Comment by banannaise | Hacker News Reader

Comment by banannaise | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, there are some DEI types who believe that. There are also some anti-DEI types who believe that whites are a superior race, and DEI is a conspiracy to subjugate them. (If you don't believe me, just keep reading the comments.)

Judging a movement by its fringe is unhelpful.

> if there is any discrepency in outcome between two groups (whichever way you cut the population), it is the result of discriminations and power struggles

A more accurate way to frame this would be "If there is any discrepancy... it is likely influenced by discriminations and power struggles, and we should be paying very close attention to the societal factors at play in an effort to reduce their impact."

You end up in looney tunes land pretty quick if you swing too far in either direction with absolute conviction. Too far in favor of DEI, you wind up with things like "actually, women are only physically weaker because they're oppressed". Too far in the other direction, you wind up with things like "actually, crime is genetic".

>Sure, there are some DEI types who believe that. There are also some anti-DEI types who believe that whites are a superior race, and DEI is a conspiracy to subjugate them. (If you don't believe me, just keep reading the comments.)

>Judging a movement by its fringe is unhelpful.

The difference is that the "fringe" DEI types who believe this are the ones running our universities and most of our most powerful institutions, while the "fringe" racists wearing white hoods sipping whiskey around a campfire in West Virginia have no institutional power whatsoever.

Woah buddy, cool it with the WV hatred. You know we broke off from Virginia specifically in opposition to slavery and the secession from the Union, right? Ain't no way we were gonna go off to die for some rich plantation slavers in Richmond.

Montani Semper Liberi

I don’t believe this is true. I think it’s much more nuanced. While some culture war things exist in the context of academia, like DEI, other culture war topics like abortion and qualified immunity have institutional power in the courts. We should definitely avoid black and white cultural notions and over expansion of analysis that confirms existing bias…

I agree, we should definitely avoid binary "culture war" positions because, like everything else, the "culture war" is not a binary issue. Many of the hundreds of millions of people in the country (myself included) hold nuanced views of many issues (like abortion and QI) that don't neatly align with the binary left vs right nonsense en vogue with political partisans and legacy media. All that being said, objective reality has nothing to do with the "culture war". How far along in a pregnancy a woman should be allowed to have an abortion is a matter of legal and political opinion. On the contrary, that genetics play a role in the developments and attributes of human beings is not. It is a scientific fact that you have genetic traits that you inherited from your parents, can be scientifically quantified and measured, and will have an influence on how you develop as a human being. This isn't a legal or political point to be debated, it is a matter of objective reality. There is still much to learn about how much influence genetics have on our various attributes, but there is no debate that the effect exists. We can (or should be) all be able to argue about politics and law without rejecting bits of objective reality that don't jive with what we wish was true.

You’re trying to debate reality of the culture war issues but I’m literally just commenting that the idea that one political extreme have captured all institutions is an extremist view, because multiple institutions have arguably been captured by multiple different political perspectives. Please don’t try to drag me into which political perspective is valid or not.

On this one particular point (DEI and outcome-based metrics), one extreme has captured virtually all of the institutional power.

Whoah... whoah... whoah... how dare you insult whiskey like that!

Though much less culturally prominent, there does seem to be a lot of people who are preoccupied with correlating race and IQ.

"Race" does not exist - it is a completely arbitrary, social construct. Genetics do exist. Different people are going to have different sets of abilities that are grounded in genetics. This is a very uncomfortable idea, for a variety of reasons, even without viewing it through the false, distorted lens of "race". Many people would rather keep their heads in the sand, simply because they wish it to be true that all people are created "equal". Indeed, this is the foundation for of the DEI movement, which puts forth that outcomes are based purely on oppression, systemic discrimination, a lack of opportunities, and so forth. This is not to say that all of those things are not issues, but it is to say that if we want a world in which everyone has an opportunity to succeed and thrive, it is not useful to keep our collective head in the sand about the reality of genetics.

No institutional power? No institutional power. They got their man into the White House. With dank memes.

Those "fringe" racists make up a large amount of whites in the USA. Likely some of your friends, bosses or partners hold those same beliefs, would act in the same way as they would, and feel just as attacked as they do.

to take that further, whenever you see a dichotomy like this, it should be a signal to turn your brain on, not to conform to a side, which is turning your brain off. it's crucial for democracy that we do so.

the best response to a dichotomy is rarely centrism (taking the middle position). that's just implicitly accepting the framework of the dichotomy. critical thinking requires moving laterally among multiple dimensions to uncover the crux of the dichotomy itself (the power interests that form the dichotomy) and to reason yourself into a better framing.

with respect to DEI, the term DEI itself is now political, so that slides us right into the false dichotomy. if we want to talk reasonably about the issue, we should probably leave that term aside.

The group of people who believe (or claim) that any demographic discrepancy is due to discrimination includes Ibram Kendi and other intersectionalists / critical race theorists.

Claiming that these people are somehow at the fringe of the DEI movement is ridiculous. These sorts of beliefs are openly professed and put into action with actual discriminatory policies.

Walking it back to "influenced by factors" is just a classic motte and bailey defense. These people don't act like these factors need to be carefully investigated, they have a fucking checklist and it's all based on race, sex and sexuality.

Then, you try to somehow equate the idea of white supremacy with the idea that DEI is an anti-white movement: as if any defense of white people requires belief in racial superiority. This is ridiculous.

The irony is that it is exactly this sort of biased, sloppy reasoning that has allowed the looney tunes land of DEI to proliferate.

Even if you can point to hard evidence of well recognized figures holding extremist views which are put into practice, there is always some eager nelly standing by to carefully explain why that's actually totally normal and the real worry is those scary right wingers over there.

Absolutely nuts.

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