Wait, oh shit, you mean that in another nation after a bloody revolution it happened? I mean, why aren’t we talking about the Reign of Terror?
The hypothetical is octopus’s claim that, for example, the woman in the funny skirt wants to murder Idaho babies, or that I’d be super freaked out if her skirt had General Lee or some other traitor on it. He doesn’t have actual facts on his side, so instead he makes up imaginary scenarios and casts them with his adversaries; and when in his imagination his adversaries do terrible things, he uses their terrible imaginary actions to imagine victory against them in the real world.
I agree. The article @Velocity linked to said the same thing:
In other words, the “fight fire with fire” logic of the competing fundamentalist strains of the American secular revival is precisely wrong. One flame doesn’t eradicate (or even permanently defeat) the other. They both feed each other, until the conflagration spirals out of control.
No fair. You get actual speakers? All the training I’ve ever done has been tedious online videos with multiple choice questions.
What do you think of Trump’s ban? I’ve been reading what the executive order says (it does NOT read like Trump wrote it), and it wouldn’t cover all diversity training. Would you say it bans the sort you’ve had or not?
Pffft, who cares if some womant “wants” to murder babies in Idaho. I “want” to engage in a torrid extramarital affair with Jessica Alba, but I am not going to act on it because she is a married woman and it wouldn’t be fair to her husband Cash Warren (or the cops who would have to come and arrest me for stalking). The conversation had moved on (I thought) from the specific to the general. Extreme leftism can be dangerous and there are sufficient historical precedents to confirm this. Just as there are sufficient evidence to convince any reasonable person that extreme right wing ideology is also dangerous.
Well it’s all online now for us too. But it used to be live training with free lunch.
I don’t know how trump enforces that in the private contractor setting.
But yes, we sometimes have a speaker that would be prohibited by the ban. But the more practical elements of diversity training would be permitted. Some of it might be on the line. The one about how to deal with racism/sexism from clients basically assumes that all our clients are racist sexist pigs. In 25 years of practice, I think I may have had this come up a handful of times but there was a lot of stuff about systemic racism/sexism and how client behavior can drive staffing decisions that harm women and minorities. It sort of assumed a level of racism and sexism that you don’t really see in professional environments these days.
Like I said, I thought we have moved from the specific to the general and Octopus was making a more general comment using the woman with the baby blood lust as a rhetorical device. But maybe Octopus also has a baby in Idaho.
What, pray tell, would be the lifespan of someone wandering around Cultural Revolution China in a skirt that had both Mao and Stalin printed on it?
The skirt has exactly zip to do with the ideology of the people represented on it, any more than I’m a racist for having H.P. Lovecraft’s ugly mug on a t-shirt.
We should be talking about the Reign of Terror. That’s a very good example as to why mob rule and the pursuit of ideological purity should be feared and not encouraged. Yet what we are seeing spread are those illiberal forces.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are hot topics in the HR world right now and my company certainly has some strategic goals with that in mind. But I’d be very concerned if my executives wanted to make continued anti-racist work a part of someone’s evaluation. Did they discuss what specific metric they’d use to determine whether or not someone achieved their goal?
I think this is a good article. It points out that those who make fun of it don’t know what they are talking about while many of those on the left who use the term are equally “unwoke” about those who laugh at the term. In this, truth.
Maybe I’m too harsh on octopus and his theories about the violence of the hard left. For the first time, this morning, my life is touched by the violence associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Some students at my wife’s workplace painted a BLM mural on campus. Someone has called in a terrorist threat to the campus in response to the painting, and the campus is on lockdown. (My wife is working from home today, so she’s safe).
But yes: the problem is 100% those hard leftists. Let’s imagine what the mural painters would do if they were secretly Stalin.
Oh, and apparently anti-abortion protestors have been standing outside the board of elections in my liberal town and yelling with a megaphone at voters going to turn in their ballots. Would you like to explain how it’s really the evil leftists responsible for these acts? Would you like to tell me that these people would literally like to torture their adversaries to death?
I’m working with my fourth graders on a novel study of One Crazy Summer, an amazing and award-winning children’s book about the Oakland 1968 Black Panthers. It takes some liberties with timeline (the kids are involved in the free breakfast program), but otherwise is pretty accurate.
Likely I’m a terrible propagandist indoctrinating our children, from the perspective of the far right.