Diversity is not a good thing

Post Reply New Topic

The customer is indeed always right. If they’re more interested in talking to someone of the right gender, or who looks the right gender to them, than in talking to someone knowledgeable, that’s their prerogative. Denying them what they want, no matter your reasons, won’t make them happy and will only alienate them. That’s not how you do business with those types.

I'm well aware of what liberalism is, thank you. You'll note that neither Trudeau nor I are American. I wouldn't consider Tony Blair a liberal, or unfortunately despite some initial promise Emmanuel Macron. I would consider David Cameron to be a liberal conservative, while his chancellor, George Osborne, was a conservative liberal.

Trudeau is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, one of the great liberal parties of the world. Liberal values and progressive values overlap to a great extent; there's no contradiction and most liberals are progressive (although unfortunately the reverse is not true). Trudeau personally has campaigned for equal marriage, legalisation of cannabis, immigration liberalisation (although not nearly far enough...), electoral reform, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and free trade, all primarily liberal causes, as well as equality of opportunity and access to birth control, which are also core liberal positions which progressives are generally equally keen on.

Nordic nations have greater political representation than in other Western countries. For example, Iceland, ranked top (best, smallest) on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap, recently returned 48% of its parliamentarians as women. Most other Western nations remain in upward trends, often pretty sharp ones. It is the height of naivety to simply assume that whatever is happening at present must be truly fair and what people "really want". There are all sorts of obstacles deterring women from getting into politics, everything from pregnancy to being given the cold shoulder by local activists.

The Canadian cabinet seems to be made up of about 35 positions, but the originally announced one contained 30. The Canadian Liberal Party has 100 female nationally elected representatives and 94 male ones (I think; Wikipedia says they have 183 MPs and 11 Senators, and I counted 100 women on their list of central government representatives on their website). A 50-50 Cabinet is pretty much what you'd expect. As far as I can tell, Trudeau didn't "trumpet" this fact, he just answered questions about it.

(On the other hand, you may be aware that the Liberal Democrats currently have fewer MPs than frontbench positions. They make up for this by appointing members of the House of Lords to their front bench. Few people outside the party have noticed that the Lords selected are overwhelmingly female, to balance out the male skew of the party's MPs. That's another liberal party with )

Ah, the old "anything a woman achieves is a man's achievement". I have no respect for this line of argument.


Bottom-up social engineering. It's a bottom-up problem. Top-down solutions are temporary ways to maximise the chances of people reaching their potential while we wait for attitudes at the bottom to change. Experience even suggests that the best way to change attitudes is for the government to take the lead; attitudes towards gay rights have a habit of suddenly becoming much more positive when governments grant those rights, for example.



There's nothing unique or special about the situation in Britain, although of course the monarchy and the Heriditary Lords are inherently racist as well as classist. I don't think there's a nation that doesn't share these issues.

Ethnic minorities (or rather, foreigners) certainly do travel to Britain to study in large numbers. I think something like a third of the ethnic Chinese population of the UK at any time is university students on temporary student visas. Whether attending a prestigious university helps them back home doesn't really seem relevant to whether non-white Brits experience discrimination.

I get that you come from a very homogenous country where these sorts of issues probably don't come up very much (although having said that, Denmark is just over there...). But one of the first things people notice about you is the colour of your skin, and almost everyone demonstrates negative perceptions of other ethic groups, particularly those with darker skin (in a Western context). Ethic minorities don't have the same degree of access to higher social circles where people get introduced to the person who can put in a favourable word. CVs containing non-white names are perceived less favourably. Most non-white people will experience casual racism a few times a month, if not more. And of course, people like people who look like them; if you have organisations which are composed largely of white men, then there's going to be an inclination for white men to want to join the organisation and to be more likely to be accepted when they try.

I list these more as demonstrations than anything. People don't sit around hoping that no black people apply for the job (and fortunately, racists tend to live in all-white places far from the major cities), but nonetheless, there are all sorts of barriers facing non-white people which a white person can easily go their whole life without considering. From reading essays by people from around the world, and looking at things like surveys of attitudes, I think equivalents to these barriers exist in most or all countries, and they will prove very difficult to eliminate. As liberals, we must make it our goal.

No one is denying them their request. The advice I'm giving is that even though the customer is not always right, he or she should be treated that way, especially if the worker wants to keep his or her job.

Rather than expressing lofty and unrealistic ideals, it's better to put it into practical terms: humility and customer satisfaction or pride and unemployment -- which is more important?

Walrus already paled over anything I would've, in a vacuum, and more, so I'll take race soldiering off this thread.

If you can't see how homogeneity clashes with opportunity then idk, I'd assume you were a bit tone deaf to the effects and, more importantly, the causes of it. I mean just look at America's history with red-lining, for example, and how it has affected the present day. I guess you would have to believe in the wholeness of a meritocracy and that you, as everyone, have the same opportunity.

Sorry, does not parse. Please re-state.

I'm tired Fnord.

Tired.

I've only rehashed what Walrus has already said, pls don't make me have to write some more.

It's only not a good thing due to clash of differences of religious and cultural views.

You're assuming immediately diversity only ever means race. It can also refer to class background, poverty, etc., but like I've said already, nobody hires people just on their skin colour alone. Equality acts don't work that way. You're perceiving it as a function that entirely overlooks merit for the sake of diversity. This is false.

I can imagine it's oftentimes a combination of diversity and qualification, I fail to see how this is a bad thing.

Most countries are constructed upon the principles of meritocracy but most still have their effects of prejudice felt. I don't believe in a whole meritocracy because this assumes that everybody is given the same opportunity at the same time. In America, few people can join university and become graduates. Trump is rich because he was born rich. This is more bordering on a bourgeoisie aristocracy than an actual meritocracy.

Essentially, I can imagine the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. Without the fundamental concepts of a true meritocracy in place, that celebrates diversity and equality, then this trend will continue, widen the chasm and have lasting effects for generations.

I always assume until proven otherwise someone who got somewhere is there on merit. Meritocracy is still more prevalent than diversity politics in moving people into positions. However if I knew somewhere was run under diversity politics I would seek out non diverse people to do business with. Because while some of the diverse people might have been there prior to diversity politics or might have got their job thanks to the quotas but wouldn't have needed the quotas to get the job on merit, you know for sure that 1. The non-diverse person got in by meritocracy (well, they might be the boss's child or something and be bad, but we're playing percentages here) and 2, well my default presumption until I actually typed it here was that the overall average standard of the non-diverse people will rise as presumably the least valuable of them will be culled to make way for the diversity hires. But then I got to thinking, they may well cull the least diverse rather than the least productive. Starting with the old, white, straight males. That's an interesting thought, if they hire according to diversity politics, will they fire by the same politics too rather than meritocracy? Meritocracy just makes so much sense and is so ingrained in me that it was my logical default presumption, but maybe not. I hear the stories about people being run out of jobs for being old, straight, white and male. It would make a lot of sense if like I said in my OP the same diversity = good, white, male, old, straight = bad thought process applied to the hiring is applied to the culling.

By the way, since British politics has come up, that reminds me. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have women only shortlists:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-women_shortlist

In a nutshell, in a significant number of constituencies for those parties, men are barred from running to be chosen as that party's candidate for election as an MP there. Of course, there are no male only shortlists. So if you see a woman running to be an MP for Labour or the Liberal Democrats, there's a good chance she's not there on merit. The infamous Jess Phillips is an example of an MP who went through a woman only shortlist, and amusingly I've seen this fact used to argue both for and against women only shortlists.

There are efforts to make BAME only shortlists a thing as well.

Good morning.

Please re-state.

The bolded section is just rubbish. I'm not even going to bother getting down in the details; even if they were as you assume, AWS do not mean that the nominee is not chosen on merit.

Why, in heaven’s name, is diversity not a good thing?

The most beautiful people, sometimes, are products of physically very diverse folks.

I wouldn’t want to live around an area which only contains white Jews with light hair and blue eyes.

I find cultures interesting. And cultures should not be dissolved under “melting pots.”

Of course it does. There's some merit in beating out the other women on the shortlist but she didn't have to go past a man when men make up the majority of political candidates. These parties are handicapping themselves.

Remember, it's only in the narrow confines of diversity politics. You wouldn't want people hired because they're beautiful, would you? (Unless it's a modelling job.)