Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong, but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more objective.
Intra-organization measurements are not the same as inter-oganizations measurements.
(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)
If you do not believe someone can demonstrate merit, you cannot believe in equality of opportunity.
If you do not have Equality of Opportunity all you have left are power structures, usually attached to some degree of structural determinism.
At that moment, you have the same logic as the Communist/Marxian/Dialectic revolutionaries we have seen time and time again. Once they gain power they label everyone else a reactionary.
Saying they don't believe in being able to demonstrate merit is why I suggest they are a Communist/Marxian/Dialectic. Because not only is that stupid in the real world, it is literally a defining feature of the base ideology.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what I did or didn't say. I didn't say people can't demonstrate merit. I said people are bad at measuring merit, and I think that is relatively true on its face, and the subject of a whole mess of thinkpieces and arguments on Hacker News. Shit I thought it was funny there was one posted today:
No where in the article is it suggesting that anyone is pressuring managers to promote demonstrably poor performers for racial reasons. They are being asked to adjust their processes to consider the most candidates.
I think for a medium size group of relatively equal performers, it would be nearly impossible to rank order them in a way you could get a small handful of people to consistently agree with. Everyone seems to love to straw men this with some idea that Microsoft is firing all of their principal engineers to replace them with entry level candidates from state universities.
They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating.
Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear similarities:
1. The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
2. The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.
3. The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.
4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies. See here:
> The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
Wholly untrue. Inequality happens for a whole mess of reasons, including individual ability and interest, it's just not exclusive to that either.
> The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.
We're probably going to disagree on the definition of oppression, but no, there should is no need for "reverse oppression", unfortunately, I can't control how people feel about aid fixes, but I think everyone should be able to pursue opportunity equally.
> The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.
This is taken too far in the other direction where I have to accept every single "DE&I Bad" Argument so as not to seem elitist. This is a complex issue and there are plenty of good arguments on both sides, the original article just didn't attempt to make them.
4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies
"In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist, but, in their opinion, contain elements of feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism or other characteristics of the ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements."
Wow, that is way more involved than I meant it to be. If forgot reactionary was a loaded term, I just meant it to mean that his argument was in reaction to "wokeism" and wasn't independent of that. See item 3.
"The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti-<insert phrase> then too.
Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.