Keeping Your Company Out of the Culture Wars, Keep it Free to Pursue its Business Purpose

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote an article that offers real-world advice to corporations. They are addressing businesses that want to simply do business while avoiding moral dependency of the up and coming generation that includes many childlike adults who have been coddled all the way through life, including at their elite universities. Here are the first three suggestions list in How To Keep Your Corporation Out of the Culture War: Eight steps business leaders can take to prevent ideological pressure and political conformity in the workplace.

1. Expand your definition of diversity. While racial diversity and gender expression often dominate what people mean by diversity on campus, for a company trying to serve a diverse market in a fast-changing economic environment, having diversity of opinion, diversity of experience, and diversity of social class and geographic background can be even more important. In fact, the kind of diversity most often found to confer advantages on teams is not demographic diversity but rather diversity of perspectives on topics closely related to the task at hand. This includes both functional diversity (e.g., what roles people play in the company) and political diversity (at least when trying to find truth about politically controversial topics).

2. Reconsider what colleges you hire from. While elite colleges offer the promise of bright and hard-working employees, the problems we covered in our book are generally more severe at elite private colleges. You might want to consider hiring from large state schools, and ones from regions of the country other than the West Coast or Northeast. This will increase your diversity by social class and region, and it may help your organization avoid the elite college groupthink that seems to be damaging some organizations, potentially giving your organization a competitive advantage.

You might want to go still further and consider hiring people who have not attended college at all, if you can put in place standards that still guarantee hard-working employees with relevant skills. We believe that the numbers of bright, hard-working, and talented people choosing to skip college or to learn through a less traditional alternative will increase in the coming years, while the ability of elite college graduates to work well with those who do not share their beliefs will continue to decline.

3. Orientation: Be direct with candidates and new hires. If you decide that you want your organization to be politically neutral or self-consciously politically heterogeneous it’s a good idea to say so in job postings, and to introduce that idea to employees from their very first day. For example, you could state: “Our company’s culture is oriented toward success in our mission, which is [lay out business mission here]. We therefore do not take public stands on issues that are not central to our business mission. If you're not willing to work for such a company, or with people who disagree with you on some of your deepest beliefs, this might not be the right organization for you.”

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A Modern Approach for Teaching Your Child about Sex at a Public School

For those of you who are parents, is this how you want sex education taught to your first grader? Is there really a medical school class called "Guessing the Sex of New born Babies"? Sex is anchored strongly to biology. That's what doctors care about. They don't care about "gender" except to the extent that gender means "sex" and only one out of 6,000 babies has an intersex condition.  And how is it that when you go to the humane society to adopt a "female" or "girl" dog or cat, they don't look confused?  They know exactly what you mean.  It's the same thing as doctors, who don't "guess" what sex a baby is, except one out of 6,000 times.

Those who hate "Libs of Tik Tok" are pissed that the creator of that account is holding up the mirror to modern incoherent non-scientific insanity.  My kids are now grown, but if I had first graders and I found out that they were being taught this gibberish, I would be outraged. I write these words as a person who has voted almost entirely for Democrats for the past four decades and who has canvassed for Bernie Sanders. If moderate Democrats don't muster up the courage to speak up, they will have earned the red wave that is currently being predicted.

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Not all Transgender “Affirmative Care” Have a Happy Ending

Excerpt from new article by Suzy Weiss (writing at Common Sense, the Substack of her sister, Bari Weiss). The article is titled "The Testosterone Hangover: The Biden administration says transgender kids are entitled to ‘gender-affirming’ medical care. These girls disagree. ‘I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me.’"

Gender-affirming care, the president’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, explained at a recent press conference, was “best practice and potentially lifesaving.” The point was: If trans kids weren’t able to transition, not just socially, but medically with cross sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries, they might well kill themselves.

The Biden policy was presented as commonsensical, but it is out of step with many progressive countries and some leading experts. Countries that have gone down the “gender affirming” road—like Norway, Sweden, France—are now reversing course in the absence of evidence that such care actually improves mental health outcomes for dysphoric children. Pioneering doctors, like Erica Anderson of the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic—herself a transwoman who has helped hundreds of teens through their transitions—are warning of the dangers of this policy. Critics say that even the phrase "gender-affirming" is misleading—a euphemism for something closer to medical malpractice. When else do we trust children to self-diagnose and make lifelong medical decisions?

And then there is the growing chorus of young people, including Chloe, who had come to regret—deeply—the decisions they had made and the gender-affirming care they had received.

In the middle of this story are teenagers who are largely going unheard by a government and a medical establishment that’s plowing ahead. “I don’t think gender affirming care helps kids like me,” says Chloe. “There should be more regard to alternatives in treating dysphoria, especially when it comes to kids.”

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