Comment by SR2Z
3 months ago
> using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words.
This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.
Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them.
When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash.
I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.
> they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants
Which would mean entirely different things if (a) that were true (b) that were not true.
It sounds as if you are completely convinced that it is not true, but what is your conviction based on, and why do you think they believed the opposite (or perhaps you take the position that they did not, in fact, believe this) ?
My position is that whether or not this is true, this is not the basis for sound and equitable policy. If I were black, I would probably be a little offended at the insinuation.
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I agree with calling people out.
> This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.
So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist.
Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to equity. So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?
Company A: Our equity policy is to only hire white men! We are proud of how we are striving towards equity with our new DEI policy.
observer: Damn those DEI policies ruining everything.
To me it is obvious you do not blame 'DEI policies' but the leadership and corruption in Company A.
> So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?
Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.
There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."
This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.
> Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example).
I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.
> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.
I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.
The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.
The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.
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The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.
The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.
This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever given the facts on the facts on the ground. Have you read the article at all?
What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to being short staffed. Rather, it’s more likely they are understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible and eager people in order to meet race quotas.
It’s hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss it as just another instance of crazy Republican screeching.
If they wanted more applicants, then they shouldn’t have been disqualifying good applicants on the basis of their biography.
> The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.
I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.
(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).
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The ATC academy can only handle ~1800 students per year. The issue is high failure rates at the academy and then at the facilities graduates are sent after graduation; increasing the quality of applicants should be the FAA's #1 goal.