Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology.
The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity.
Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents.
When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away.
Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost.
Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words.
This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.
Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them.
When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash.
I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.
The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.
What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to being short staffed. Rather, it’s more likely they are understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible and eager people in order to meet race quotas.
It’s hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss it as just another instance of crazy Republican screeching.
Around 1994 I was interested in Trotskyism and Anarchism and wasn't sure if we needed to get the 4th international back in the US or start a 5th international.
I believed in this really stupid kind of vanguardism where if you put up the biggest and most radical flag you would get everyone to rally behind it. I reformed because I got tough love from black nationalists who told me in no uncertain words they wanted to decide things for themselves and not get bossed around by some white guy.
A modern form of this involves the adding of random stripes to the rainbow flag which means that when you really do put that flag up you won't have anybody under it, at least not when the going gets tough, when it rains, etc.
For one thing left-wing movements have this divergent character where they feel they have to follow all these people who are subaltern for different reasons. Right-wing movements have this convergent character that moves towards something which makes it much easier form them to manage inconsistencies.
Which would mean entirely different things if (a) that were true (b) that were not true.
It sounds as if you are completely convinced that it is not true, but what is your conviction based on, and why do you think they believed the opposite (or perhaps you take the position that they did not, in fact, believe this) ?
what on earth does this mean?
I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.
(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).
This is what always happens to politicians. Their mumbles become coherent. Shyness fades. Vague dithering words transform to bold calls to action. Infirm display vitality.
This is what politicians do. Otherwise they would be school teachers and programmers.
On the other hand leftists are always telling Hispanic people that they have to have solidarity with black people, telling trans people they have to have solidarity with animal rights people (or the animals?), etc. And... crickets. The people never quite tell you that they don't agree with you but they don't really give money, they don't really listen to you, they don't really turn out at your march, they don't really vote for you, etc.
I've been there, done that, and lived it. If you listen to people you make a little more progress than you make by just flying a really big flag. The antipattern is common in articles from Trotskyite papers which you will find collected here:
https://www.wsws.org/en?redirect=true
Often there is some issue that the people involved see as an isolated issue, but the Trotskyite always wants to smack it together like a Katamari Ball [1] with other issues and conclude a socialist revolution is necessary and the answer from most people is [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(Beatles_song)
[3] "But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao: You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow"
I was shocked at how long it took Labour to beat the Tories in the the UK in the last decade. I mean the Tories kept screwing up over and over and it had to go really far before voters finally gave up on them.
It's easy to conclude that politics in the US are like professional wrestling and the Democrats are getting paid to lose.
> This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.
So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist.
Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to equity. So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?
Company A: Our equity policy is to only hire white men! We are proud of how we are striving towards equity with our new DEI policy.
observer: Damn those DEI policies ruining everything.
To me it is obvious you do not blame 'DEI policies' but the leadership and corruption in Company A.
Telling people they're acting childish and are not bringing anything to the table argumentation wise I think is pretty low on the hostility scale.
The irony of being called out as hostile after confronting someone that they're just asserting their opinions is definitely not lost on me. What a thread...
Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.
There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."
This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.
I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.
> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.
I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.
The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.
The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.