The Problem with Many DEI Trainings

Jesse Singal raises many red flags regarding DEI trainings in his article, "What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?" I agree with many of his concerns, but I don't think it took any research to be wary of these trainings. In fact, the default should have been to not hold any such "trainings" until they could be shown to be effective in encouraging human flourishing. That was not done, of course, so now we have a multi-billion dollar industry that is self-interested in promoting these struggle sessions in order to maintain continued employment, often at absurd levels of compensation.

D.E.I. trainings are designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on. The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net-negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about." ....

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary re-understanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are intentionally designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

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News Media Fail Regarding the COVID Risk to Children

The "news" about COVID and our children. Matt Orfalea's latest mashup about our national hysteria, about the continuing calls to vaccinate and mask 3-year olds. The real stats representing the risks are embedded in this video and they represent a shocking mismatch between reality and the news media portrayal of the risk. See also, Matt Taibbi's added analysis:

Living in America in the last 6-7 years has been like being trapped in a fugue state, where reality is kaleidoscopic, memory is elusive, and moments of clarity sometimes more jarring than reassuring. To be reminded of what we were told day after day for years, after being trained to forget, is like waking from an unpleasant dream, prompting thoughts like, “Did that really happen?”

In Matt’s video, we see how the pandemic was reported not as a collective problem to be solved, but a horror movie to be passively experienced. This is a media approach we see deployed in a variety of issues from fake news to “sonic weapons,” one that trains frightened audiences to endorse extreme solutions and outsource thinking to authorities. This makes it all the more important that we remember episodes like “Children of the COVID,” the next time we’re told to Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Pandemic coverage was also a classic example of how reporters now are often not really free to write in nuanced ways about politically charged issues. Even a breezy writing style can be taken as evidence of secret political unsuitability.

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Hillary Clinton Tries to Inject Life into the Dead Theory of Russian Collusion

Someone needs to urge Hillary to take a deep breath and go read the Twitter Files for herself. No need to trust Taibbi. Just go read the files themselves on Twitter. BTW, you won't find meaningful information about these historic disturbing disclosures at NYT/MSNBC/NPR/WaPo, because it would be too embarrassing for them to admit that they were actively cheerleading the fraud for years. Here is a rare exception

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Stanford Declares “The Science” instead of Engaging in the Scientific Method

This is an excerpt from article by highly regarded Stanford Researcher, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose account was shut down by Twitter, recently restored. An excerpt:

About a year later, after historian Phil Magness made a FOIA request, I learned a part of the story of how the U.S. government-sponsored propaganda campaign against the GBD came into being. Four days after we wrote the GBD, Francis Collins, the geneticist and lab scientist who was then the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and lab scientist who is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the email, Collins called Martin, Sunetra, and me “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a devastating public takedown. The attacks on the three of us, aided by the cooperation of supposedly private social media platforms like Twitter, were launched shortly after Collins sent that email.

But this is not an article about the ethics of social media companies whose profits depend to a large extent on the friendliness of government regulators and whose employees may see themselves as partisan political activists. This is a critique of our best universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—yet which turn out to be no different than government propagandists and private corporations in their self-seeking, amoral behavior.

. . . .

Stanford failed to meet the higher standard of positive academic freedom, which would have required it to promote an environment where faculty members engage with each other respectfully despite fierce disagreement.

. . . .

The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.

The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.

The title to the article: "How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test: For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed."

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The Lies Told by Governments and their Allies

George Galloway eloquently states the facts about the about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, smashing the official lies, one by one. Who told these lies? Governments in bed with weapons contractors and people who pretended to be journalists, who actually served as their stenographers. For those thinking that such a big lie is not possible, here's your proof. It's possible for powerful people to tell a big lie in broad daylight and never be called out on it. Or maybe not for 20 years, when it is too late to save hundreds of thousands (or millions) of lives.

The lies we heard regarding Iraq should make us pause whenever a government official looks us straight in the eyes and tells us to trust them. It's possible that they are telling the truth, but governments and their newspapers have a long history of misleading us. We need to always keep this in mind. The Twitter Files are blowing up more big government/corporate/media lies every week and the official silence is deafening and telling.

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