Microblog Memes

You know what, let's give it a shot. 3 things I dislike.

1. Equity based on gender or skin color. So many people pretend that somehow one average working class person should be put ahead in line compared to another, if the other person has the same skin color as some unrelated asshole slaver whose descendants still profit from their riches.

   Most of you would probably agree that a world where the majority are exploited by a few billionaires is not equitable just because the billionaires are diverse. So why push policies that pretend all is equitable as long as you give a few minorities preferential treatment.

   Not only does it not make any real sense, but more importantly, it is divisive. No person struggling in this f**ked up economy wants to hear they should be even worse of, because they have the same skin color as the billionaires exploiting them and they should feel ashamed for that. I would not be surprised if these ideas are intentionally pushed by the rich to divide the working class people and turn them on each other.

2. Bringing people down in the name of Equity. Equity is definitely what we should strive for, but by lifting disadvantaged people up, not tearing "privileged" people down. The whole message that you should be ashamed for not being disadvantaged is ridiculous to me. Maybe you should be ashamed if you are in a privileged position and you refuse to use it to help the disadvantaged, but just be ashamed of privilege period is a wild take to me. We should be aiming to make everyone privileged enough that they don't have to fear being shot every time they see a cop, that they can make a living wage, ...

   If your movements/policies are hostile towards the very people whose support can help you most, then no wonder you can't make any progress and radicals like Trump take advantage of the divisiveness.

3. Low quality diversity in media. Adding diverse characters to media should ideally be like adding trees. You add them when it makes sense without even thinking about it and don't add them when it doesn't make sense. We should work slowly and carefully towards that goal. Unfortunately, so many movies, shows and games have tried to awkwardly add diversity with no regard for how it negatively affects the enjoyability of the product. So your goal presumably was to make diverse people feel included and to normalize diversity in peoples mind. But the result for minorities often is that they repeatedly see character like them being badly and lazily written, either by having no proper character beyond being diverse or conversely feel like straight cis white character that just happens to mention they are diverse. On the other hand, the majority just sees these poorly made products and associate diversity and DEI with bad products. So failure on both goals. The answer is of course quality over quantity. It may take a while to get where we want to be, but it will get there without making things even worse with good intentions.

   By the way, there of course are great examples of well made diverse shows, but they are drowned out by the slop. My favorite example is the Owl house. The plot of the first episode is literally about being captured and placed into "the conformatorium" for being different and then escaping and dismantling the place. And it did this so smoothly I did not even realize there was any messaging in it until long after seeing it.

This is my sad hill to die on, I guess, despite my personal feelings on why anti-discrimination across all aspects is important for society. But after reading some informed perspectives, I think I get where some of the DEI pushback is coming from.

It’s not about diversity, equity or inclusion individually, but DEI as a concept, ie as an actionable form of some underlying ideology. It doesn’t matter if the practitioners of DEI may not subscribe to any underlying ideology, the fact is that DEI opponents are unconvinced about the allegiances of DEI practitioners in special contexts, like the military.

I personally don’t care about having DEI in corporate or education contexts, but i think the concern there is that if the public thinks one way, then it will question why the military/govt doesn’t want to. So, I think I get why they removed DEI/CRT from corporate and education as well.

Per my understanding, the pushback is coming jointly from the military, and the main point of contention was the CRT-derived idea of “inherent racism” or “whites as oppressors”. For example,

CRT scholars argue that the social and legal construction of race advances the interests of white people[9][12] at the expense of people of color,[13][14] and that the liberal notion of U.S. law as "neutral" plays a significant role in maintaining a racially unjust social order,[15] where formally color-blind laws continue to have racially discriminatory outcomes.[16]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

Here’s an article which says why DEI was necessarily started (the writer is an academic)

DEI policies and practices were created to rectify the government-sanctioned discrimination that existed and systemic oppression that persists in the United States.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-the-cubicle/202411/what-we-get-wrong-about-the-dei-backlash-narrative

You have to appreciate why some part of the American armed forces pushes back on these ideas when your CO may be white, and you a minority. There are practical considerations to having such ideas in the back of your mind when you’re supposed to act without question and as a unit.

Here’s some context for reading https://starrs.us/dei-how-to-have-the-conversation/

Here’s another perspective from a Stanford professor, https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/25/will-dei-end-america-or-america-end-dei/

Edit to clarify, I am not saying that we shouldn’t have anti-discrimination policies across different aspects of being a person. I am saying this is why some people don’t like/want DEI or CRT (which are distinct and separate from the existing anti-discrimination policies). And yes, I know the military has issues regarding race and sex discrimination. But I think people can address those without DEI or CRT.

TBH, as a poor white kid from coal country, DEI based scholarships were quite unfair to me. Busting my ass to survive while these kids who were already better off than me from the start got a free ride. Nonsense.

I don't have a great answer, but the extreme implementations of these programs and now the extreme removal of them are both wrong.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
- Not Voltaire

I've heard the E as both Equity and Equality. Anyone know which it's supposed to be?

The alternatives to DEI are:

Conformity Inequity Exclusion

Despite earning literal millions for my employer(maybe billions, I didn't do the full math and got really upset when I realized it was at least millions) I was not included in any promotions while women that had done a quarter of the earning I had, if that, were promoted above me. I wasn't included and left to rot. Promoting, hiring, and giving awards to people because they belong to a minority is borderline retarded in the purest medical sense. Promoting someone that is a hard worker, intelligent, or a cornerstone to the business despite them belonging to a minority is how it should be, but neglecting people because of their skin color and gender is how we got here, simply doing it to the other gender or ethnicity doesn't solve anything. Let's lay this out for you. Who remembers Rick Flairs Retirement Pay Per View(PPV) Event a few years back? A certain cable operator was going to lose the right to have it on their service due to MAJOR problems with the PPV service showing incorrect prices. Regularly prices for live events were $4.99, 6.99, and 7.99, for events meant to be $69.99, that's about 90% loss of income or more. Rick Flairs team was about to pull the plug and go to Netflix, this was his last hurrah, this had to make him money, now this cable operator, let's call them "Cable Town" had a single engineer that had been working on this issue, and had very good success with no event that they worked the data ever having a pricing issue. This engineer saved the day for Rick Flair and Cable Towns relationship, but Cable Town promoted a woman over the engineer, a woman that had improved a system for contracting out to third party cable providers, that had yet to turn a profit due to just starting out. The engineer that was consistently fixing the PPV events pricing data walked the hell out. Now, where did Mike Tyson's most recent fight air? Netflix. Not Cable Town. D.E.I. is dumb, and doesn't work. The best and brightest regardless of their ethnicity, gender, or anything else unique to them should be promoted and paid in step with their contributions to the income of the organization, otherwise you risk losing MAJOR clients to an internet startup that takes things like profit seriously.