Making everything worse
From the Guardian’s live updating:
[A]mid nightmarish images eerily evocative of Cormac McCarthy’s dark post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, a political firestorm has sparked from Donald Trump and his supporters that seems as scorched earth in its characteristics as the blazes ravaging neighborhoods across Los Angeles.
Far from calling a temporary truce, the president-elect and his Maga (make America great again) acolytes have used the fires to attack the Democratic political ruling establishment in Los Angeles and California – possibly foretelling power struggles ahead over a range of issues after Trump assumes office this month.
The attacks have used disinformation, wild claims, conspiracy theories and extremist culture war tropes. But absent from their critique has been any acknowledgement that climate change has played any role in igniting the catastrophic fires – despite a consensus among experts that they have been caused by exceptional environmental conditions, including near hurricane-strength winds, low rainfall and unseasonably high temperatures.
The Republicans have instead blamed Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, for supposedly failing to ensure enough water was available to douse the infernos – along with his fellow Democrat, Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, who drew flak for not returning from a pre-planned trip to Ghana until after the fires began. Also targeted has been the head of LA’s fire department, Kristin Crowley, derided as a “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusiveness] hire” in reference to her being the first openly gay woman to hold the position.
Ah yes, a “DEI hire.” I guess that’s a popular sneer in Trump world these days – it certainly annoyed the hell out of me the other day when it was applied to Kamala Harris, as if she has zero value apart from the DEI type.
The climate catastrophe deniers have long given up on any attempt to argue a case. They tried that long and hard but there’s only so many times you can use sleight of hand* as an argumentative technique. The Trump technique of more or less random abuse of anyone perceived to be less than 100% supportive of your grift is just so much more effective so everyone is doing it now.
*Favourite sleight of hand techniques that I have personally encountered, in most cases multiple times:
1. cite a scientific paper as demonstrating your point when the paper does no such thing. Indeed in many cases the paper is only tenuously related to the subject under the discussion – the important thing is that the title suggests that it might do what you say since the sucker is not actually intended to follow the link let alone do any reading
2. If 1. seems too much like hard work just make up a title and give it a non-working link to a reputable scientific publication. If someone bothers to follow the link they will hopefully just put it down to link rot or some sort of screw-up.
3. If you’re cashed up hire a PR agency to call itself an institute and have it put out a “report” saying whatever you want them to.
4. Lord Monckton. Just bloody Lord Monckton.
Hahaha I love item 3.
Ah, yes, the Paul Simon ploy. “Why don’t we get together and call ourselves an institute?”
It seems bizarre to me that supporters of DEI-based hiring practices would be so bothered by acknowledging that DEI played a role in someone’s hiring. One would think that they would be proud that their favored policy works as intended. It’s as if they actually can see the problem, just as supporters of gender ideology actually do know and can tell what a woman is when it matters to them or when deciding whom to fuck over. They know that DEI-based hiring necessarily undermines confidence in competence, because competence is made subordinate to “identity”. A DEI hire could be the best person for the job, but the process prioritizes unrelated traits, so …
*shrug*
@NIV #4
And previous to DEI, the process prioritized different unrelated traits.
NiV – But when people sneer about a “DEI hire” they don’t mean DEI played a role along with other factors. The phrase doesn’t imply other factors; it implies that DEI is the only factor.
@ Colin: … tu quoque? Yes, in some cases; no, in others. Where yes, that’s bad, and bad for reasons that most of us intuit, because we’re primates who were raised properly. Where no, that’s good, for the same reasons. In the former case, implementing DEI-based discrimination is a sidegrade, a wash, six of one. In the latter, it’s actively bad. Ergo, DEI is monotonically bad.
@ Ophelia: My father said nearly the same thing to me a few months ago, except that he went further and asserted that everyone who says “DEI hire” or complains about DEI is really just a racist. To which I responded, “Um, Dad? I have critiques of DEI. Am I a racist?” He knows I’m not, so he was put in a cognitive pickle, which he resolved by (correctly) moderating his take from “everyone” to “many”. And thus I did my duty as the family pedant.
All’s I’m saying is that, because natural language is often ambiguous, it isn’t clear whether you mean everyone or many. I’ll happily and enthusiastically agree with the latter, but I can’t accept the former, because I have my own mind as a counter-example.
Except that DEI hires don’t (have to) work that way. The notion of ‘the best person for the job’ is, in most cases, a bit of a myth. Rather, there’s a pool of candidates that are all roughly equivalent, and will do similarly competent jobs (with some variance, but generally equivalent). In such cases, I would argue, “DEI hires” (ie, advantaging racial minorities, women and LGB candidates) are, in fact, a good thing–they encourage previously underrepresented groups to enter the profession, which can also, in the case of government services, reduce the institutional bias that such organizations have often shown in their dealings with the public.
Another point is that Diversity itself tends to have some benefits, like for instance making “diverse” people themselves more willing to use the service in question, more comfortable when they do, more likely to return, and so on. If all hospitals, schools, shops, transportation, cops, fire departments, restaurants are staffed by pale men, then all other people are going to feel unwelcome or intimidated or angry or all three.
Colin Day #5
Of course in the Trump era the process prioritizes personal loyalty to the Orange one. Either way the idea of “meritocracy” is dead.
DEI in practice often isn’t great, but “DEI” now is just their equivalent of “everything is racism”. Really just a new version of “diversity hire” but it seems to be something like their theory of the universe now.
You can critique it without bigotry, but that’s not happening here.
Here as in here or here as in there?
[…] a comment by Francis Boyle on Making everything […]
Many moons ago I was down to the last two in the race for Marketing Manager of a successful software business, so obviously I was pretty close to being “the best person for the job”. I lost out. To a woman. A woman of Greek heritage. A woman who had been trained by me at another software firm where I was marketing manager. At the time of interviews we didn’t know we were the last two.
So, was she a DEI hire? No, I lost out because the suits that interviewed me were horrified that I came to an interview minus jacket and tie! Hiring decisions can really be that simple. I had to laugh when she told me she beat me and why.
Oy. I wonder what they were thinking. “Wull, if he does an interview minus jacket and tie maybe he’ll talk to clients in shorts and a backward baseball cap.”
You, marketing:
Rev, human resources can be the strangest people on earth sometimes. I was on a search committee at work for a sustainability coordinator; we hired the lesser qualified of the two finalists. Why? Because they wanted someone who understood statistics. Never mind that the other woman was the one who had statistics; never mind that the one we hired didn’t even know basic math. The real reason behind it, I suspect, was that the other woman came from her job, and was dressed for being an ecologist. The first woman, the one that got hired, was business suit and all; she downloaded a shit load of statistics straight off the internet, and never understood a word she was saying, but she sounded impressive. She didn’t do one thing right while she was sustainability coordinator, and almost everyone hated her. The other woman knew how to talk to people working in a rural community college; they probably could have avoided a lot of bad karma by hiring her. But the assumption was that I wouldn’t really know; after all, I was told (by Miss Sustainability Coordinator), Environmental Science has no relationship to sustainability. WTF? I gave up.
Ophelia:
That’s true, I suppose. One can certainly devise scenarios, especially in contexts like social epistemology, where having diversity of thought is beneficial. Having breadth of talent/skill distributions can make having a critical lack less likely. You’ll get no quarrel from me in that respect.
On the other hand, diversity is often (usually) completely orthogonal to anything like benefit, or worse, actively incompatible with that which is necessary for major groups (e.g., females) to have fairness, like for instance erasing references to biological reality to make “diverse” people more willing and comfortable with respect to a service. If all rape shelters, female health clinics, and women’s sports leagues are composed of females, then all other people are going to feel unwelcome or angry or all three.
For every benefit we can point to in diversity, we can point to a matching one in unity, because both sets are infinite. It’s like Hilbert’s Grand Hotel—we can always find an empty room for every new guest. We’re always left with the basic questions of fairness and purpose. Is this practice fair? Does this practice best accomplish our purpose? And the real kicker is that the two questions are inseparable. If I’m looking to hire a striker for a women’s soccer team, candidates’ sex matters—not only is considering it fair, not doing so would be unfair.
@ Freemage:
Yes, they do. By definition, DEI-based hiring reduces the pool of available applicants prior to the evaluation of any other sort of merit, which necessarily (unless each demographic slice is infinite) results in selecting someone of lesser capability. (I say any other sort of merit, because on the DEI view, diversity, equity, inclusion, and their advancement are themselves meritorious in and of themselves. A “diverse”—the right kind of diverse, of course—group is perforce superior to a non-diverse group.) Even if every possible way to slice the pool yields subsets of equal size [cardinality], that still privileges some groups over others (which is unjust) and leads to violations of fairness. And really, on what grounds if not fairness/justice is DEI based? Even going with the assumption that demographics would only be used as tie-breakers doesn’t wash the bitterness from my mouth. I’d much rather a tie be broken and someone else get hired because the employer thought me ugly than that I was the wrong color.
If we really think that applicants are interchangeable and that “there’s a pool of candidates that are all roughly equivalent, and will do similarly competent jobs (with some variance, but generally equivalent),” then we have a hard time explaining why we ought vote for one candidate (e.g., Kamala Harris) over another (e.g., Donald “The Great Orange One” Trump).” Or why NBA teams would seriously tank entire seasons just to have a shot at maybe getting to draft a skinny kid from France.
Differential competence is no myth. The entirety of professional sports is premised on this fact. There are so many people better at so many things than I whom I would want to be hired before me in a vast number of fields that I can’t even find a number within intuition’s reach. That you would dismiss the idea of comparative suitability as “a bit of a myth” actually confuses me. No, really. I’ve reread your comment multiple times, and my brain still won’t give me the “okay, we got this” signal.
I realise that the election is a still-raw wound for Democrats, and I should likely have the sense to stay out of this, but since I started this (and since I don’t):
For a small business, receiving criticism from customers can be unpleasant, but the smart owner realises that such customers are doing them a favour, telling them what they need to do to improve and grow.
About 7 or 8 million people who had voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t vote for Harris in 2024. If you want to win in 2028 you need them all back. You also need to persuade 3 or 4 million who this time voted for Trump to switch. The smart Democratic strategist will be pondering how to appeal to those center-ground voters (not to the activists who would vote for a scarecrow were it the Democratic nominee), and that involves listening to them.
And I can promise you that many of those floating voters were thinking “do I vote for the mediocre DEI hire with woke policies that I dislike, or do I go for the incompetent buffoon who lacks integrity; well that’s not much of a choice, is it?”.
(If you’re unsure why they might think this, read this article about the 2020 primaries, including “… plummeted in early state polls to the low single digits”, and note that this is not a right-wing hit job, it’s the New York Times, and then ask about the process by which, from there, Harris then became the 2024 candidate.)
Saying this is not saying that future Democratic candidates should not be black women, that would be fine, so long as the candidate is an inspiring leader who appeals to the center ground (and who happens to be a black woman) in the same way that Obama was an inspiring leader who appealed to the center ground (and who happened to be black).