What an appalling comment. You can’t possibly justify what you’re doing so you pretend it’s something “the left” did first. Did the left deport students because they wrote an op-ed article, or went to a protest? Did senior administration officials call for jailing opponents for thought crimes?
You are correct in your assumption that I am a conservative, but I abhor the lunacy of the MAGA right as much as anyone. But the fact remains that the roots of this behavior are in men like Foucault and Marcuse, who were squarely on the left.
So just to be clear - by "abhor the lunacy of the MAGA right" you mean you did not vote for the current crop societal arsonists and otherwise generally denounce them, right? I ask because there is a common disingenuous pattern of people claiming to distance themselves from the methods or other things they find distasteful (eg the profligate deficit spending), but ultimately still falling in line with support.
Not disingenuous, I think. I did vote for Trump, and even if I had a crystal ball in November and knew then what I know now, I would still prefer him to Harris. On the other hand, I have been quite vocal in my criticism of him -- but the circle of friends and acquaintances who have heard my criticisms is pretty small.
It's disingenuous because you're bringing up the lunacy as if its one of your primary concerns while invoking the concept of "integrity". But then you're not actually living out that concern, rather assuaging your own ego by imagining that "the left" is still somehow worse in this measure. You don't get to bemoan societal decay when you're directly contributing to that decay.
A recent report from the Goldwater Institute found that 80% of job postings for Arizona’s public universities required applicants to submit a statement detailing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. - https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-report/the-new-loy...
“If you write: ‘I believe that everyone should be treated equally,’ you will be branded as a right winger,” Vinod Aggarwal, the chair of Asian Studies at the university, said in an interview. - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...
UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating diversity statements penalized candidates for saying that they prefer to “treat everyone the same,” or for objecting to racially segregated affinity groups. As my reporting has shown, by the early 2020s, the Berkeley rubric had become something of a gold standard, used by search committees across the country, including at the University of New Mexico, University of South Carolina, Northwestern University, and Ohio State University. - https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-death-knell-for-diver...
(to debunk the usual counterpoint that these diversity requirements merely test for being able and willing to teach all demographics of students)
But if we point out the McKinsey study that finds companies with greater ethnic and cultural diversity were 36% more likely to experience above-average profitability compared to their counterparts, the facade of the conservative dedication to free market capitalism crumbles.
Look, plenty of DEI programs weren’t done well, especially affirmative action programs at some prestigious universities where the design of the admissions programs were boneheaded at best and illegal at worst.
But in truth, many DEI opponents who just “want everyone to be treated equally with merit” don’t actually realize that “merit-only” doesn’t mean utopian pure equality, it means going back to a status quo state where the concept of merit is tainted by personal biases.
I also think this idea of “merit-only” is hyper-individualist, because this type of thinking resists the consideration of the social interaction of humans. A business owner needs employees who can not only have merit on their own but also work well together.
Typical corporate DEI was never about race/gender quotas or anything malicious like that, it was just training to help avoid employees/managers being biased toward solely hiring and working with people who are aligned with their world view.
And it isn’t just cultural or racial or gender-based, it’s also based on things like diversity of background. E.g., maybe we don’t just hire people with a degree from a prestigious university, maybe someone who got experience through some non-traditional way is also qualified.
A lot of the focus of the training is also just informing employees about how they can respect/accommodate different types of thought and culture so that the diverse people you already hired don’t decide to quit.
For my anecdote, I worked with a black woman in an SRE role who said she almost never lasts more than a year at an employer before she can’t stand someone she works with being racist/biased against her and has to quit for her own sanity. This is a person that is getting hired because she’s highly qualified but keeps getting pushed out because employees frequently have bias against her ingrained in them. Turnover costs tens of thousands of dollars for each occurrence, and that’s one area where DEI training is meant to help.
And yes, that’s why it’s important to use people’s preferred pronouns. Employees are supposed to be adults and not big dumb babies who can’t adapt to basic changes in the world. The company already hired a trans or non-binary person because they are the most qualified for the role, and now they want employees to not ruin it for them and cost the company a bunch of money because their bigotry causes them to quit.
I wanted to reply to this in detail because it's a very interesting topic for me, but the result exceeded the HN comment length limit (I don't know by how much) and this is already quite derailed from the original topic, and layers deep beneath a dead comment. I did save my thoughts in a local text file, though. Please feel free to reach out by email (I use this username on the Proton email service) if you're interested.
> Did the left deport students because they wrote an op-ed article, or went to a protest? Did senior administration officials call for jailing opponents for thought crimes?
Did the right? What incidents are you referring to?
Specifically because they protested and not for any other reason (such as, for example, specific actions taken at the protest; or just opportunistically because appearing at the protest made it possible to catch someone that they'd already been looking for)?
What is scary to me is that at his age, given the opportunity, I would have done the same thing. I was active in the Purdue Libertarians, a student group.
The moral calculus is very simple: taxation is theft, the ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how many people would die. The theft must stop.
Cf. with abortion: Abortion is murder, so it must stop. The ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how much suffering the banning of abortion would cause, abortion must stop.
What these have in common is a phenomenon which Orwell talked about in his "Principles of Newspeak" essay. If you make words like "theft" and "taxation" to be synonymous, or "abortion and murder" to be synonymous, you blur over the endless richness of meaning that English has. You destroy meaning which are useful in tracking features of reality--and you destroy meanings which could refute your position.
At the age of 23, I had completely bought into it. I would have cheerfully consigned those 14 million people to die. At 23, I knew exactly which lever to pull in trolley scenarios.
What is even more scary is this: would I ever even have been able to let myself realize I was wrong? Or would I have spent the rest of my life rationalizing? How, exactly, do you admit to yourself that you consigned more people to death than Goebbels? Would it even be possible to express any kind of empathy without feeling the weight of so much guilt that it would cause you to be so traumatized that you would never recover?
The hazards of improper binding of meaning in language and experience are well known.
It so happens there was a Polish philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century who wrote an enormous tome on the subject of society and science, and the general hazards inherent to the structure of language and meaning:
His work has an extensive legacy, yet is not well known.
The subject of semantic hazards needs to be taught. Children can pick up on the hazards very readily with instruction, but are not likely to comprehend the matter on their own. Moreover they will tend to prefer to wield their personal discoveries like magic which is another hazard.
Electronic mass media have greatly amplified semantic hazards and has greatly disturbed us. We are engulfed by media that leverage semantic hazards for ill gains, and many of our leaders are blend of ignorance of the hazards or maliciously exploiting them.
As anyone who is paying attention to the AI can see, the social media industry is greedily at work on systems intending to further disturb and exploit the public mind for fun and profit, no matter the cost.
Always been particularly baffled by the concept of _anti-abortion libertarians_. I mean, they do seem to exist, but it feels like it takes a particularly messy series of mental gymnastics to get there.
They are the billionaire Silicon Valley people who thought it would be cute to use their insane wealth to back a fascist seizure of power by Musk and Trump
We’re about to watch a bunch of “libertarians” and anarcho-capitalists with kindergarten-level opinions about how societies function realize that markets require strong state regulation in order to function
There’s a reason there’s no stock exchange in the jungle
That’s 3.3 million estimated deaths caused by DOGE illegally shutting down a congressionally established and funded agency of the US government:
- 1.65 million deaths from AIDS
- 500,000 from lack of vaccines
- 550,000 from lack of food aid
- 290,000 from malaria
- 310,000 from TB
“are the effective altruism guys mad about this or are they still trying to figure out how buying a castle will prevent AGI robot attacks in the year 300” [email protected]
