A pledge to God?
The mishandling of DEI doesn’t invalidate the need to fix broken systems which fail to select the best people instead of those who score highest in easily gamed and inherently biased metrics.
This is the Trojan Horse, just like the fundamentalists coming to spread peace and love in society of course.
Fortunately, people are judged by outcome and action, not stated intention, and we can see DEI has failed in this regard.
I've submitted that link to the HN front page by the way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263411
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Maoism-West-Rage-Radical/d...
https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzacedx5ta6zzpq2ix4km2x5sf...
"This notwithstanding, the passionate fervour that informs contemporary anti-racist rhetoric, and that of environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion, and the LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and other) movements that share its goals and feed off its righteous indignation, constitutes a calculated iconoclastic assault on the West’s history and culture."
"Culture war was, after all, one of the People’s Republic’s earliest exports to the West. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, for years, explicitly viewed it as its ‘magic weapon’. Why, then, this book asks, did a twentieth-century Chinese revolutionary ideology become so adaptable and spectacularly successful in the West?"
By the way, I've been censored multiple times on this site, for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party and it's connections with the woke movement, by the way. It's awful.
My submission is now the top Google result for "beijing woke" and "woke propaganda war" right now, and the HN censorship is plainly visible for everyone to see worldwide.
It's the 7th result for the term "woke propaganda", by the way.
13:08 UTC: To any potential Chinese Communist Party trolls, the more you try to censor me, the more I'm going to be posting about you. Same for russian trolls. Your propaganda is destroying the lives of innocent people here in the West.
It’s awfully apparent that you subscribe to a political extreme right wing view if you feel that Climate and LGBTQ issues are extremism.
Climate concern and LGBTQ pride were barely even a thing during Mao’s time, yet to listen to you you’d think the Chairman himself created and pushed those onto the public stage.
Meanwhile the MCPC is not the same thing as the CCP, despite your apparent belief to think they are.
And give us a break with this “poor me, I’ve been censored on this site” mentality.
Everyone here is free to say what they want. It’s up to the collective here to decide (by and large) if such messages are deemed worthwhile or not. If they’re not then they’ll get flagged and downvoted.
I'm so fed up with what the Woke-leftist movement is doing to our liberties, and its Maoist "long march through the institutions" that I'll keep protesting it peacefully in every way I can.
And censorship is one thing that the modern Left is very keen on nowadays, and of course it's being done in the name of the "collective" or "greater good" - typical collectivist behavior there - and an example of the disdain for individual rights today.
This supposed decades long, communist driven ideology has penetrated every part of society - maybe all the way from teamwork in the workplace - to relations between the genders - and just maybe design work and building architecture. And it's got something to do with postmodernism as well, but I haven't looked into that fully yet.
Communist countries have very long term plans lasting decades.
That wasn’t censorship and nor do I complain about it. I am however happy to observe it. They’re both privately run websites are and free to do what they like.
The trouble is that you have apparently mistaken the MCPC with the CCP.
The Maoists are an underground faction in China, and see the CCP are a political enemy.
Yet you’re so reverently “anti woke” (despite “woke” being simply an umbrella term used the the extreme right to group anything they don’t like together without it actually meaning anything), that you come accross as the same sort of person who thinks anyone to the left of Nixon can only be a Marxist/Communist/Liberal flag waving pinko.
Your position lacks nuance, empathy, and understanding.
I’ll have to admit, whilst I often see claims of me being Marxist or Communist because I’m trans, this is the first time I’ve been grouped in as a Maoist.
In the 2010s and 2020s the censorship[1] (and cancelling of open-source software authors) is coming mostly from the Left - and I hate it.
In the 1990s the censorship was coming from the Right - and I hated that as well. I still remember a group called "Focus on the Family" and its pressure on the government to adopt widespread Internet filtering.
I have no problem with trans people in any way whatsoever, what they do with their bodies and in their private lives is absolutely none of my business. I only get annoyed when segments of their political movement start to enact speech codes[1] and other means of impeding our right to freedom of speech. I understand it doesn't mean all trans people are doing this, it is just a vocal minority.
To clarify: When I complain about "Woke" I complain about those people within the movement who are trying to take our hard-earned Western liberties away, including freedom of speech and thought. These liberties were acquired over hundreds of years of hardship by so many people, throughout history. People who chose to suffer in the name of liberty, for the good of other people. And certain segments of the Left want to diminish or even eliminate them.
And by the way I agree with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, yes there is a serious problem with discrimination against Black people by law enforcement. And other minorities too. Those with less power in society tend to be discriminated against the worst. It really does appear to be a "pecking order", almost something from the animal world, which is terrible.
But I still don't think censorship (and especially cancelling people) is ever a suitable response to discrimination or offensive speech. Offensive speech should be countered with further, lawful speech.
The quoted text in my first post above is taken from the book, it's not my specific personal opinion. If it were to be the case that Extinction Rebellion and other peaceful protest groups were to be labelled "extremist" I would be seriously considering that we are living in a police state. It's completely unacceptable to brand peaceful political movements as "extremist" to me. That has no place in a free society.
As demonstrated before by history, I'm worried that the left-wing Woke movement might provoke a right-wing backlash, and it's why Trump or someone even worse could get into power at some point. I think we need to keep protecting our individual liberties, so people don't end up voting a right wing party into power, as a knee-jerk reaction.
I hope I've thought it all through properly. So it looks like I'm a bit of a fence sitter on the matter, but are still strongly in favor of individual liberty.
By the way, many of my posts here are getting 50:50 with an almost equal number of upvotes as they are downvotes. Many just "0", or "1", but not -1 or any worse than that. So HN opinion seems to be split on it?
1. The "Contributor Covenant" code of conduct and others. These codes of conduct are the main censorship issue I'm bothered about nowadays.
I think you’ll find what’s really happening is that people are having to adjust to the real world, and are being held accountable for previously socially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination.
The irony in your statement is that you also say you support BLM, yet the same people who would agree with your statement above, are totally against BLM.
Gateway Pundit, Breitbart and Fox News are three very active right wing places that routinely silence left wing voices.
Trump’s own Truth Social advertises itself as a place of free speech, however it has been shown to be shadow banning posts up the yazoo that the moderators (whomever they are) feel don’t toe the party line.
You not experiencing something does not mean it doesn’t happen.
I wasn’t discriminated against as a trans woman until I came out as trans.
Since then I’ve lost a job, and been verbally abused, simply for being a trans woman.
You claim the the LGBTQ cause is extremism. As a member of the group I can tell you that given the huge amount of laws being made to legislate us out of existence, I’m seeing extremism on both sides.
For the true ideologues those intentions come down to the deconstruction of society which is supposed to enable its reconstruction into the 'permanent revolution' model professed by its adherents, for most others is is just a way to gain positions of power which they would otherwise not be able to gain due to their lack of skills or lack of relevant education (which does not equate to no education, there are many graduates of higher institutions of learning among those who suffer from a lack of relevant education). The scheme is to get one 'DEI expert' into organisations who will invariably find 'problems' in that organisation which 'need' to be 'addressed' by pulling in more 'DEI experts' and 'DEI consultants', thus creating a parasitical organism which feeds off the organisation without contributing anything itself.
Really, this stuff can be psychological/psychiatric (no or little empathy, obsession with power and control, projective behaviors). I've experienced it first hand.
The relevant psychiatric disorders are Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, the two co-morbid produce a monstrous "malignant narcissist". Who can appear charming and charismatic in public, but horrendous psychological abuse goes on behind closed doors. So few would suspect it. It's these aforementioned "dark triad" personalities who are most attached to this authoritarian strain of woke ideology. It all feeds the ego. And their power base. Also, they fundamentally believe "might is right".
Often they will accuse others of lack of empathy, for being racist, as a means of avoiding confronting their own behavior of the same nature. They lack empathy, and they use "projective identification" to displace it on to others, denying their own problems as a small child would. Part of their psyche is stuck at an infantile level of development.
It's ~1% of the population, and I think it's actually equal between the sexes, with men using aggression and threats, and women using relational aggression instead. Often society fails to recognize the female offenders.
Vladimir Putin is strongly suspected to have the disorder. Stalin, and Hitler too. All of them "dark triad" personalities. https://highconflictinstitute.com/personality-disorders/puti...
It's almost like OCD in a way, they have to feel in power, they must be in control, if they don't keep the compulsion up, then they will feel worthless, almost dead inside, and that feeling of worthlessness is breakdown inducing. The disorder forces them to get extremely good at manipulating people, so they have the upper hand (power) at all times, just as a person who plays chess all day will get good at it. And they've been doing it all their life, since early childhood. They can even enjoy it, experiencing sadistic pleasure upon seeing their victims suffer.
By the way, voice recording them (if legal to do so) helps enormously, if you're the victim of it or suspect it.
IQ tests are not easily gamed and suggesting otherwise is mostly lying. They might be too easy, or have too low a ceiling (SAT), or might have some mild response to coaching. But a very stupid person cannot come out the other side with the very high score, and a very smart person should be able to figure them out sufficiently that they prove their utility.
By the way, the author of the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto is known as "Bantik" on 1990s Usenet, there is high quality evidence on the Web that that's correct, some of it has been removed from Google. That just shows the background behind some of the most prominent people in DEI programs, at least in open-source.
https://archive.ph/P258A https://archive.ph/NsPmk https://archive.ph/EkJzO https://web.archive.org/web/20180717044421/http://s35819.gri... Bantik writes, in 2000: https://everything2.com/title/How+to+Be+a+Charismatic+Cult+L... - "How to Be a Charismatic Cult Leader"
Ironically, the methods that the DEI types use are not even hidden. There are numerous books and "scholarly" articles that discuss their methods in detail and also their true purpose.
At it's root DEI is one of the byproducts of Critical Race Theory which is derived from Critical Theory which is (arguably) the root of Marxism and a bunch of other -isms. You can think of Critical Theory as the most abstract form of that particular tree of political theory and Marxism applies it to class inequality and CRT applies it to race/gender inequality. This is a simplification, but it's good enough for now.
The CRT leader types are without a doubt anti-meritocracy, anti-science, anti-civilization, anti-family, etc.. They have said so directly and emphatically in books, papers, talks, etc..
If you wanted to discredit "numerous books" you should have named at least one. Do you have an example?
Do you often have proper IQ tests when navigating in the academic sector? I personally never have one.
On top of that, I'm not sure IQ tests themselves are really relevant to select people in the academic sector. They already have demonstrated they master their subject with their grades, so we already know they are smart enough, and it is not because someone score higher in an IQ test that this person will be more valuable for the academic sector, where collaboration and mentoring are as valuable as the holywood cliché of the genius solving all the problems. IQ does not tell much about laziness or motivation or willingness to follow the good scientific process, ...
Also, at this level, you are selecting people amongst a set of candidates that are all already very very close in IQ, to the point that choosing on IQ alone is not making scientific sense: if the IQ questions would have been randomly different, or if they would have passed the test a different day, the scores would have been slightly different and the selection would have been different. The scores would not have been totally different, of course, but slightly different, and because the candidates are all very close, it would have changed the winner.
For having been part of it, the selection process in the academic sector is very very very difficult and is very very prone to unconscious bias. When you have 5 very good candidates and you need to pick one, how do you decide? At the end, it is very often "on feeling": "for this person, I feel they will be a good match". It's a fair way of choosing, because choosing someone that you "don't feel it" over someone that you "feel it" is just very counter-intuitive. But it means that between two persons, it is often the one that "looks superficially the best for the job" that gets it, which is easily affected by unconscious bias (for example, you will "feel it" more easily with someone of your own culture), or can easily be gamed (for example, to progress, you need to build a professional network and manage your reputation, and some very good candidates are just not interested to play these silly games).
There is, but there's definitely some similarities too. Specifically that if you happen to believe in these things, advancement of their goals is one of the most important things you can do, which causes a big temptation to misappropriate institutional power to further the cause.
Regarding the pledges specifically, both require employees to take personal positions to advance at work, which I think is the part blackhawkC17 finds "culty".
Even for banal acne treatments, proof of safety and efficiency through several stages of trials is required before people are actually subject to it.
With DEI, we are just expected to believe that it actually works and should be applied across the country because some smart people say so.
In the eyes of the advocates for each, I actually don't know that there is.
Religious pledges likely are intended to say "we want faculty who will teach and represent the values this school holds and that students expect out of this institution", which feels pretty much exactly like the rationale for DEI pledges.