Comment by pasabagi
5 years ago
> diversity hires
Oh dear. I suppose you think Boris Johnson got to where he was by his sharp intellect? Or does he also qualify as a diversity hire, on the basis that his family tree is more a family strongly-connected graph?
On the other hand, perhaps you are seeing the brilliance of british leadership in the coronavirus numbers, which are of course, neck and neck with other great nations, like the US, and Brazil.
Johnson won the London mayorship, leadership of his party and then an election (by a landslide), all of which were open and competitive contests. Love him or loathe him, he got to be PM by fighting for it: it wasn't handed to him on a plate. Far from it. His own colleague Michael Gove famously stabbed him in the back to stop him becoming PM on a prior occasion!
van der Leyen got to be head of the EU via an entirely secret process, about which we only have one public piece of evidence as to how it works: the claim that the next president of the Commission had to be a woman. She won nothing whatsoever to get there. Then she insisted that half of all Commissioners be women: this is a matter of public record. In theory she doesn't even get to influence the choice of Commissioners, that's meant to be up to the country, but the reality of the EU often doesn't seem to match what the treaties say.
COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty. None of the interventions tried so far have any statistical correlation with healthcare outcomes. Vaccination programmes are quite responsive to politics, on the other hand (whether COVID will respond to vaccines is another topic, but the manufacturing and rollout are within the scope of human control).
> COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty.
You clearly live in a parallel reality, where east asia does not exist, where there isn't a direct and obvious relation between leaders who made light of COVID (Johnson, Trump, Bolsanaro) and horrible casualty figures, and where the population of british people named 'Dave' has more talent than the entire population of british women.
Honestly, mandating 50 percent of commissioners are women seems very reasonable. 50 percent of the population are women, so it makes sense that they should be proportionally represented. That's called democracy.
For the record, I'm not a big EU fan. But I also live in the real world, and on that planet, the fact that the last two male prime ministers of england (and diverse cabinet members) were in the same school, the same (small) social club, and probably share more than a few second cousins, is an outcome that would be so incredibly unlikely in a fair and competitive system that if it did happen, reasonable people would call foul play.
If you still think it's a fair and competitive system that selects for talent if this kind of ridiculous anomaly happens on a regular basis, then you're a dupe. If, moreover, you think it's a fair and competitive system when nobody even claims it is fair, or competitive, or about talent, then you're a moron of such rare and unique quality that you're basically redefining the word.