The new inclusion policy put out by Amazon Studios offers entries on "womxn" and "acquired limb difference." Meantime, the company's drivers urinate in bottles.
Like Greenwashing (remember LEED certified?) that proved a marketing genius and an engineering fraud. The policy of Affirmative Action, that for the last +- 40 years was also a marketing dream for business and universities, and a sinker for most working class men.
Women it turns out got most of the University, Board Positions, and Grants not "People of Color". Wealthy and networked males (private schools) didn't suffer for a minute, but my generation (a mass of us) had to let a less qualified person take their place . Most of us did that graciously to heal past wounds but our sacrifice got us nowhere. Those shown to the head of the line are even angrier and now demand the respect that most American's withhold from "Insiders" and "line cutters".
One of the nice things about streaming is that one can easily be exposed to foreign cultures and people of all ethnic groups. We are currently enjoying a Korean series and a long one from Turkey.
If I could give free advice to the big corporations, it would be to intelligently navigate the anti-diverse “diversity” mania. Mining companies and basket ball teams could hypothetically be charged with diversity failure (gender and race, respectively). Diversity comes in many forms apart from melanin and genitalia. One would think the PR folks at these corporations would advise against such foolishly sheepish behavior. I am guessing the market response will introduce a mediating effect.
One would hope so, but who knows. You don't about know what you don't get. I don't know the quality of health care I'm not getting if the doctors and researchers are hired because of demographics and not brilliance. I don't know about the brilliant books that aren't published because of woke pressure. A generation or two of this, and my great grandchildren don't know about the great works of Western civilization because they are forgotten. It doesn't take long to veer into mediocrity and ignorance. We need a cultural seed ark or more Irish monks to hold on past the dark ages we may be approaching. I am doing the best I can with my own children (moving across the country to enroll them in a high quality classical school that emphasizes truth, beauty, and goodness and preserves the great works of Western and world achievement) but we need to make the lifeboat bigger.
Much of the present focus on wokeness, to me, is a well-intentioned desire to pursue fairness in both equal opportunity, America's "special sauce", and equally fair outcomes, now rebranded as "equal equity." This is especially honorable considering one's opportunities are the most amplifying outcomes, as success breeds success.
Unfortunately, evolutionary homo sapien genetic development will enforce boundaries and constraints that will never yield equality of outcomes. Individuals given actual equal opportunities, especially in capitalist marketplaces, always choose the best price/value choice available to them. And that choice is the result of a meritocratic effort. It would be tribal and personal suicide, for example, to demand medical care be based on irrelevant performance factors such as melanin (skin pigment) or sexual genitalia; what matters is intelligence (IQ), conscientiousness, experience, and sufficient infrastructure. While any human may have these necessary, irrefutable attributes, evolutionary biological science confirms the statistical averages are not the same between races organically, and most certainly culturally. Which means, goods or services that depend upon, for example, generally high-IQ labor will gravitate toward races and cultures with high IQ's. Life is hard. It is especially hard if you have a low IQ, or live in a culture that suppresses IQ.
In a woke world, to the subject of this article, corporations will spend tremendous effort in finding statistical high-IQ outliers in historically lower-IQ populations and cultures in order to maintain meritocratic competitiveness. They will be foolish do think otherwise.
I don’t think woke is well intentioned at all. It’s intention is and always was malign. And it’s a diversion, the opiate of the masses. Concentrate in woke and all sorts of nefarious things and cons slip under the radar.
I quit both Hulu and Disney+ because they went full woke. I still have HBOMax because it still occasionally hits a homerun and has a huge catalog of great movies along with some old series worth a re-watch. Yes, I still have Netflix. Why? I don't know. And I have Amazon Prime Video only because it's free if you have Amazon Prime membership.
It will be interesting to see how publicly owned corporations, who now own all the big studios, will explain to their share holders the big losses from studios going woke.
I'm not sure there are big losses. Coincidentally, this went along with a monumental fear campaign in which people were told they were saving their own and their neighbors' lives by staying home and opening a vein to this cultural IV.
What hope is there for society when people like Bari Weiss complain that the biggest problem with left-wing extremism is that it distracts from less extreme Leftism? She wants to get to the same destination, but less quickly!
Identity politics is the problem, whether it's the kind Bari prefers or the kind she mocks.
I am not Bari therefore I cannot claim to know the totality of her mind. I can't claim to know the totality of mine most of the time. I can however state that based on my readings of many (I doubt I've read all.) articles that she is what I would call a 'classical liberal' and supports free speech, free exchange of ideas and the other values that are placed in what would probably be called the 'Centrist' bucket now. I don't see her playing Identity politics.
I consider myself a conservative but I don't have a big problem with the center left. We need balance. But the left has a lot of explaining to do regarding the take over by the extreme left. They certainly expect the same from the right.
Soon enough I will only be watching shows made before 2021-or none at all. Will it matter? I am not missing the Awards Shows or half the sports I used to watch. Most likely though, new media companies will emerge that produce quality product again. Let's hope.
Just wait for the upcoming woke Olympics. That should be a $#@% show. We will soon see the first transgender female weight lifter breaking world records.
Once again, I wholeheartedly agree with each of your takeaways.
Has anyone sued these kinds of companies yet? If not, they should since most of them have offices in Equal Opportunity states. That makes it illegal to consider someone's race/gender etc when making employment decisions. Even California has these laws / regulations in place. So why aren't they being enforced?
On the subject of California - their voters just rejected an affirmative action measure in 2020. The fact that people in the most liberal state in the country (where a majority of people are non-white) rejected an affirmative action measure in 2020 just shows how out of touch Corporations like Amazon really are.
Thank you Bari for your use of humor in making what many of us view as common sense points (no pun intended). I am very glad that I do not have to take a spelling or vocabulary test these days given how quickly the spelling and meaning of words has become part of the battleground in our quest to reach ever moving, undefined goal posts. I also wonder how spell-check and dictionaries keep up.
I found this upsetting. This is intersectionality yes?
Stupidity that begets losers, my unkind but maybe accurate description. Or am I wrong; am I a bad person?
I'll note some guesstimates, worldwide:
Black: 1,000-2,000 million
Asian: 3,000 million
Muslim: 1,500 million
HIspanic: 1,000 million
LGBT: 400 - 800 million (5% - 10% of world population)
Jewish: 15 million
So what sort of hiring make a company diverse?
My family in Mexico laughed at loud when we explained to them the whole “Latinx” thing. They see it as the worst kind of “gringo” self-centerdness.
"Wokescreen" is the new label we should apply to this fake corporate wokeness.
Like Greenwashing (remember LEED certified?) that proved a marketing genius and an engineering fraud. The policy of Affirmative Action, that for the last +- 40 years was also a marketing dream for business and universities, and a sinker for most working class men.
Women it turns out got most of the University, Board Positions, and Grants not "People of Color". Wealthy and networked males (private schools) didn't suffer for a minute, but my generation (a mass of us) had to let a less qualified person take their place . Most of us did that graciously to heal past wounds but our sacrifice got us nowhere. Those shown to the head of the line are even angrier and now demand the respect that most American's withhold from "Insiders" and "line cutters".
The wheels on Bezo's bus go round and round.
On the way to D.C. to spend some pound.
Gonna grease the pocket of the poli-ti-ci-an.
Who will help him with the acqui-si-ti-on.
And ward off all the compe-ti-ti-on.
So he can spend his money
Living as a Mar-ti-an.
One of the nice things about streaming is that one can easily be exposed to foreign cultures and people of all ethnic groups. We are currently enjoying a Korean series and a long one from Turkey.
If I could give free advice to the big corporations, it would be to intelligently navigate the anti-diverse “diversity” mania. Mining companies and basket ball teams could hypothetically be charged with diversity failure (gender and race, respectively). Diversity comes in many forms apart from melanin and genitalia. One would think the PR folks at these corporations would advise against such foolishly sheepish behavior. I am guessing the market response will introduce a mediating effect.
One would hope so, but who knows. You don't about know what you don't get. I don't know the quality of health care I'm not getting if the doctors and researchers are hired because of demographics and not brilliance. I don't know about the brilliant books that aren't published because of woke pressure. A generation or two of this, and my great grandchildren don't know about the great works of Western civilization because they are forgotten. It doesn't take long to veer into mediocrity and ignorance. We need a cultural seed ark or more Irish monks to hold on past the dark ages we may be approaching. I am doing the best I can with my own children (moving across the country to enroll them in a high quality classical school that emphasizes truth, beauty, and goodness and preserves the great works of Western and world achievement) but we need to make the lifeboat bigger.
Much of the present focus on wokeness, to me, is a well-intentioned desire to pursue fairness in both equal opportunity, America's "special sauce", and equally fair outcomes, now rebranded as "equal equity." This is especially honorable considering one's opportunities are the most amplifying outcomes, as success breeds success.
Unfortunately, evolutionary homo sapien genetic development will enforce boundaries and constraints that will never yield equality of outcomes. Individuals given actual equal opportunities, especially in capitalist marketplaces, always choose the best price/value choice available to them. And that choice is the result of a meritocratic effort. It would be tribal and personal suicide, for example, to demand medical care be based on irrelevant performance factors such as melanin (skin pigment) or sexual genitalia; what matters is intelligence (IQ), conscientiousness, experience, and sufficient infrastructure. While any human may have these necessary, irrefutable attributes, evolutionary biological science confirms the statistical averages are not the same between races organically, and most certainly culturally. Which means, goods or services that depend upon, for example, generally high-IQ labor will gravitate toward races and cultures with high IQ's. Life is hard. It is especially hard if you have a low IQ, or live in a culture that suppresses IQ.
In a woke world, to the subject of this article, corporations will spend tremendous effort in finding statistical high-IQ outliers in historically lower-IQ populations and cultures in order to maintain meritocratic competitiveness. They will be foolish do think otherwise.
I don’t think woke is well intentioned at all. It’s intention is and always was malign. And it’s a diversion, the opiate of the masses. Concentrate in woke and all sorts of nefarious things and cons slip under the radar.
I quit both Hulu and Disney+ because they went full woke. I still have HBOMax because it still occasionally hits a homerun and has a huge catalog of great movies along with some old series worth a re-watch. Yes, I still have Netflix. Why? I don't know. And I have Amazon Prime Video only because it's free if you have Amazon Prime membership.
It will be interesting to see how publicly owned corporations, who now own all the big studios, will explain to their share holders the big losses from studios going woke.
I'm not sure there are big losses. Coincidentally, this went along with a monumental fear campaign in which people were told they were saving their own and their neighbors' lives by staying home and opening a vein to this cultural IV.
What hope is there for society when people like Bari Weiss complain that the biggest problem with left-wing extremism is that it distracts from less extreme Leftism? She wants to get to the same destination, but less quickly!
Identity politics is the problem, whether it's the kind Bari prefers or the kind she mocks.
I am not Bari therefore I cannot claim to know the totality of her mind. I can't claim to know the totality of mine most of the time. I can however state that based on my readings of many (I doubt I've read all.) articles that she is what I would call a 'classical liberal' and supports free speech, free exchange of ideas and the other values that are placed in what would probably be called the 'Centrist' bucket now. I don't see her playing Identity politics.
I consider myself a conservative but I don't have a big problem with the center left. We need balance. But the left has a lot of explaining to do regarding the take over by the extreme left. They certainly expect the same from the right.
Soon enough I will only be watching shows made before 2021-or none at all. Will it matter? I am not missing the Awards Shows or half the sports I used to watch. Most likely though, new media companies will emerge that produce quality product again. Let's hope.
Just wait for the upcoming woke Olympics. That should be a $#@% show. We will soon see the first transgender female weight lifter breaking world records.
Once again, I wholeheartedly agree with each of your takeaways.
Has anyone sued these kinds of companies yet? If not, they should since most of them have offices in Equal Opportunity states. That makes it illegal to consider someone's race/gender etc when making employment decisions. Even California has these laws / regulations in place. So why aren't they being enforced?
On the subject of California - their voters just rejected an affirmative action measure in 2020. The fact that people in the most liberal state in the country (where a majority of people are non-white) rejected an affirmative action measure in 2020 just shows how out of touch Corporations like Amazon really are.
HI Bari, please try not to link exclusively to Amazon when announcing a book. I know there is Barnes and Noble.....
But folks, What other booksellers do you use?
Bookshop.org for new; Thriftbooks for used. Bookshop directs money to small booksellers.
thank you!
thank you!
I’ve decided to master the art of the “eye-roll” every time I hear a woke-ism. I’m retired and can’t be fired for a microaggression (eye-roll).
Thank you Bari for your use of humor in making what many of us view as common sense points (no pun intended). I am very glad that I do not have to take a spelling or vocabulary test these days given how quickly the spelling and meaning of words has become part of the battleground in our quest to reach ever moving, undefined goal posts. I also wonder how spell-check and dictionaries keep up.