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I don't quite understand what the conservatives think DEI actually is, because as far as I can tell three women being in leadership positions in the LA fire dep

I don't quite understand what the conservatives think DEI actually is, because as far as I can tell three women being in leadership positions in the LA fire department is "DEI". It just seems like the new "woke" or "political correctness", and just as vague.

newsclues 2y ago
It’s less about the end result and more about the process.
slt2021 2y ago
>what the conservatives think DEI actually is Speaking as part of a video that aired during a commercial break for the FOX show 9-1-1 about firefighter capabilities, Larson said, "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place" https://www.newsweek.com/lafd-deputy-chief-faces-backlash-past-remarks-fire-victims-2013351 https://www.newsweek.com/lafd-deputy-chief-faces-backlash-pa... DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males Women are perfectly capable of working in firefighting, the military or police. I've personally seen a female police officer of barely 1.60m throw a drunk 2m Russian dude on a rampage in a bar fight onto the ground and tie him up alone, about a solid third of the volunteer force in my THW unit are women, a good friend of mine is a trained volunteer firefighter at about the same height as the police officer, and the IDF has women in active fighting roles since the 70s, and fully equal to males since 2000 - and look where the IDF is, they are without question the top dog in the MENA region, despite all the cries about women threatening the fighting capability. "DEI" means opening up the gates for everyone on actual merit. For women, it can sometimes mean having to rely more on skill than on brute strength (as in my first example), but in the end it doesn't matter much.
  - nailer 2y ago
    I’m not sure you read this part of the comment you’re replying to: > "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place" You’re making points that women can be physically strong. Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong.
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      > Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong. Yeah and that's where the last sentence with the skill I wrote comes into play. Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back, and anyone too heavy for that will also be too heavy for most male firefighters (bodybuilders are rare, especially in volunteer corps most people will be of average strength and body stature). That's also one part of why firefighters always go in pairs (besides providing backup for personal safety) - you never know who and what you come across. Besides: Carrying a person in front of oneself is a movie cliche about firefighters, it's extremely rare to see it in practice and banned outside of actual life-and-death emergencies because it's dangerous as fuck - trip over a hose or debris and suddenly you're falling with the full weight of you and your gear onto the already injured person, possibly injuring yourself in the process. Not nice.
      - nailer 2y ago
        > Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back Lifting someone onto your back still qualifies as carrying someone out of a fire which this firefighter says she can’t do.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men. Which makes efforts to recruit as many women into firefighting as possible a sad ideological travesty, and people are perfectly right calling it out. There is a difference between emancipation and group delusion. There are meaningful physical differences between the sexes, and everyone knows that, even people who try to engage in sophistry when it comes to this topic. BTW the IDF, which conscripts women out of necessity, tries to keep them away from the most dangerous combat roles, and employs them mostly in support roles. Your description is very misleading. The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies. IIRC only about 1 in 20 of the "enemy-facing" IDF soldiers like helicopter pilots are female.
- Angostura 2y ago
  DEI means, thinking about your hiring practices and looking hard at yourself if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population. DEI can be implemented badly, but that doesn’t mean that DEI is bad
  - snehk 2y ago
    And a true Scotsman would know this.
  - slt2021 2y ago
    > if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population. why it should be in proportion? This argument is flawed as it ignores that not everyone in general population has the same abilities. You can look at the roster of any top performing NBA team and tell me if their players population represents general population. Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population. In fact the only case when both population would be equal, is if hiring decisions are based on random chance
    - dqv 2y ago
      > Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population. This is an assumption, not a fact. Companies hire less-qualified candidates all the time through nepotism.
      - slt2021 2y ago
        I have a mixed opinion on this. There are cases when nepotism fires back via poor job performance and quickly self-corrects itself. But there are cases when nepotism is a job requirement, as in being connected to a powerful network is job description. You can find it in investment banking, big law, VC, sales when people are hired because they know the right people and can get the right results through back-channels/established network. You cannot make the same argument however in favor of hiring lesbians, unless being a lesbian is a job requirement
newsclues 2y ago
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discourses-bullets-ep-1/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discours... I think this is a quick explanation. Many people on the left complain about the “old boys club” where “white men” hire each other and control all the power without merit for their authority, and DEI seems to be a way to smash the patriarchal old boys club and enforce the new regime where women, and minorities are in control. Shouldn’t the people be wary of any type of authoritarian cabal?
- piva00 2y ago
  > Shouldn’t the people be wary of any type of authoritarian cabal? Yeah, and how do you expect the status quo authoritarian cabal to be dismantled while they are in power?
  - newsclues 2y ago
    Not by replacing one authoritarian cabal with another authoritarian cabal! If the system isn’t working, fix the system don’t just adapt the broken system to serve your needs.
    - piva00 2y ago
      Fixing the system has always worked by a tug-of-war between the status quo and a opposite reaction to it to find a new middle. I don't know of any other way a social system has been fixed that couldn't be reduced to this approach.
- snehk 2y ago
  If others are just as capable, then there's no need to change any of the requirements, right? Why is it happening then?
tomlockwood 2y ago
slt2021 and newsclues you've now posted two wildly different definitions: * newsclues: "the Woke Marxist DEI industry is a racket designed to install commissars for its ideology" * slt2021: "DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males" Help me out here.
nailer 2y ago
Nobody thinks women being in leadership in the fire department is DEI. Three lesbians being leaders at the same time though (as happened a few years ago) given the small portion of lesbian firefighters seems indicative of bias.
- tomlockwood 2y ago
  > Nobody thinks women being in leadership in the fire department is DEI. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1877170586297971157 https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1877170586297971157
- pavlov 2y ago
  And by this same logic, the Nobel Committee for Physics has an obvious historical bias towards Jews, right? What else could explain 37 Jewish physics Nobel winners in the 20th century? People can simply be good at something. Maybe lesbian firefighters actually work very hard to overcome the expectations against them.
  - logicchains 2y ago
    >And by this same logic, the Nobel Committee for Physics has an obvious historical bias towards Jews, right? No, because Ashkenazi Jews have been demonstrated to perform significantly better on IQ tests on average, and performance on IQ tests is associated with various intellectual outcomes like winning the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, lesbians haven't been demonstrated to perform better on any kind of metrics associated with success at firefighting, and the greater difficulty women face gaining muscle mass puts them at a disadvantage.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      Do you really think being a successful leader in a fire department is about muscle mass and genetics? Or that IQ tests predict physics Nobels? My lord…
    - mongol 2y ago
      The correlation between Jews and Nobel Prize is much more likely attributed to social factors.
poulpy123 2y ago
DEI is focusing on the identity of the person instead of the abilities/programs/skills/work related arguments. When the LAFD communicates that the LGBT status of the 3 heads of the department they signals it's the reason they got hired to this position. if you add absurd communication like saying it's better to be rescued by someone that looks like you or that the first thing you'll say to someone you want to rescue is "it is you fault" and let's be honest outright lies by conservative, you have the recipe for a catastrophic drama as soon a the conditions are here
- eesmith 2y ago
  DEI is focused on the identify insofar as that identity has been the basis of discrimination preventing equality on the basis of abilities, skills, etc. > they signals it's the reason they got hired to this position That does not follow. When an organization communicates that Obama was the first US president born in Hawaii, that does not signal that he was elected because he was from Hawaii. The local paper had a short article last year that for the first time the entire crew of three people on a truck were women. The article added that the scheduling was happenstance, and not deliberately done. A couple of years ago, Teri Eidson and her daughter, Nicole McAllister made the news because they were the first mother-daughter team to co-pilot an international flight. Neither of these should be interpreted to mean that those women were hired specifically to get that reported result. Sergei Volkov was the first second-generation cosmonaut, that is, his father was the cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov. When that made the news, did it also signal that the son got the position not due to abilities, skills, etc., but because of his father? And so on, and so on, and so on. It also does not follow because you have to know if there are complicating factors. For example, if other cities discriminate against LGBT department heads while LA does not, then the population of qualified potential department heads would be higher for LA than other cities.
  - franktankbank 2y ago
    I see the whole thing as a triangle: nepotism on one point dei on another point and meritocracy on the third Each presents different ways to make selection and each has intrinsic biases which are in tension with one another. Neither one can be the end all be all solution because each leads to unhealthy endpoints if carried on for long enough. I suspect Sergei Volkov did in fact benefit from nepotism but maybe that's not a bad thing on its own?
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
It's whatever each company makes of it, which is why definitions vary. It can range from explicit efforts to actively reach out to candidates from schools with students predominantly from historically-disadvantaged groups, to outright "no hiring of white men this quarter" (which is one of the more egregious documented cases, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...). What I think most conservatives think it is: When choosing between a more qualified white cis man and a less qualified "diverse" candidate, some companies will pick the latter specifically due to DEI policies. I am very sure this is actually happening (see also e.g. the above source). Turns out people don't like being explicitly discriminated against, even if they're from a majority group.
- tomlockwood 2y ago
  So on the one hand "it varies" and to conservatives it means one very specific thing. Interesting. Which is correct?

newsclues 2y ago

It’s less about the end result and more about the process.

slt2021 2y ago

>what the conservatives think DEI actually is Speaking as part of a video that aired during a commercial break for the FOX show 9-1-1 about firefighter capabilities, Larson said, "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place" https://www.newsweek.com/lafd-deputy-chief-faces-backlash-past-remarks-fire-victims-2013351 https://www.newsweek.com/lafd-deputy-chief-faces-backlash-pa... DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males

mschuster91 2y ago
> DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males Women are perfectly capable of working in firefighting, the military or police. I've personally seen a female police officer of barely 1.60m throw a drunk 2m Russian dude on a rampage in a bar fight onto the ground and tie him up alone, about a solid third of the volunteer force in my THW unit are women, a good friend of mine is a trained volunteer firefighter at about the same height as the police officer, and the IDF has women in active fighting roles since the 70s, and fully equal to males since 2000 - and look where the IDF is, they are without question the top dog in the MENA region, despite all the cries about women threatening the fighting capability. "DEI" means opening up the gates for everyone on actual merit. For women, it can sometimes mean having to rely more on skill than on brute strength (as in my first example), but in the end it doesn't matter much.
- nailer 2y ago
  I’m not sure you read this part of the comment you’re replying to: > "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place" You’re making points that women can be physically strong. Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong. Yeah and that's where the last sentence with the skill I wrote comes into play. Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back, and anyone too heavy for that will also be too heavy for most male firefighters (bodybuilders are rare, especially in volunteer corps most people will be of average strength and body stature). That's also one part of why firefighters always go in pairs (besides providing backup for personal safety) - you never know who and what you come across. Besides: Carrying a person in front of oneself is a movie cliche about firefighters, it's extremely rare to see it in practice and banned outside of actual life-and-death emergencies because it's dangerous as fuck - trip over a hose or debris and suddenly you're falling with the full weight of you and your gear onto the already injured person, possibly injuring yourself in the process. Not nice.
    - nailer 2y ago
      > Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back Lifting someone onto your back still qualifies as carrying someone out of a fire which this firefighter says she can’t do.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men. Which makes efforts to recruit as many women into firefighting as possible a sad ideological travesty, and people are perfectly right calling it out. There is a difference between emancipation and group delusion. There are meaningful physical differences between the sexes, and everyone knows that, even people who try to engage in sophistry when it comes to this topic. BTW the IDF, which conscripts women out of necessity, tries to keep them away from the most dangerous combat roles, and employs them mostly in support roles. Your description is very misleading. The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies. IIRC only about 1 in 20 of the "enemy-facing" IDF soldiers like helicopter pilots are female.
Angostura 2y ago
DEI means, thinking about your hiring practices and looking hard at yourself if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population. DEI can be implemented badly, but that doesn’t mean that DEI is bad
- snehk 2y ago
  And a true Scotsman would know this.
- slt2021 2y ago
  > if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population. why it should be in proportion? This argument is flawed as it ignores that not everyone in general population has the same abilities. You can look at the roster of any top performing NBA team and tell me if their players population represents general population. Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population. In fact the only case when both population would be equal, is if hiring decisions are based on random chance
  - dqv 2y ago
    > Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population. This is an assumption, not a fact. Companies hire less-qualified candidates all the time through nepotism.
    - slt2021 2y ago
      I have a mixed opinion on this. There are cases when nepotism fires back via poor job performance and quickly self-corrects itself. But there are cases when nepotism is a job requirement, as in being connected to a powerful network is job description. You can find it in investment banking, big law, VC, sales when people are hired because they know the right people and can get the right results through back-channels/established network. You cannot make the same argument however in favor of hiring lesbians, unless being a lesbian is a job requirement

newsclues 2y ago

https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discourses-bullets-ep-1/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discours... I think this is a quick explanation. Many people on the left complain about the “old boys club” where “white men” hire each other and control all the power without merit for their authority, and DEI seems to be a way to smash the patriarchal old boys club and enforce the new regime where women, and minorities are in control. Shouldn’t the people be wary of any type of authoritarian cabal?

piva00 2y ago
> Shouldn’t the people be wary of any type of authoritarian cabal? Yeah, and how do you expect the status quo authoritarian cabal to be dismantled while they are in power?
- newsclues 2y ago
  Not by replacing one authoritarian cabal with another authoritarian cabal! If the system isn’t working, fix the system don’t just adapt the broken system to serve your needs.
  - piva00 2y ago
    Fixing the system has always worked by a tug-of-war between the status quo and a opposite reaction to it to find a new middle. I don't know of any other way a social system has been fixed that couldn't be reduced to this approach.
snehk 2y ago
If others are just as capable, then there's no need to change any of the requirements, right? Why is it happening then?

tomlockwood 2y ago

slt2021 and newsclues you've now posted two wildly different definitions: * newsclues: "the Woke Marxist DEI industry is a racket designed to install commissars for its ideology" * slt2021: "DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males" Help me out here.

nailer 2y ago

Nobody thinks women being in leadership in the fire department is DEI. Three lesbians being leaders at the same time though (as happened a few years ago) given the small portion of lesbian firefighters seems indicative of bias.

tomlockwood 2y ago
> Nobody thinks women being in leadership in the fire department is DEI. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1877170586297971157 https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1877170586297971157
pavlov 2y ago
And by this same logic, the Nobel Committee for Physics has an obvious historical bias towards Jews, right? What else could explain 37 Jewish physics Nobel winners in the 20th century? People can simply be good at something. Maybe lesbian firefighters actually work very hard to overcome the expectations against them.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >And by this same logic, the Nobel Committee for Physics has an obvious historical bias towards Jews, right? No, because Ashkenazi Jews have been demonstrated to perform significantly better on IQ tests on average, and performance on IQ tests is associated with various intellectual outcomes like winning the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, lesbians haven't been demonstrated to perform better on any kind of metrics associated with success at firefighting, and the greater difficulty women face gaining muscle mass puts them at a disadvantage.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Do you really think being a successful leader in a fire department is about muscle mass and genetics? Or that IQ tests predict physics Nobels? My lord…
  - mongol 2y ago
    The correlation between Jews and Nobel Prize is much more likely attributed to social factors.

poulpy123 2y ago

DEI is focusing on the identity of the person instead of the abilities/programs/skills/work related arguments. When the LAFD communicates that the LGBT status of the 3 heads of the department they signals it's the reason they got hired to this position. if you add absurd communication like saying it's better to be rescued by someone that looks like you or that the first thing you'll say to someone you want to rescue is "it is you fault" and let's be honest outright lies by conservative, you have the recipe for a catastrophic drama as soon a the conditions are here

eesmith 2y ago
DEI is focused on the identify insofar as that identity has been the basis of discrimination preventing equality on the basis of abilities, skills, etc. > they signals it's the reason they got hired to this position That does not follow. When an organization communicates that Obama was the first US president born in Hawaii, that does not signal that he was elected because he was from Hawaii. The local paper had a short article last year that for the first time the entire crew of three people on a truck were women. The article added that the scheduling was happenstance, and not deliberately done. A couple of years ago, Teri Eidson and her daughter, Nicole McAllister made the news because they were the first mother-daughter team to co-pilot an international flight. Neither of these should be interpreted to mean that those women were hired specifically to get that reported result. Sergei Volkov was the first second-generation cosmonaut, that is, his father was the cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov. When that made the news, did it also signal that the son got the position not due to abilities, skills, etc., but because of his father? And so on, and so on, and so on. It also does not follow because you have to know if there are complicating factors. For example, if other cities discriminate against LGBT department heads while LA does not, then the population of qualified potential department heads would be higher for LA than other cities.
- franktankbank 2y ago
  I see the whole thing as a triangle: nepotism on one point dei on another point and meritocracy on the third Each presents different ways to make selection and each has intrinsic biases which are in tension with one another. Neither one can be the end all be all solution because each leads to unhealthy endpoints if carried on for long enough. I suspect Sergei Volkov did in fact benefit from nepotism but maybe that's not a bad thing on its own?

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

It's whatever each company makes of it, which is why definitions vary. It can range from explicit efforts to actively reach out to candidates from schools with students predominantly from historically-disadvantaged groups, to outright "no hiring of white men this quarter" (which is one of the more egregious documented cases, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...). What I think most conservatives think it is: When choosing between a more qualified white cis man and a less qualified "diverse" candidate, some companies will pick the latter specifically due to DEI policies. I am very sure this is actually happening (see also e.g. the above source). Turns out people don't like being explicitly discriminated against, even if they're from a majority group.

tomlockwood 2y ago
So on the one hand "it varies" and to conservatives it means one very specific thing. Interesting. Which is correct?