can tell you I don’t like their books, but that’s about it.
Now when a lot of people don’t like the books and the books still get published because of diversity, that’s a stupid decision on the publisher’s part, but it doesn’t prove they’re bad books.
On the other hand, now that diversity is going where no diversity has gone before — into science and research and the disciplines that bring us health and plenty — what is the margin of tolerance? How bad can the majority of workers – hired for reasons other than competence – be before the wheels come off and we have famine or plague or worse?
I don’t know. I’m going to say, though, from the small percentage of people who both wish to do and are able to do technical work, that there isn’t much margin. Check me if you don’t believe me. The U.S. is graduating a ridiculously small number of engineers every year, and at least half of those are foreign-born.
So what happens when even those are replaced with people of little ability/learning but interesting ways of tanning? How fast do necessary things like energy production or bridge construction or medical care go to hell in a handbasket?
Would it not be a ridiculous thing to destroy civilization, not in a nuclear fire, not in a blaze of glory, but in a flaming pyre of crazy — a conflagration of delusion and virtue signaling?
The worst part of it? The absolutely most insane part of this whole mess – and as a mess it’s crazy enough that it’s running around making chicken noises and wearing its underwear on its head – is that the great advocates of “diversity” have a completely erroneous and insane view of what the world they live in actually is like.
Take this woman, yes, another member of my profession – it’s enough some days to make me consider digging ditches for a living – running her mouth on Facebook.
Ignore her attempts at amateur psychology there at the end. Trust me, they don’t hurt you as much as they hurt me. It’s actually impossible to persuade these luminaries of my field that adults aren’t toddlers, looking to see an image of themselves or their own names in a book. If I tell them that as a kid I fell in love with the writings of Heinlein, Asimov, Simak, and that it didn’t matter the least to me that they didn’t write little Portuguese girls, they’ll say I’m self-hating. I just think I’m an adult who can identify with things like adventure, discovery, and ambition, instead of with race, sex and other neo-Marxist group determinants. Oh, and I was an adult in comparison to that at eight.
Instead, let’s examine why she’s so stridently advocating “diversity.”
“The world is about 25% white.” Uh… depends on what you consider white, deary. My family might consider themselves “Latin” now. I’ve – sigh – seen it going that way for the last few years, which shows you the power of U.S. crazy. But Latin is a language and culture group, not a color. Most Portuguese consider themselves white. So do most Spaniards. So do most people in South and Central America. They’re only considered “Latin” here as the marker of a culture that our State Department wants to track within the country for whatever bureaucratic markers of their own.
Outside of Africa and China and other obviously ethnic places where the race is obviously and clearly not white, most people consider themselves “white” as a default status. (Even when they obviously aren’t. I could show you family pictures.)
But leaving that aside, what does it matter what the world is or isn’t?
She seems to assume that her books (pfui) will sell all over the world to people of all languages. For the purpose of the U.S., the purpose of writers and publishers, the majority is still – thank you so much – white if that matters to anyone.
Worse, when she starts talking about sexuality, it becomes obvious that she has no contact with reality whatsoever. Note where she says that many of the 50% of males are gay or bi. Uh, if by many you mean 3% gay and maybe 5% bi, yeah, that’s “many.” Which leaves, you know, the vast majority of men who aren’t either of those things.
I am not, by the way, advocating having a cast of characters that are all male, all straight and all white. In fact, unless you’re dealing with some kind of restricted circumstances, like say the historical military (and even then your supporting characters at home are likely to be girlfriends or wives), I don’t know of anyone who has written a male-cast-only book. There are, I’m sure, some just as there is Women by Pearl S. Buck which pulls the opposite trick (and others like it, I’m sure. That’s just the one that came to mind).
In general books have males and females, straight or gay, whatever color they need to be to fulfill the narrative purpose. And readers like them or not according to the story and the writing, not the percentages of characters.
But other than the lovely straw man this creature built, her post made me realize what’s at the back of all this “diversity” insanity.
These people, the vast majority of whom are white, and mostly female, and mostly wealthy or at least from comfortable backgrounds, are scared.
It reminds me of the Cold War when the most “convinced” communists were not idealists or even revolutionaries, but cowards. They “knew” the Soviet Union would win and had preemptively donned the uniform of the would-be winners in the hopes they’d be eaten last.
Apparently, the diversity warriors are in the same boat. Having convinced themselves that the world is overwhelmingly “other” and that they are therefore on the losing side, they’ve gone on the attack, hoping to show the new overlords that they’re useful and should be killed last.
And for this we’re going through contortions, discarding the principle of meritocracy, and endangering civilization and prosperity for everyone.
It’s not altruism. It’s not caring for the oppressed (most of whom don’t consider themselves so). It’s not even trying to be fair.
These people are scared.
It is their fear that leads them to run around advocating for destroying the only civilization in which cowards like them could survive.
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