The “antiracism” big picture: the new meanings of “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity”
Get up to speed on the new meaning of such terms that sound good but have been redefined to mean something quite different:
We’re being lied to, and it’s been costing us a fortune, both economically and socially. For most of the last decade, the industry selling these lies has operated within the ten billion dollars a year range (with a B), selling a product they know doesn’t work, and it’s now growing exponentially. This industry produces no tangible product, makes workplaces less effective and efficient, and reliably leads to toxic and hostile working cultures that can tear companies—and our society—apart, and yet we can’t get enough of it. It’s a particular kind of madness that’s almost impossible to understand, explain, or stop.
What does this industry sell? “Diversity,” “Inclusion,” and “Equity” (DIE) consulting, training, and administration.
Two aspects of how this industry is so successful are immediately comprehensible. First, it sounds good and so plays on our best instincts, which is genuinely an evil thing to do to people. Advancing oneself and one’s interests through distortion and emotional manipulation is always bad, but there’s something genuinely evil about defrauding people by means of the best parts of their natures: the parts that care, that want to do better, and that are horrified to have possibly hurt someone.
Second, and more to an actionable point, the Theory from which DIE originates manipulates the language we use so that we sign up for what it’s selling while we think we’re buying something else. This is how it achieves most of what it achieves, and it’s so central to how the DIE industry operates that it’s something of a marvel that we haven’t figured out the con well enough yet to apply consumer protection laws against it, just like we did a century ago in countless other damaging and fraudulent industries.
Please read the whole thing.
I just wish Democrats would stop shilly-shallying and put out a Newspeak dictionary each year so everyone would know the score and we could conduct ourselves accordingly.
The DIE or diversity racket is without question the most successful example of the combining of a shakedown operation (in the manner of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) with an academic grifting operation which allows pseudo-intellectuals with mostly worthless credentials to obtain lucrative positions in government, in K-12, in the academy, and in corporate America. Yet what truly matters is not only that billions are squandered yearly on this worthless nonsense; much more troubling is that it is truly pernicious, with the malign intent of poisoning the minds of the young.
So, according the anti-racist racist narrative any white person who has black friends is a racist trying to pretend they’re not racist by having black friends, leading to white people not having any black friends, making them racist.
sigh…
Exactly. Diversity, other than of individuals and principles, is a dogmatic doctrine of color judgments, an insidious normalization of racism, that denies individual dignity, denies individual conscience, normalizes color blocs, color quotas, and affirmative discrimination. It is a Progressive artifact and legacy and sustained through semantic games and em-pathetic appeals that obfuscate the nature of its character. Diversity breeds adversity.
diversity racket
Yes, a racket, a protection racket. Hopefully, this perception is clear and widespread, and will not be lost in the proverbial black hole… whore h/t NAACP.
Besides DIE there is a new 3 letter acronym for socially woke investing.
I forget the TLA.
The hope is that cities and pension funds and woke investment funds will use these principles and it will put pressure on ALL companies to act the way the Left wants them to act, since otherwise these big buyers won’t touch their stock.
In my state our CalPERS (gov’t emp retirement program) is way, way behind and a big part of that is that the investment managers got poor returns due to avoiding successful, profitable companies and choosing weak, unsuccessful companies instead. So now the People get to pay lots more taxes because of their shortcomings … how fair is that?
The Social Justice Warrior Grifters are having a field day staking out turf in AI / Machine Learning. Their Big Thing is ‘Ethical AI’. Needless to say this is a way for people with mediocre maths and data skills to set themselves up as Gatekeepers.
So what’s the issue with Ethics in AI? Do I need to say that we’re not talking about Asimov’s Laws of Robotics here? Well, you see, a disembodied deep learning model crunching away on Googlplex-sized *uncurated*, *raw* (the horror!) datasets might NOTICE (Quick! Pull the plug!) things about race or sex in the Real World that are not supposed to exist. This utterly terrifies the SJWs and they are hell-bent on stamping it out.
When you create an ersatz religion based upon not seeing what is there and pretending to see what isn’t there, I can’t figure out how we’re going to avoid virtue signal spiraling back into the caves. Except that would be an Act of Penetration, so I guess the surviving males will get to sleep under the stars.
The Chinese will survive. They are different. They see. They have their own pathologies and I sure as @#$% wouldn’t want to be one, but they’re not going to go down the SJW @#$%^er with us.
FWIW, Dr. Jordan Peterson has warned of the dangers posed by SJWs; his warnings bear hearing. He explains the evolution of identity politics in a way that helps us understand, in part, how we got to this point, and where it could ultimately lead. I encourage everyone to seek out his videos on this subject, if for no other reason, to better understand the predicament we find ourselves in.
It’s really a staggering scam. We can stop mocking the Dutch. At least tulips were real flowers.
Diversity = an end to a variety of viewpoints and to impersonal performance standards
Inclusion = exclusion of people we despise
Equity = we take your stuff and give it to our clients
The Social Justice Warrior Grifters are having a field day staking out turf in AI / Machine Learning. Their Big Thing is ‘Ethical AI’.
Zaphod: Thanks for the heads-up. I had thought Ethical AI was something anodyne like:
https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2019/ethical-ai.html
Inquiring further and reading between the lines, I see something else looming:
____________________________________________________
A second crucial factor limiting the development of robust AI ethics comes from computer scientist Melvin Conway, PhD. Conway’s Law states that “organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” That is, if a team developing a particular AI system is made up of similar types of people who rely on similar first principles, the resulting output is likely to reflect that.
Conway’s Law exists within educational institutions as well. In training technology students on ethics, institutions are mostly taking a Silicon Valley approach to AI ethics by employing a singular cultural frame that reinforces older, white, male, Western perspectives deployed to influence younger, male minds.
–“Everyone’s talking about ethics in AI. Here’s what they’re missing”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90356295/the-rush-toward-ethical-ai-is-leaving-many-of-us-behind
____________________________________________________
Heaven spare us “white, male, Western minds.” Nothing good come of those!
I believe we need Ethical AI — Machine Learning poses serious risks for humanity and I am nervous as hell about it — but this EAI is just more SJW/Critical Race Theory/Diversity crap.
@Huxley:
I for one do not wish to welcome our new SkyNet Overlords, so I’m with you on the notion that AI is going to need an ethical framework.
But I wouldn’t trust anyone calling him or herself an Ethicist anywhere near this important issue. In fact the safest thing to do would be to shoot and bulldoze into a commodious pit the first 10,000 who put their hands up for the job. Logic being that anyone who wants the job that badly is by definition an enemy at best fit for employment as a Telephone Sanitizer.
The same problem pops up all over the harder sciences. Widespread easy DNA sequencing and computational genetics is a minefield for the same reason. Paleo-genetics ditto. David Reich (‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’) spends a good deal of his writings hurling abuse at a few cardboard cutout race realists to protect his lab and his field from the mob.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” George Orwell
““The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” ? Philip K. Dick
I think we are supposed to help others and have fun….maybe in any order.
I don’t see the distraction of negotiating an ethical maze gratuitously foisted on us by other people in there.
Whatever happened to General Semantics?
It seems to have been big back in the day for a while and then just plain disappeared.
Serious question. Is there anybody here who knows much about this?
Whatever happened to General Semantics?
Zaphod: It didn’t entirely disappear. The Institute of General Semantics and its magazine, “ETC: A Review of General Semantics” are still around, but not terribly active.
I was quite excited by semantics back in the 70s. I still have a moldy copy of Korzybski’s “Science and Sanity” as well as Hayakawa’s “Language in Thought and Action.” I still think there is much value to be found in general semantics. “The Map is not the Territory” is a life-changing insight. Apparently, it was difficult to extend semantics much further.
Semiotics, a larger field including semantics, became the hot academic pursuit with a wonderfully abstruse jargon.
Robert Anton Wilson offers some excellent essays on general semantics in his non-fiction writing. Example:
https://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/gsb-65-wilson.pdf
Sadly, this garbage isn’t happening in isolation – it is coming into the corporate world.
The company I work for has “embraced” all of this nonsense. They have given us “helpful” reading lists which include books on these nonsense ideas.
Okay, I could ignore the “helpful” reading lists. But, we have also had “required” training on diversity which includes such terms as “white privilege.”
Of course, me and my big mouth just couldn’t shut up and take it. So, they had an HR person explain to me that I needed to learn exactly what these terms mean and I would then have a better understanding of things. Good Lord, that HR person might as well have told me I need to be sent off to the “re-education” camp!
The company has also embraced the idea that law enforcement is systemically racist and that as a company they need to do something about it. Just what they plan to do has not yet been announced. Nor have they made anything public yet.
I hope they don’t do anything more stupid as I heard that 2 employees who have gone back to the office were assaulted by “peaceful” protesters just outside the office. Luckily office security called 911 and the police responded right away. Will the police be willing/able to respond if/when they find out the company is willing to throw them under the bus?
A possible reason general semantics is out of fashion is that its insights for clear thinking and clear speaking undermine the leftist, postmodern, and critical theory projects.
The company I work for has “embraced” all of this nonsense. They have given us “helpful” reading lists which include books on these nonsense ideas.
Say his name. Who is the executive responsible for this?
@Huxley: Many Thanks!
@Charles: Vox Day (mad half the time and bang on correct the other half) has a book out called ‘Corporate Cancer’. Worth a look.
@Charles:
Art Deco is correct on the proviso that there is a way to name and shame the perps without making yourself identifiable. That’s bit big If, of course.
These people have been getting it all their own way for far too long and have grown complacent. It’s time to take the fight to them by means fair or foul. They themselves have no notion of fairness, so that makes most things this side of the letter of the law OK. Understanding the caveat of course that the Law is applied more stringently to you than it would be to them.
@Huxley,
A dictionary would mean that we could learn it and conform and escape. It is essential to their power ploys that they always be able to throw someone to the wolves, so they can to be able to spring something new on us at any point.
When the meaning of words is changed with the purpose of deceit, generally synonyms can be found and used instead.
The real danger is not that 2+2 can now be said to be 5 but that tomorrow it can be insisted to be 7 and the day after 3.
It’s control of the mind they desire and the doorway to the soul is through the heart. Using people’s compassion to lead them into intolerance is positively Micheavelean in its evil.
Using people’s compassion to lead them into intolerance is positively Micheavelean in its evil.
It is Service to Self, as defined in the Law of One.
https://www.lawofone.info/results.php?q=%22service+to+self%22
Here are some other pyramid scheme rackets.
The IRS
Federal Reserve
Private banking cartels (redundant due to FR too)
Your government.
A dictionary would mean that we could learn it and conform and escape. It is essential to their power ploys that they always be able to throw someone to the wolves, so they can to be able to spring something new on us at any point.
Mary Catelli: You make a good point. Perhaps we need a conservative to construct a Newspeak dictionary and update it at regular intervals. That would be a useful project, as well as an apt reminder of the Orwellian nature of the left’s program.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced General Semantics would slice the bottom out of Critical Race Theory and all Social Justice doctrines.
General Semantics could be described as a method for understanding how words hypnotize us. For instance, to hear the left go on about “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” they seem absolutely real like the concrete curb you could trip over, if walking carelessly.
However, according to General Semantics:
The Map is not the Territory.
The Name is not the Individual.
The Word is not the Thing.
The Symbol is not the Thing Symbolized.
Which is to say, however elaborate and wonderful the words may be, the reality to which they refer is always larger and more complex, and the words can easily cause us to lose sight of that and only see what the words say one should see.
Looking over my old copy of Hayakawa’s “Language in Thought and Action,” I find it has lost none of its power as a great one-stop-shopping guide for using one’s brain.
“The company I work for has “embraced” all of this nonsense”
All those Race Studies and Gender Studies majors have been hired into HR departments of giant corporations.
With the rise of ESG investing (socially woke stock picking), some companies justify going political by saying that pension funds, etc, won’t buy their stock otherwise. A convenient excuse only but as the companies domino no one argues back.
All those Race Studies and Gender Studies majors have been hired into HR departments of giant corporations. –JimNorCal
Back in the 60s/70s when all those Studies programs were folded into college curricula to buy off the radicals from rioting, who foresaw these consequences?
If you give a mouse a cookie…
huxley, I added that to my reading list.
I think Neil Postman proposed, toward the end of his book Technocracy (I say “I think” only because I gave away my copy of it years ago, so can’t consult it to see), a reform of youth school curricula such that prominent place would be given to the study of comparative linguistics, at least perhaps for the higher grades. To judge from a quick glance on Amazon’s preview pages of Hayakawa’s introduction, the latter may also ultimately have been interested in a similar goal.
a reform of youth school curricula such that prominent place would be given to the study of comparative linguistics,
[eyeroll]
Philip Sells: I think you’ll find “Language in Thought and Action” useful. Let us know.
Back in the 2000s I noticed critical thinking was enjoying renewed attention in colleges. Then I discovered it was Critical with a capital-C Thinking to find the oppression of Western Civilization in everything.
I believe basic critical thinking — the standard logical fallacies such as ad hominem, emotional appeal, false dilemma, strawman, circular reasoning, no true Scotsman, etc. — ought to be in everyone’s toolbox.
2+2 can now be said to be 5 but that tomorrow it can be insisted to be 7 and the day after 3
Political congruence (“=”), a sociopolitical construct, is a dogmatic feature of the ostensibly “secular” Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, relativisitic quasi-religion (“ethics”) of the Progressive Church.