I work in insurance and I’ve seen DEI brought up in conversations at work, so here’s my take. I think it could apply to many industries.
1) our profitability is based entirely on government largess. Sometimes this is direct, like if you sell Medicare or Medicaid insurance.
Sometimes it’s indirect, even non-governmental insurance is heavily regulated and good luck making a buck if you’re on the wrong side of those regulators.
2) sometimes DEI is directly impactful on policy. Like if CMS demands that you hit some specific DEI target in your outcomes.
This is BTW quietly happening as DEI gets institutionalized, it’s why I don’t believe in “peak woke”. Woke isn’t about struggle sessions, it’s about your insurance coverage changing in a way that hurts you because you’re white even if you don’t know it.
Sometimes it’s more indirect. “We know that if we do xyz it buys goodwill.”
3) companies usually wont purposely do unprofitable things for woke, but they also aren’t perfect at determining what’s going to be profitable. Especially outside of their core business competency.
Lastly, something can be unprofitable but if it comes with a government bailout it’s fine. My industry recently got what amounts to a $10b+ bribe from the government to cover up for the failures in the inflation reduction act.
4) I think going woke is a mistake for companies, but I may be too much of an optimist. Maybe we are far enough down the road to serfdom that it’s all just vibes and connections now.
I do think companies have learned that public in your face wokeism is toxic, but I think that they are also institutionalizing lots of woke policy and assumptions that will be the new normal for the next generation
I like all the points made. In general, we don't need conspiracies to make things happen that look like conspiracies. Discovering conspiracy is something akin to attributing intent to everything, according to Piaget, as Hayek has taught us.
--Birth control was not new with the pill! The pill merely reduced the variance around the desired number of children. All the other stuff associated with the so-called sexual revolution, like women working outside the home, predates the pill. It's machinery and rising productivity that made that possible. We gotta talk more to working stiffs, and read about them!
--The signaling value of PC or DEI is obvious. It's like finding a mate. Not a conspiracy.
--The appeal of Vance & Co, who I just voted for absentee, is merely competition with the other party. It's not about truth value, for the rational voter rationally chooses ignorance. Both parties know this, and act accordingly.
--The March through the Institutions -- you are right to point to Gramsci and Dutschke -- is in the interests of an unproductive intellectual class of individuals, a superstructure if you will, and an absence of resistance on the part of the institutions. That's merely about incentives. As my father used to say: There's too much money around! [I thought he was nuts even before I studied economics. Afterwards, I was sure he was nuts. Like Mark Twain's father, my father grew in intellectual stature over the years.]
The signalling value quote was there as an example of something that the gender/sex distinction might have enabled, or at least facilitated. It means that in an ordinary conversation not about politics or ideology you can, deliberately or unintentionally, signal whether you are part of a tribe. The hypothetical conspiracy was introducing "gender" to mean "claimed sexual identity" as a way of facilitating that. The other quotes were about other things the conspiracy might have aimed at.
The alternative is that the introduction didn't have any such purpose, was merely the result of people who were interacting with transsexuals, wanted a way to make it clear that they accepted the claimed identity, and wanted an academic justification for what they were doing and a way of talking about it.
> but forty thousand dollars is more than zero, which is what the company would have paid if the riot hadn’t happened.
Not to mention, if the business is dead for good, you won't get premiums in future either. So the real loss is more than just the 40K. The new businesses might have to pay higher premiums and as a result you have fewer businesses which means fewer employees, fewer cards etc. Insurance companies generally do poorer in areas of higher property crimes. Does not pass giggle test.
I have only experienced minor riots first hand in India. It is indeed true that some people pay right people for right actions. For example a gas station owner paying a mob to destroy a competitor's gas station. A politician paying off a mob to take care of a rising opponent etc.
There are non-zero cases in USA where business owners themselves payed bad people to rob them so the employees on some kind of limited purpose visa could quality for better U visa. [1]
I can see why a BLM riot ends up becoming a force of destruction bigger than what it would have been as a result of many human actions but not necessarily a grand plan.
I'm pretty sure Baptists and Bootleggers didn't conspire to pass Prohibition. And I'm not convinced Vance was imply any conspiracies at all. But he does point out that different people and groups can benefit/profit by various policies that they support in common.
I mean, is there a conspiracy (needed) for the enormous growth of NPOs that take the lion's share of the money produced by various policies claimed to benefit the homeless/poor/discriminated against, between the universities that churn out otherwise useless graduate degrees and the policy-makers who push for more policy and more funding in the face of decades of gross failure of such programs? I think not.
It's that no matter how the government spends tax dollars many of those dollars will end up in the pockets of individuals who don't necessarly help alleviate the problem.
"Preferred pronouns" strike me as a kind of trap where no matter what you do, you can be called out for it. Some people claim multiple, conflicting pronouns, and you're somehow supposed to know which one to use at any moment. You can't, so they always have grounds for denouncing you when they find it convenient.
As I pointed out in the post, the fact that living things are well designed looks as though there is a designer, the watchmaker argument for the existence of God, and evolution provides an alternative explanation.
The distinction between sex and gender was first promoted by feminists themselves. Their goal was to promote the idea that people of either sex could pursue "non-traditional gender roles". The tranies have simply taken this idea to its logical conclusion.
The parallel between the traditional use of the term gender for the classification of nouns and the new use for the classification of people has an advantage from the point of view who introduced the new use. As students of German or Latin learn, there is no ‘natural’ belonging of a noun to a given gender and counterintuitive classification abound (eg das Mǎdchen, the girl, is neuter, and the masculine/sounding malus, the apple tree, is feminine)
"I don’t know whether or not insurance companies funded the movement or they underpaid claims, but forty thousand dollars is more than zero, which is what the company would have paid if the riot hadn’t happened"
Forty thousand dollars is less than zero if the increased premium over the expected remaining life of the policy (including expected renewals, often mandatory) is greater than forty thousand dollars in the same way people often don't report insurable claims out of a just fear long term they are harming themselves. I.e. I don't believe the conspiracy but it's reasonable to believe an insurance company paying someone to cause harm slightly above the deductible to encourage claims to provide a basis to sharply increase premiums especially when the insurance is mandatory (auto, property*, etc).
* As in mortgage holder so bank requires or leasor so the owner requires.
> but it's reasonable to believe an insurance company paying someone to cause harm slightly above the deductible to encourage claims to provide a basis to sharply increase premiums especially when the insurance is mandatory (auto, property*, etc).
Premiums going up does not necessarily benefit an insurance company.
1. Your premium goes up the client switches to another insurance company.
2. If all insurance companies run some kind of secret collusion, you don't even need a riot. You can just jack up premiums to whatever you want and make a killing profit but you also run the risk of losing billions through government action.
3. Insurance companies do not do well where there is lawlessness, property crimes and natural disasters overall so promoting criminal behavior is not in the long term interest of the insurance company. One can argue that BLM is just one time thing but remember if Insurance companies can pay them so can Lowes and Home Depot to cause more destruction. It is a tiger you can ride but can't get down.
I work in insurance and I’ve seen DEI brought up in conversations at work, so here’s my take. I think it could apply to many industries.
1) our profitability is based entirely on government largess. Sometimes this is direct, like if you sell Medicare or Medicaid insurance.
Sometimes it’s indirect, even non-governmental insurance is heavily regulated and good luck making a buck if you’re on the wrong side of those regulators.
2) sometimes DEI is directly impactful on policy. Like if CMS demands that you hit some specific DEI target in your outcomes.
This is BTW quietly happening as DEI gets institutionalized, it’s why I don’t believe in “peak woke”. Woke isn’t about struggle sessions, it’s about your insurance coverage changing in a way that hurts you because you’re white even if you don’t know it.
Sometimes it’s more indirect. “We know that if we do xyz it buys goodwill.”
3) companies usually wont purposely do unprofitable things for woke, but they also aren’t perfect at determining what’s going to be profitable. Especially outside of their core business competency.
Lastly, something can be unprofitable but if it comes with a government bailout it’s fine. My industry recently got what amounts to a $10b+ bribe from the government to cover up for the failures in the inflation reduction act.
4) I think going woke is a mistake for companies, but I may be too much of an optimist. Maybe we are far enough down the road to serfdom that it’s all just vibes and connections now.
I do think companies have learned that public in your face wokeism is toxic, but I think that they are also institutionalizing lots of woke policy and assumptions that will be the new normal for the next generation
I like all the points made. In general, we don't need conspiracies to make things happen that look like conspiracies. Discovering conspiracy is something akin to attributing intent to everything, according to Piaget, as Hayek has taught us.
--Birth control was not new with the pill! The pill merely reduced the variance around the desired number of children. All the other stuff associated with the so-called sexual revolution, like women working outside the home, predates the pill. It's machinery and rising productivity that made that possible. We gotta talk more to working stiffs, and read about them!
--The signaling value of PC or DEI is obvious. It's like finding a mate. Not a conspiracy.
--The appeal of Vance & Co, who I just voted for absentee, is merely competition with the other party. It's not about truth value, for the rational voter rationally chooses ignorance. Both parties know this, and act accordingly.
--The March through the Institutions -- you are right to point to Gramsci and Dutschke -- is in the interests of an unproductive intellectual class of individuals, a superstructure if you will, and an absence of resistance on the part of the institutions. That's merely about incentives. As my father used to say: There's too much money around! [I thought he was nuts even before I studied economics. Afterwards, I was sure he was nuts. Like Mark Twain's father, my father grew in intellectual stature over the years.]
There, that's too much. Apologies.
The signalling value quote was there as an example of something that the gender/sex distinction might have enabled, or at least facilitated. It means that in an ordinary conversation not about politics or ideology you can, deliberately or unintentionally, signal whether you are part of a tribe. The hypothetical conspiracy was introducing "gender" to mean "claimed sexual identity" as a way of facilitating that. The other quotes were about other things the conspiracy might have aimed at.
The alternative is that the introduction didn't have any such purpose, was merely the result of people who were interacting with transsexuals, wanted a way to make it clear that they accepted the claimed identity, and wanted an academic justification for what they were doing and a way of talking about it.
> but forty thousand dollars is more than zero, which is what the company would have paid if the riot hadn’t happened.
Not to mention, if the business is dead for good, you won't get premiums in future either. So the real loss is more than just the 40K. The new businesses might have to pay higher premiums and as a result you have fewer businesses which means fewer employees, fewer cards etc. Insurance companies generally do poorer in areas of higher property crimes. Does not pass giggle test.
I have only experienced minor riots first hand in India. It is indeed true that some people pay right people for right actions. For example a gas station owner paying a mob to destroy a competitor's gas station. A politician paying off a mob to take care of a rising opponent etc.
There are non-zero cases in USA where business owners themselves payed bad people to rob them so the employees on some kind of limited purpose visa could quality for better U visa. [1]
I can see why a BLM riot ends up becoming a force of destruction bigger than what it would have been as a result of many human actions but not necessarily a grand plan.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/six-defendants-indicted-federal-fraud-charge-allegedly-staging-robberies-apply
I'm pretty sure Baptists and Bootleggers didn't conspire to pass Prohibition. And I'm not convinced Vance was imply any conspiracies at all. But he does point out that different people and groups can benefit/profit by various policies that they support in common.
I mean, is there a conspiracy (needed) for the enormous growth of NPOs that take the lion's share of the money produced by various policies claimed to benefit the homeless/poor/discriminated against, between the universities that churn out otherwise useless graduate degrees and the policy-makers who push for more policy and more funding in the face of decades of gross failure of such programs? I think not.
It's that no matter how the government spends tax dollars many of those dollars will end up in the pockets of individuals who don't necessarly help alleviate the problem.
Most of corporate support for DEI is basically extortion and Havel's greengrocer.
Was it deliberate to have a spelling mistake in the word spelling, while talking about spelling errors? 🤣
I am quoting a post. The post contained the mistakes. My guess is that it was intentional.
Thanks, David. I should probably have realized that!
"Preferred pronouns" strike me as a kind of trap where no matter what you do, you can be called out for it. Some people claim multiple, conflicting pronouns, and you're somehow supposed to know which one to use at any moment. You can't, so they always have grounds for denouncing you when they find it convenient.
To someone who doesn't understand how the invisible hand works, the operation of the market looks like a conspiracy.
The market is not the only phenomenon that has this property.
As I pointed out in the post, the fact that living things are well designed looks as though there is a designer, the watchmaker argument for the existence of God, and evolution provides an alternative explanation.
The distinction between sex and gender was first promoted by feminists themselves. Their goal was to promote the idea that people of either sex could pursue "non-traditional gender roles". The tranies have simply taken this idea to its logical conclusion.
The parallel between the traditional use of the term gender for the classification of nouns and the new use for the classification of people has an advantage from the point of view who introduced the new use. As students of German or Latin learn, there is no ‘natural’ belonging of a noun to a given gender and counterintuitive classification abound (eg das Mǎdchen, the girl, is neuter, and the masculine/sounding malus, the apple tree, is feminine)
"I don’t know whether or not insurance companies funded the movement or they underpaid claims, but forty thousand dollars is more than zero, which is what the company would have paid if the riot hadn’t happened"
Forty thousand dollars is less than zero if the increased premium over the expected remaining life of the policy (including expected renewals, often mandatory) is greater than forty thousand dollars in the same way people often don't report insurable claims out of a just fear long term they are harming themselves. I.e. I don't believe the conspiracy but it's reasonable to believe an insurance company paying someone to cause harm slightly above the deductible to encourage claims to provide a basis to sharply increase premiums especially when the insurance is mandatory (auto, property*, etc).
* As in mortgage holder so bank requires or leasor so the owner requires.
> but it's reasonable to believe an insurance company paying someone to cause harm slightly above the deductible to encourage claims to provide a basis to sharply increase premiums especially when the insurance is mandatory (auto, property*, etc).
Premiums going up does not necessarily benefit an insurance company.
1. Your premium goes up the client switches to another insurance company.
2. If all insurance companies run some kind of secret collusion, you don't even need a riot. You can just jack up premiums to whatever you want and make a killing profit but you also run the risk of losing billions through government action.
3. Insurance companies do not do well where there is lawlessness, property crimes and natural disasters overall so promoting criminal behavior is not in the long term interest of the insurance company. One can argue that BLM is just one time thing but remember if Insurance companies can pay them so can Lowes and Home Depot to cause more destruction. It is a tiger you can ride but can't get down.