The price of diversity

[frostfire]

I put this under comedy section because at the end of the day it was amusing and hillarious

To spice up qualification, my unit did team championship for sections to compete against each other. I'm the marksmanship OIC, distinguished and compete on the army's dime, so I couldn't be part of my section team. Two NCOs with the same rank and ethnicity were the top scorers in last year individual excellence in competition match, so the outcome of the team match was certain with those two and another two above average shooters as a team.

After catching some flak and sneers from other sections, I nonchalantly told my NCO's that each of them would form team and make sure it reflects Army's top priority of SHARP/EO i.e. the teams represent everyone. As in e.v.e.r.y.o.n.e.
I left them in charge and continued 1:1 coaching with shooters who were still shooting on the line.

When I came back, the teams were already moving towards the firing line. The NCO's had come up with the perfect EO team!
The team had officers of various ranks, NCO of various ranks, junior enlisted, multiple ethnicities, all genders, various age groups, and a cadet!
I guess they failed to catch my sarcarsm.
Care to guess how our perfect EO teams perform in the match?

Yep, that is the price of "forced" diversity. But hey, we accomplished SHARP/EO goals.
Who cares about marksmanship anyway. It's such an archaic, sexist, discriminating concept.
Ever see the top lead slingers in any shooting discipline in the US? They can use more diversity.

[Peregrino]

Measureable progress Comrade FF; the proletariat acknowledges you. Unfortunately, by not redefining success to meet the party's goals (focus on diversity vs. performance outcomes [marksmanship - unacceptable, recidivist sexist term prone to causing an individual to concentrate on personal achievement vs. party goals]), you've only accomplished part of the mission. Report to your anointed Political Commissar for remedial SHARP/EO/EEO indoctrination and a mandatory Maoist auto-flagellation session immediately. (I need to get better at channeling BL; sadly my heart just isn't in it any more.)

[Box]

some of you jokers just dont get it....

If 'the party' says there are five fingers, then damnit, there are five fingers.

[bailaviborita]

When the Left Turns Against Itself

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/o...e-iphone-share

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.

A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.

[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by bailaviborita

When the Left Turns Against Itself

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/o...e-iphone-share

Irony. LMAO.

[bblhead672]

Interesting to watch the various extreme left factions turn on each other. I've read a few places where it has been said that the radical leftists blacks have no interest in anything to do with whites or other races-even if most of their other goals are the same.
Maybe they all will decide to take up arms against each other and thin the leftist herds without assistance from any groups on the right.

[Box]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

Maybe they all will decide to take up arms against each other and thin the leftist herds without assistance from any groups on the right.

I think we would end up with a bunch of dead patriots that intervened in order to protect these idiots from one another...
...because WE are the good guys and thats what we do.

we protect the weak
THEY are the weak...

they are just very dangerous when they stampede - like all dumb animals

[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by Billy L-bach

I think we would end up with a bunch of dead patriots that intervened in order to protect these idiots from one another...
...because WE are the good guys and thats what we do.

we protect the weak
THEY are the weak...

they are just very dangerous when they stampede - like all dumb animals

Kind of like Buffalos. Why can't they be more like Lemmings?

[frostfire]

Originally Posted by Billy L-bach

some of you jokers just dont get it....

If 'the party' says there are five fingers, then damnit, there are five fingers.

The day drinking has started I see...

Originally Posted by Peregrino

Kind of like Buffalos. Why can't they be more like Lemmings?

um....more firearms can achieve minute-of-buffalo accuracy than minute-of-lemming at distance

[PRB]

Mediocrity

[Penn]

Democrats have formally re-instituting segregation on a national level. It began on campuses with identity politics in elite universities. Different ethnic groups demanding safe spaces, Black/Spanish/Asian only privilege. Recently argued that the unintended consequence of this process have over turned Brown vs the Board of Ed, 1954, and that the new mantra for the left should envision George Wallace's historical statement on the capital step in 1968. "Segregation Now, Segregation forever"!

This is a copy of the reply I received.

Hi Dennis!

Thanks for forwarding this. I have more than a couple of thoughts about it. Harvard has always been a highly segregated place, particularly in the College. When I was there in graduate school more than 50 years ago, the undergraduate residential houses were implicitly segregated by student type: nerds, townies, preppies, jocks, etc. All of this was pretty much whites only, just because there were very few students of color in the college, and it had not been so long since Jews were, if not excluded, controlled by the admissions process. The graduate student experience then, and apparently now as well, is one of silo: nose to the grindstone, specialize for professional advantage, get your degree asap, and move on.
So it does not surprise me that black graduate students from different departments/programs don’t know each other: nobody from different departments/programs knows many people from other departments/programs.
That said, no doubt the current situation is very different from the one a half-century (!) ago. There was a hullabaloo at Penn recently about the proposal of having a day on campus when only students of color would meet on campus, while white students would meet off-campus. This is a reversal of what has already been happening, but reversed as to who goes off-campus and who stays on.

There are a couple of ways to think about it. The optimistic way is to see what’s happening as an equilibration, fluctuations leading to a relatively comfortable homeostasis. This happened, for example, in respect to gender discrimination in elite colleges. Fifty years ago there were no women at Harvard; they were segregated into Radcliffe. That discrimination has disappeared, and feminism has moved on to other battles. Re racial discrimination, the current fuss at Harvard arises in part just because there are so many more people of color atttending Harvard graduate and professional schools. The current problem reflects success rather than failure. On this theory, following the evolution of the trend toward gender equality in higher education, we can anticipate tugging and hauling that will reach a new balance.

The other, pessimistic view is that rising expectations among people of color runs ahead of the system’s abilities to respond meaningfully to them, and that this will accelerate viciously rather than equilibrate. The scenario you describe in your email is of this sort.

A third possibility is that examples of both vicious acceleration and equilibration will happen, in different institutions. What will be in play is not only “the facts of the matter” but how the facts are framed and interpreted. We see this already in college admissions, regarding Asian and Asian-American students. Penn, for example, has very actively sought applications from Chinese and Korean students. The Asian percentage in the college has grown rapidly. The same is true in the U.C, system, where “color-blind” admissions at Berkeley have produced a college student body that is close to 50% Asian and Asian-American. It could happen (though I think the likelihood is small) that white students would lobby and organize for separate graduations, etc.

At the most general level, one can see what’s going on as the continuing saga of race in America. White folks get tired of feeling bad about it; after all, not everything is rosy in white American either. And no doubt, step-wise improvements in the situation of racial minorities leads to increased, rather than decreased, expectations by the disadvantaged class. Expectations framed as demands pisses the majority off. Etc.

Enough.

So, back to basics: how are you? I have a question and a recommendation.

The question is this: I think that some time ago I ordered a tote bag from you. Is that enterprise still ongoing? I’d still like to buy the tote bag, and now I don’t remember what the story is, or was, about it.

The recommendation: Interact Theater opened a new play last night that I’m sure will interest you for a few reasons. It’s called “How to Use a Knife.” It’s set in the kitchen of a restaurant, with a cast that includes two Guatemalan cooks, an African dishwasher, and an owner, chef, busboy, and immigration agent who are Anglo/white. It is a powerful play, wonderfully produced in Interact’s new theater at the Drake. I’m sure you and Estella would be moved by it. Full disclosure: I’ve become a member of the Interact board of directors.

I’ve written something that connects theater in Philadelphia to the politics of identity in theater, just as we have been discussing it in higher education. I attach it here for your interest.

Yours as always,
gb
XXXXXX XXXXXXX, Ph.D., J.D.
Lecturer in Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
3720 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Subject: Harvard Graduation

[frostfire]

Originally Posted by Penn

What will be in play is not only “the facts of the matter” but how the facts are framed and interpreted. We see this already in college admissions, regarding Asian and Asian-American students. Penn, for example, has very actively sought applications from Chinese and Korean students. The Asian percentage in the college has grown rapidly. The same is true in the U.C, system, where “color-blind” admissions at Berkeley have produced a college student body that is close to 50% Asian and Asian-American.

This got me thinking. Can it be seen as a practical supply-demand capitalistic approach? After all, if certain group of students provide higher grade, more resilient to brutal nose-to-grind academic demands, and consequently elevate the school reputation, attract grant money, latest research breakthrough, etc., would it not be understandable that school would want to have more of that group?

If the NFL, NBA, AMU, SOF, various national shooting teams can pull it off, then why not higher institutions?

Yes, it is alarming if higher education only caters to those who are driven and whose parents are strongly invested in their children's academic performance. But a responsible society would fix the problem at the home/parental level.

I concur with PRB, the price of (forced) diversity is mediocrity.

[Penn]

In this mind, the recruitment of certain ethnicity, regardless of how PC, especially with the Ivy's, is playing forward politically. Generations down the road, a ruling class (elite) is created and which possess the same value system and world view, in those countries that are a deemed a strategic, be it grain, energy, or resources.