Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

[sebastian_dangerfield]

You were calling DEI a form of authoritarianism, and I was saying it was exactly the opposite, in that it is not really changing anyone's behavior much at all. Saying that companies spend money on DEI consultants or lose money with ESG is missing the point.

Except it is. It's a cult that's caused corporate America to engage in performative rituals. Performative rituals are not conducive to productivity. Companies exist to make money, period.

HR is enough of a cash suck/cost center already. Larding it with DEI strictures is throwing sand in gears. At one point in my life, and very annoying one, I had to work with an HR head managing 1100 people. This kind of stuff drove everyone nuts. "This is sexist, that's discriminatory, we should have a workshop." Pissed away a small fortune getting opinions from outside counsel on employment matters. Godawful, tedious.

I believe all sorts of things about the laptop. I believe Hunter Biden has done things I disapprove of, and I wouldn't vote for him. I didn't vote for him. I voted for his father, and he is being dragged through the mud in an effort to harm his father, as we all know. If he were a Republican, you would be full of sympathy for the way he is being abused, but since he is a Democrat, it doesn't bother you -- you think his dick pics should be on the news.

If the Trump kids had such a laptop, it'd have been on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Don Jr's dick picks would still be a meme today.

And you know it. There's a double standard in the media (legacy and social) and only a liar or a knave would state otherwise. And it's defended, laughably, as efforts to stanch misinformation.

But the Biden laptop is just one of the most recent examples of it. Recall how the media got in line and parroted Bush's bullshit to get us into Iraq? How about the stamping out of lab leak theories as disinformation, and worse yet, racism? How about the endless bullshit about the efficacy of masks? Even Fauci has admitted lying about that. But it's okay, and we shouldn't talk about his lies, because they were noble lies - those who know what's best for everyone else needed to get people in line.

There's an official narrative on everything these days, and what doesn't fit it is branded false. The left should give Trump a lifetime achievement award for gifting it the greatest weapon of all time: the allegation, "Fake news!" It's fucking brilliant. Destroys opposition in two syllables.

I'm not defending the pieties you want to mock (but aren't mocking). I'm saying they don't exist. You carp and carp and carp about how you can't say the things that you and many other people are saying.

I couldn't and can't say those things in public. I go along to get along just like everyone else. It's only in private where one can do so.

Your both-sidesism is apologism for authoritarianism. Left-wing authoritarianism exists -- it's called Communism. It is a real problem in some parts of the world, like China. But not in the US. Here, the authoritarian threat is from the right. And your both-sidesism is a myopic effort to deny reality, to invent a non-existent left-wing counterpart to MAGA.

Your refusal to see authoritarian creep all around you is kind of surprising. You're not a blindered sort. But I think you're so tied to the idea that it can only come from the right that to show you how it insidiously comes from the left incenses you. It's like pissing on some article of faith.

There are all sorts of things you can't say at many large organizations, because saying them reveals that you are a little dim, with poor judgment, someone who doesn't know how to fit in. You can poke fun at DEI just like you can poke fun at Finance. (But if you go after either in the wrong way, you are demonstrating that you don't know how to play.)

Here's where you shift and adorn yourself with the wise cynic hat. It is a game, and you're right - only a fool fails to act as a Roman when in Rome. But we're not in Rome. The conversation here is inconsequential, only had for the purpose of the intellectual exercise. If your immediately preceding statement is true, if you mean it, then you and I don't really disagree. We both admit things like DEI are feel good performative behaviors. We only disagree on the extent to which they impact things (you say not much; I say they are productivity-sucks and cash machines for manipulative consultants).

But on your last point, I don't see any right way to poke fun at these things. And things like DEI, or ESG, are not like finance at all. People hold these things to be so virtuous as to be beyond reproach. I can make fun of finance all day long, anywhere. Nobody takes offense or thinks one "dim" for doing so. Finance doesn't care; it's making money. Poke fun at a DEI consultant or exec and see how that flies. Better yet, try it with a Dean or Professor. These things are sanctified. And what's sanctified is... religion.