Posted on 03/28/2024 8:59:09 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
Nincompoop. Nincompoop. Nincompoop.
There, I said it.
I’m in Maryland, and during all of the bridge collapse coverage I haven’t been very impressed with either this mayor or our governor.
But I was very impressed with the head of the State Police, Lt. Col. Butler. I didn’t know anything about him previously, but he seems very capable and ‘on top’ of things.
what if I’m lip syncing to a rap song?
This may explain his defensiveness:
Last year a new Port Commissioner was appointed.
Her qualifications? She founded a diversity consulting firm.
Does “pickaninny” work?
5.56mm
There’s a huge difference between a nigger and a black man. Same as white trailer park trash and a white man. It’s silly to be offended unless someone is telling the truth, then maybe learn to do better.
They’ll use the Race Card every chance they get. Little Peter Buttcrack (Buttieg) used the other day! These idiots are insane and only the insane, loony lefties will go along with it.
Which makes her perfect for a government job paying 6 figures, telling other people how to run a lemonade stand.
What planet does he live on? For decades, productive straight white males have been the silent victims of discrimination, while black hood dwellers are slipping backwards despite all the DEI in their favor.
Mayor Brandon Scott gets engaged on Christmas Day to girlfriend Hana Pugh
Glad you asked. :)
Joy Reid that these attacks on his identity are rooted in racism.
Joy Reid won’t admit it but she uses that word as a training program to hide her hatred for white people.
Before the latest Baltimore mayoral election, I was in my car listening to a conservative talk show on the radio. Someone was being interviewed who gave the most absurdly stupid answers to questions asked of him. I was thinking, "Who is interviewing a special ed student?" It was Brandon Scott being interviewed. And I haven't changed my opinion of him,
I think you are underestimating the completely corrosive effects by DEI and Affirmative Action on society and industry.
Nothing personal here, but you don’t sound as if you realize this DEI poison is being baked into society in general and industry in particular, and the overall effect is disastrous.
DEI and Affirmative Action are, and have been for some time, being encoded into investment, so that investors on a large scale are NOT being encouraged to invest money in competency, but instead are being steered into investing in entities that, instead of focusing on quality and competency, focus on how many women occupy positions in management, or how many minorities are piloting aircraft.
The overall debilitating effect is not a Chicken Little event, it is real. It isn’t people squawking about DEI because they don’t know anything else. It is real.
Damned real.
I am not the only one who is noticing that things are beginning to fail in this country. One of the best things about this country, and anyone who has ever traveled extensively or lived in other countries as I have, knows this, is that people wanted to come to America because things just worked.
You could turn on a water faucet nearly anywhere, water would come out, and you could drink from it with a reasonable degree of safety. If there was an elevator, it worked. If there was a street light, when it got dark, it illuminated.
These types of things seem small, and individually, they are. But collectively, they are meaningful.
In our daily lives, there is far less competency in this society, and it is reaching into every sector. And things like DEI and Affirmative Action are major contributors to this degradation.
In this particular incident, nobody knows yet. It could be terrorism. It could be incompetency. And it could be something that was unavoidable and due to neither of those things such as a bird being sucked into the intake of a jet engine causing a crash.
But anyone who has ever taken the time to study mishaps in ANY arena knows that at the very top of the pyramid of causes, it is almost ALWAYS human error involved. It is rare when erroneous human action does not contribute in a major way to an incident.
In this case, sure, it is a possibility they might have lost power for some completely unforeseeable and unavoidable reason, and did not have time to take appropriate action.
But that is far less likely than a ship experiencing an engine casualty caused by poor maintenance, exacerbated by poor or inadequate training, compounded by administrators who didn’t ensure competency or spend the money for the appropriate maintenance.
If you can’t tell the difference between a knee-jerk leftist who advocates banning guns after a mass shooting, and people who look at an airplane crash and suspect (rightly so in nearly all cases) that incompetent or flawed humans (which DEI and Affirmative Action BY THEIR INHERENT NATURE promote) are always the first weak link to examine in the chain of events, then I think you should re-examine your premises.
In this case, where the mayor decides to play the race card, that says volumes about him, and none of it good.
By the way, this isn’t meant as an attack on you. I have read your posts for many years and respect your views as generally well thought out.
I feel very strongly on this subject.
DEI and Bud Light is an exercise in stupidity, that is certain. But Bud Light is simply bad beer, and that stupidity may only bring down what was once a cultural icon, and the wages of that idiocy means people will lose money and jobs.
DEI in military actions, air traffic control, aircraft design, training, and operation are exercises in death and destruction.
And that goes for maritime operations of seagoing vessels as well.
Thank you your measured and civil reply. This is, in part, why I often cc you in replies in relevant threads.
In sum, I believe what you’re ascribing to DEI and Affirmative Action I ascribe to collectivism. There is overlap but also difference and distinction, and how those of us who love our founding principles ”call our” this or that “cause” can help or hurt America.
First, let me say the Mayor is a dope. The fact that Baltimore remains a high crime city under his leadership is all his. I was no fan of Giuliani when he was Mayor (I worked in NYC back then) but he cleaned it up. Leaders, lead. Losers, deflect.
Second, my chief criticism here is the knee-jerk blaming of this catastrophe on DEI by some, based on Synergy Marine Group (the firm operating the Dali) having a DEI internet page. Not that it matters too much, but I’m not the only one decrying this knee-jerking.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4227184/posts
Third, or possibly part of #2, the last big blow-up “blamed” on DEI - SVB - was a grand example of our side making fools out of themselves in the rush to judgement. To wit: it’s no better than leftism blaming MAGA gunmen after a shooting. SVB lacked a Chief Risk Officer for MONTHS but in that rush, “our side” failed to do basic research and blamed a mid-tier employee IN THE UK who was all about DEI on LinkedIn. A little bit of searching on the interweb would have revealed the difference between risk assessment and comprehensive risk management. But no…gotta blame the DEI monster, even though in SVB the actual culprit was a plethora of things that have zero to do DEI, ESG, and other pet things despised by “the right.”
In the end, we looked stoopid. Because we were.
I don’t doubt the caustic dimensions of promoting losers that have eroded many basic foundational elements of America. But I would submit to you, this transcends DEI. I observed lots of favoritism and elitism that destroyed firms big and small…and that had nuthin to do with DEI. I saw plenty of losers growing up in my white suburban town who would have perished in the Founders’ times. At the same time, I’ve seen a few people who would have been sidelined in my youth (autists, for example) who now have doctorates in math. That’s the result of embracing the Christian virtue of diversity which got integrated with the Populist DEI. It’s a small silver lining, and worth celebrating, but it comes with a cost.
In my view, DEI is a symptom, not a cause, of THE main problem, which is collectivism. Look at Uvalde…the cops got off with barely a slap on the wrist. Educators who groom children are protected by the union and administrators.
Back in the day, bad eggs would be flushed out and strong individuals would be championed. Today, is nobody’s fault…”it’s the system.”
Bud Light was forced tolerance run amok. I don’t care if a guy wants to wear a dress. I thought Divine was a hoot, and FWIW John Waters thinks reassignment surgery for kids is bad. But when their head of marketing hates me and tells me I have to buy their crappy beer and like it, she can go pound sand.
We may agree more than disagree. Or not. But your reply was worth a lengthy reply on my part. I hope it makes sense.
I admit fully I neither looked at the SVB root causes nor commented on it, because I view the abuses there as endemic in the financial system, so I don't feel qualified to comment on that. (also, I am largely a dunce on financial matters beyond the conservative concepts of economics in overviews laid out by the likes of Thomas Sowell)
Your reply made sense. In any criticism, we should wait until all facts are in. I make an exception with regard to speculation on mishap reporting, because humans error is overwhelmingly the root cause of nearly all mishaps in any endeavor where humans are involved in the chain. Speculating on where in that chain human error can occur is normal and necessary. Fixating on where in that chain human error occurs before all information is available is unwise and often, unkind.
With regards to this, in your post, you said: "In sum, I believe what you’re ascribing to DEI and Affirmative Action I ascribe to collectivism..."
On this, I agree, but...it is because I view collectivism, DEI, and Affirmative Action as ALL fundamentally Marxist in nature.
In summary, I view all those as the same thing, and in my mind, it is only the implementation that is a little different. In that light, I don't think we have a significant disagreement on that, although you view DEI and Affirmative Action as "symptoms" and collectivism as the cause, where I group them all together and view them as part and parcel of each other.
My view on this is that DEI/Affirmative Action in the hiring of people in sectors such as entertainment and hospitality is bad, but who really cares about it?
The problem with baking DEI/Affirmative Action in everything at the investment level is that changes the scope, so that Boeing (I choose Boeing only because it is in the news) when hiring people for the engineering design of passenger planes, fully embraces it, resulting in people who are hired because they are female, homosexual, or a minority of some kind.
And, as a result, doors fall off planes, mechanical components fail, or they fall out of the sky because the flight control software is flawed.
When females make up 13%, and black/hispanics each make up 14% of those in Mechanical Engineering, but the focus is on hiring them because of their sex and race instead of their competency, those pushing this are CLEARLY stating that hiring the "correct" percentage of some sort of person with physical characteristics is MORE important than ensuring that a plane full of screaming people doesn't fall out of the sky and kill everyone aboard.
Look at how much has been spent in the last 30-40 years trying to drag women kicking and screaming into STEM fields (like Mechanical Engineering) and STILL women only make up 13% of the workforce in this field.
This should be telling us, loud and clear that it IS NOT because women are being discriminated against, it it is because there are other factors at play in this fake issue of "under-representation) that no amount of money being thrown at it is going to solve.
The effort at running a "High Reliability" organization requires a HUGE amount of discipline, time, and money, and it makes sense in endeavors where failures (such as designing a walkway that collapses and kills hundreds of people) or ensuring that ongoing maintenance efforts in an airline, for example, are funded adequately by the airline, correctly administered by airline administration, scheduled correctly by the departments, performed competently by individual specialists, and verified as safe by trained and experienced inspectors.
As I said in another post, every single one of these aspects, in order to have an airline where planes aren't falling out of the sky, require that every aspect mentioned above is performed in such a way that the attainment of an overall error rate is so low that plane crashes are decadal experiences, not annual ones.
Or monthly ones.
Therefore, the margin for error is so razor thin, that any factor which increases the likelihood of any error at any stage erodes the ability of ANY organization to be a "High Reliability Organization", and over time, it is inevitable that there will be loss of life, property, and money.
DEI and Affirmative Action ENSURE that that margin for error is eroded, and this is a conscious decision. People pushing this have only two reasons for pushing these destructive things: They either want bad things to happen, or they have made the calculation that the bad things that will happen are the price to be paid for the goal of ensuring "representation" in a field or an industry.
I haven't made the leap yet to deliberate and intentional debilitation of quality in order to cause chaos, but it is Marxist in origin, so...I don't rule it out.
Yet.
But I fully believe that people pushing it have made the deliberate calculus that in various fields, addressing "under-representation" is more important than anything else, and I see this as catastrophic. It may not be catastrophic in the hiring of actors to fix "under-representation" in commercials, or reception desk personnel in an office building.
Had a Black roommate in the military. His stance was that “there are black folks, and niggers... Black folks are ok, but watch your back around niggers....”
Chris Rock - Black People vs Ns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
Pretty much exactly that.
And yeah... It felt weird, as a White guy, typing out the exact quote. Been a lot of stigma over it...
Again, we have about 95% agreement and the 5% isn’t worth a flame war. But I feel compelled to explain that 5%.
under-representation
“Proportional representation” is a forced human construct. It doesn’t exist in nature. Now, humans shouldn’t be ruled by the ways of the cuttlefish or cow or osprey, but it IS helpful to remember that men and women populate in professions or groups differently vs society as a whole.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The “bad” is when the natural proportion is suppressed. The problem is that the natural proportion is unknown to man; only God knows it.
Thus, using your example, women make up about 35% of all STEM practitioners vs 51% of the US. However, 51% isn’t necessarily the natural proportion of women in STEM. We don’t KNOW what is that/God’s proportion, but it’s wrong to presume it’s 51%. Indeed, I would never presume to impose that proportion in the NHL.
Parenthetically, STEM excludes many professions that ARE math-intensive such as economics and econometrics. There are many sharp women in those omitted fields. Ironically, women are under-represented in economics (30% by some measures) but I can sure you, depending upon the sub-field (eg in investment advisory, or risk management) their numbers are way higher. Personally, I believe a lot of this proportionality discussion is made muddy by poor data and people not understanding what they’re measuring. That’s a bigger problem, but also one not worth debating here right now.
Therefore, the margin for error is so razor thin, that any factor which increases the likelihood of any error at any stage erodes the ability of ANY organization to be a "High Reliability Organization", and over time, it is inevitable that there will be loss of life, property, and money. DEI and Affirmative Action ENSURE that that margin for error is eroded, and this is a conscious decision.
Here’s the 5%. The High Reliability Organization (HRO) has all sorts of less-than-optimal practices baked into its quantitative history. Favoritism, nepotism, affinity bias, and yea bigotry and the he-man women haters club are all pooled and included in that success rate.
Now, I’m not arguing that the government has an enumerated Constitutional power to regulate the hiring practices to optimize the HRO. Quite the contrary-Paxton and any leftist AG should back off. MYOB.
What I AM saying is that groupthink can be bad. So is your boss hiring his idiot buddy over promoting you. And so on.
Ingesting a wide range of input on a matter that draws from a diverse and informed pool of opinions and thoughts and experience often buffs out the scratches. Across many years of work in some cool HROs, this has always been my experience.
To be fair, that happened ORGANICALLY.
I will go further. I observed lots of less-than-optimal practices. I’m also privy to the occasion of such practices in some major firms and smaller companies. Those less-than-optimal practices wrecked heretofore HROs at the department and firm level.
Therefore, I’m not so quick to condemn firms that work on diversifying their talent pool.
Now, I’m not that stupid….diversification for the sake of diversification without any intent to optimize shareholder value is a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t matter if the diversity metric is age, race, who you want to kiss and then some, or whatever….you need to optimize.
I could go on, but I think you get my point on the 5%.
It is beyond the scope of our chat to examine the minutiae of where DEI for the sake of diversity uncoupled from shareholder - or taxpayer - value has replaced the fabric of America from a ‘may the best man/woman win.” However, lest you think I’m a DU plant(!), there was a story a few years ago from a leftish not-for-profit that embraced DEI and it lead to infighting, allies becoming targets of ire, departures, and a few implosions. It may collapse under its own weight. The closest I could get was this article. https://www.tlnt.com/articles/the-great-dei-resignation-why-are-so-many-diversity-heads-calling-it-quits.
You explained that 5% quite well…
I know where you are coming from. I do think we are wholly in agreement about the silliness of “proportional representation”.
Honestly, I don’t really think they believe it, either. To them, I think it is just another cudgel to beat us with!
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