Self-Imploding Woke-Permeated Organizations

Can Woke people even get along with each other? Apparently not. Aaron Sibarium reports on "Women Against Abuse." 

"One of the largest domestic violence groups in the United States offered to pay "BIPOC" employees more than white ones; asked white staffers to sign a statement affirming their innate racism; and discouraged black abuse victims from calling the cops."

There are many more examples. Woke workplaces tend to destroy the ability to do meaningful work. A recent example is the meltdown at The Washington Post, featuring Felicia Sonmez. Here's what tends to happen when social justice warriors invade the workplace, as reported by Ricki Schlott.  And if you'd like a lot more example of woeness destroying morale, check out this article by Ryan Grimm at The Intercept:

ELEPHANT IN THE ZOOM: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Here is an excerpt:

A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.

“I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.” Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept.

The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization’s management. “If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,” blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.)

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society . . .

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Biden’s Proposed Title IX Procedural Rules Bring Back Kangaroo Courts at Colleges

What is the best way to determine whether a person engage in sexual harassment or sexual assault at a university? What procedural safeguard should we offer, given the fact that being expelled from college could destroy a person's career?

The National Review Compares the current rules (enacted by Trump's secretary of education Betsy DeVos) to the rules being proposed by Joe Biden. The article is titled, "Guilty until Proven Innocent: Biden Title IX Changes Mean Return to ‘Dark Ages’ for Falsely Accused Students."

While the woman who’d accused him of rape appeared before a Columbia University panel in June 2017, Ben Feibleman was in another room watching it on Zoom.

Feibleman was not allowed to cross-examine his accuser during the hearing to determine if he would be expelled from the school, potentially scarring his personal and professional life permanently. He wasn’t even allowed to be in the same room with her.

During the hearing, Feibleman was also barred from discussing a medical report that found his accuser was likely not impaired or unable to consent to sexual activity the night of the alleged assault. He was barred from discussing his accuser’s behavior that he said eventually caused her friends to doubt her. If Feibleman mentioned any of it, he’d be removed from the hearing.

Feibleman’s written statement to the three-member hearing panel was heavily redacted, according to court records. The panel took no testimony. Members refused to ask questions of Feibleman or his accuser that Feibleman had repeatedly begged them to ask about evidence he’d submitted in his favor — hundreds of photos, videos, and a damning audio recording.

And then the panel found Feibleman guilty. He was expelled and denied his diploma.

“Nobody had any interest in my version of events,” Feibleman told National Review.

Feibleman’s experience with a less-than-fair quasi-judicial university hearing was not unique in the years after the Obama administration issued Title IX guidance documents directing the nation’s colleges and universities to crack down on sexual harassment and sexual violence cases on and off campus. The Obama-era guidance essentially tipped the scales in the direction of the accusers, typically women, with millions of dollars of federal funding for schools on the line. [More . . . ]

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Gender Ideology: Colin Wright Offers a Case Study

How does one explain "the sudden and dramatic rise in the number of children being referred to gender clinics for gender dysphoria—the experience of distress caused by a perceived mismatch between one’s biological sex and “gender identity.”

Biologist Colin Wright followed one recent case on the Facebook Group, “Trans People and the Allies Who Support Them” Facebook Group.? Here's a great recipe if you would like to confuse and abuse a young child.

[This sudden and dramatic rise of such cases] is likely due to the equally sudden rise of a radical new ideology—gender ideology—which is a set of beliefs asserting that whether someone is a man/boy or woman/girl is entirely rooted in one’s subjective “gender identity” as opposed to one’s objective biological sex. In practice, “gender identity” reflects an individual’s affinity to, or rejection of, masculine and/or feminine stereotypes.

This truly radical reconceptualization of what it means to be a man, woman, boy, or girl, does not come without equally radical and harmful consequences. The harm results from the fact that the completely natural and common tendency of some individuals of each sex to exhibit gender nonconforming personalities and behavior is now being incorrectly interpreted as being transgender—a psychological condition that requires treatment.

The current standard of care is called “gender-affirming therapy,” which is the practice of immediately accepting and accommodating a child’s new identity without question or exploration of causal factors. Initially this often means participating in the child’s social transition, which can involve calling the child by a new name, using new pronouns, and allowing them access to spaces (e.g. bathrooms) that “match” their claimed identity. Following social transition, the next step often involves taking puberty blockers to halt further body development, and then cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions such as double mastectomies (removal of breasts) in girls, or orchiectomies (removal of testicles) in boys.

[More . . . .]

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Journalist Amanda Ripley Avoids the News

Journalist Amanda Ripley has a "secret." She avoids reading the news. Here article is titled: "I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?"

Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working? . . .

I found that there are three simple ingredients that are missing from the news as we know it. First, we need hope to get up in the morning. Researchers have found that hope is associated with lower levels of depression, chronic pain, sleeplessness and cancer, among many other things. Hopelessness, by contrast, is linked to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and … death. . . .

Second, humans need a sense of agency. “Agency” is not something most reporters think about, probably because, in their jobs, they have it. But feeling like you and your fellow humans can do something — even something small — is how we convert anger into action, frustration into invention. That self-efficacy is essential to any functioning democracy. . . .

Finally, we need dignity. This is also not something most reporters think about, in my experience. Which is odd, because it is integral to understanding why people do what they do.

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