Dishonest diversity right now is the mainstream version of diversity. It slices and dices individuals into categories and then leaves them there. Now, I acknowledge in my book that labels can be starting points for further discovery, but they should never be finish lines, because labels can lie. They flatten each of us to one dimension, and vaporize all the rest that makes us, as I put it in the book, plurals.
By that I mean that all of us — the so-called white straight guy, as much as the queer Muslim — all of us are so much more than meets the eye.
The people of the United States need to have a robust and wide-open conversation on this proposal. I don't know that a meaningful conversation would be possible, however, given that so many people now support censorship, cancellation, ad hominem attacks, words-are-harmful, Manicheanism and the idea that we should divide all people into two--count'm, two--"colors." I think Chris Rufo is correct in his prediction that a large majority of Americans would support his proposal.
In the meantime, the annual DEI budget for the University of Michigan is $18M.
The university’s vice provost for equity and inclusion, Tabbye Chavous Sellers, is the highest-paid DEI staffer. Sellers, the wife of former DEI provost Robert Sellers, makes $380,000. Seventeen DEI staffers make more than $200,000 in total compensation, according to the data. Ninety-five staffers make more than $100,000 in total compensation.
That annual expenditure would be enough money to pay the instate tuition for 1,075 students.
I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.
Excerpts:
“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”
. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.
You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.
One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.
On October 29, the newly minted MacArthur “genius” posted the results of a widely discussed survey project on Twitter, saying simply: “More than a third of white students lied (about their race) on their college applications.” Kendi went on to claim that about half of the students who chose dishonesty falsely identified themselves as Native American—presumably to benefit from affirmative action programs—and that “more than three-fourths” of all students who lied about their racial background were accepted to colleges they applied to. As any academic should, Kendi duly linked his source, which I also provide here.
The backlash to Kendi’s comments was immediate, and, frankly, rather predictable. As Oliver Traldi details for Quillette, and as Jerry Coyne does for the popular blog Why Evolution Is True, conservative and heterodox intellectuals pointed out that Kendi’s claim about white students seeking to benefit from affirmative action logically debunks the main thesis of his scholarly work. Founder and former editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald not only questioned the objective accuracy of Kendi’s data, but also noted that his argument “negates every core contention about American society on which his career is based.” Journalist Alex Griswold described Kendi as having “blown up his life’s work,” noting that Kendi would “have to delete” his tweet, which, in fact, he did.
I'm not a fan of singing the national anthem before a baseball game. Patriotism and the anthem have nothing to do with playing a sport. Absolutely nothing. The anthem wasn't even played at Major League Baseball games until 1918. There's nothing magic about the anthem. The lyrics are not compelling today and it's not even a beautiful melody. It is a great excuse for powerful people to push ordinary people around by challenging their patriotism if they resist. That's why, even since the anthem started being played in 1918, no one was able to uproot it and yank it out of baseball games to speed up the games (which desperately need speeding up). In fact, given that there were 2,430 Major League Baseball games played in 2022, assuming that it takes 2 minutes to sing the anthem and given that 65 million American fans attended attended MLB baseball games in 2022, this means that more than 5 Billion person/hours were spent listening to the National Anthem at MLB games in 2022 (5,265,000,000). The song is not a fan favorite. It doesn't stand on its own. I doubt that of those fans ever bought a recording of the national anthem, none of them sing it in the shower, and none of them seek to listen to it as a work of art.
Enter musician Jose Feliciano, who sang the national anthem for Game 5 of the World Series between the Cardinals and the Tigers. Here is Jose's unique version, which is much in keeping with his musical style. I enjoyed it.
But this version was too much for some of the fans, who booed after Jose finished singing. The Tigers even blamed him for the losing that game. Here's what Feliciano had to say about his version of the anthem:
Baseball is permeated with ritual, one of which is the singing of the national anthem, which must be played, or else. And even if one is a gifted musician, it must be song close enough to the standard version, or else. Why? Just because.
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