Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
John Leo says “Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are ever on the move.” Now why, I have to ask, must a movement designed to get rid of something rather than to create more of something, be restless and ever on the move?
Yale already has an impressively vast diversity bureaucracy headed by Nydia Gonzalez, the new chief diversity officer. She is working on a long-term plan, “Diversity Yale 2010 and Beyond.” Each school has its own system of diversity apparatchiks. There’s even a Yale library diversity council with 10 to 16 members and a three-year diversity program. Now Yale’s Coalition for Campus Unity (CCU) is encouraging the residential colleges to create “some kind of diversity-awareness position or board.” A board of, say, ten members in each college would add 120 new officials – another diversity gusher. Last February, Yale continued its long-term program to segment the student body into ever smaller ethnic and sexual groups. It hired a new assistant dean for Native American affairs. Can anyone say that a provost for the transgendered is somehow out of the question?
Why does Yale, or any university, need to keep creating more diversicrats? Undergraduate Robert Sanchez says his group, CCU, “thought most Yale students lacked sufficient cultural awareness,” i.e. a high enough degree of enthusiasm for the diversity movement. Sanchez, according to the Yale Daily News, seems distressed that “when we have these forums and panels we are preaching to the choir because only a certain demographic of students attend the event.”
“Diversity” has an ugly truth to it. It is the one pursuit that, on an intellectual level, is devastated completely — not just intellectually embarrassed, but intellectually devastated — by a simple rhetorical exercise. You supervise a team of ten minorities. Two of them quit. You replace them with two six-foot-tall, right handed, straight white guys. What did you do to the diversity of your team?
The mathematician, or anybody else who works in a formal discipline that has a utilitarian requirement for the d-word…not a political requirement, but a utilitarian one…would have no choice but to answer “you just increased it.” But of course that isn’t the correct answer.
Now, perhaps it’s overstating things to say “diversity” is what we call it when we deal career and economic injury and destruction to straight white guys. Or perhaps that could be called an over-simplification. But the awkward truth of things is that diversity is not race- or gender-neutral. It is a code word to promote the population of, and success of, certain groups of people. Toward other groups of people, it is hostile at worst…apathetic at the very best.
Perhaps the most pernicious canard about the d-word, is that it is costless — a canard left unspoken, although people in positions of great authority are implicitly required to behave as if they think it’s true. The truth is, the d-word cannot be costless. When you are young, you don’t have the opportunity to develop basic aptitudes that involve independence, creativity and resourcefulness, when there are officers occupying high positions for no greater purpose but to ensure that the success of your group against other groups is guaranteed. And enforced. And measured. And…that next year and the year after, there will be more officers working toward exactly that.
Needless to say, your opportunities are similarly denied when you’re a member of the group targeted. It hurts everyone. The thing we’re supposed to be calling “diversity,” on the other hand, really is harmless or ought to be harmless. It’s just this other thing, this quite different thing, to which we’ve started to affix this word. The simple fact that this thing is on a never-ending mission to expand itself, is a red flag the size of a city block all by itself.
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