Barbara Kay: In the progressive era, even literary critics aren't safe - "In 1981, Toni Morrison wrote, “If there were better criticism, there would be better books.” Better can mean negative — sometimes even harsh — criticism. There was a time when that was received wisdom. No longer. John Metcalf, a transplant to Montreal from England, has for 55 years toiled in Canada’s various literary vineyards: teaching, editing (300-plus books), publishing (Porcupine Press and Biblioasis, where he has his own imprint) — and, of course, writing. Metcalf is an accomplished novelist and short-story writer. He has personally published some 18 books. He received an Order of Canada in 2004. In 2014, he was voted editor of the year by the Canadian Booksellers Association. Metcalf has been a writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, McGill, Concordia and the University of Bologna. As a critic, Metcalf sets a high bar for excellence, so he has numerous enemies, but also many fans. Of Metcalf’s criticism, University of Toronto English Prof. Sam Solecki testifies: “You must admit that it’s better written … and simply more interesting than almost anything written on Canadian literature within the academy.” Nobel Prize-winning short-story writer Alice Munro said he is “bracing and encouraging,” and that, “Praise from him, you feel, is real gold.”... oth Metcalf and Cohen regard their critical vocation, in T.S. Eliot’s words, as “the common pursuit of true judgment and the correction of taste.” Taste? That’s so over for progressive ideologues. Today, the critic’s function is the “correction” of colonialism, racism, LGBTphobia and historic under-representation. For 20 years, Metcalf has been on contract with Humber College in Toronto as a mentor in its School for Writers. In mid-December, he received a formal letter from Guillermo Acosta, senior dean of Humber’s faculty of media and creative arts, which informed him that one of the three students he was mentoring (“from an equity-seeking group,” according to Humber’s communications director, Andrew Leopold) had complained to the dean regarding remarks Metcalf made about the writing of Giller-winning Canadian novelist M. G. Vassanji, who is of Indian descent, in a 2009 interview with writer and bibliophile Nigel Beale. Acosta wrote: “Your opinions in this interview can be interpreted as race-based discrimination … I find your remarks on Mr. Vassanji’s writing problematic given your position.” The word “problematic” is woke-speak for “unacceptable.” I find a few things about this pretty “problematic” myself. I listened to the 2009 interview. Metcalf’s critique of Vassanji’s writing was indeed damning: “He cannot write English, (it) reads like a translation,” Metcalf avers, and says it is “laughable” that Munro and Vassanji could have both been granted a Giller Award. But the discussion with Beale was wide-ranging. In the same interview, Metcalf opines that (white, old-stock Canadian) Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel, “Fall on Your Knees,” was “so grossly written,” he needed two bottles of scotch to finish it, and describes (white, old-stock Canadian) Robertson Davies as “one of the biggest windbags I have ever come across.” Metcalf explains this vituperation as a visceral response to bad writing, which he experiences as “almost an assault on everything I hold most sacred.” For Metcalf, good writing is wine; bad writing is vinegar. In his letter, Acosta — who has an extensive background in information technology and administration, none in literature — asked if, since 2009, Metcalf’s views had changed and “whether or not you are approaching your work with a broader EDI (equity, diversity, inclusion) lens.” He invited Metcalf to call or write if he wanted “to have a conversation about this issue.” Metcalf attempted to initiate such a “conversation” in multiple letters between December and early March, primarily to explain that he had criticized Vassanji’s writing, not Vassanji personally. But he did not receive a response from Acosta or, when finally appealed to, from Humber president Christopher Whitaker. Metcalf resigned from his gig at Humber on March 6... If Acosta had taken the time to probe a bit before rushing to judgment, he might have discovered that Metcalf has praised another Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul, as “one of the ornaments of prose writing in the 20th century.” He might also have discovered that Metcalf is the adoptive father of two Indian children, a strange life choice for someone who allegedly holds racist views of Indians... Even more ironically, as critic Andy Lamey noted in a balanced 2017 article on Metcalf in the Literary Review of Canada, Metcalf was once a pariah in Canada for championing style over the prevailing cultural nationalism in this country that privileged old-stock writers, however fusty their output, an attitude Metcalf sought vigorously to change. “We take it for granted today that immigrant literature is a central part of Canadian literature,” Lamey wrote, “while the notion of the Canadian duty read has gone into a long decline.” Metcalf played a large role in this change"
EDI (DEI) means that "minorities" can never be criticised
Facebook - "I used to think diversity was neutral - that only diversity for the sake of it, forced, was bad. But I'm beginning to think otherwise. It objectively hinders productivity and is a distraction from business goals. Consider the rise of Asian corps - Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Indian firms. All homogenous nations that have outcompeted America in many industries such as cars, electronics, software engineering, and IT. What happened to American dominance? If diversity was our strength, how did Japanese and Korean automakers beat multiracial Detroit? The US still has an edge in software(but China and India are catching up) - but "Silicon Valley's" workforce is almost entirely white and Asian, often very homogenous based on department or team. The DEI racketeering industry is frothing at the mouth to undonthis. Not to mention, the SW/engineering indistry and has a ton of outsourcing and manufacturing in... Asia and India. The US did have global dominance. When it was much less diverse, and industries were much more segregated. The "West" has doubled down on unchecked immigration and multiculturalism as a virtue. Expect to see more losses and the inevitable rise of Asia. Diversity/multiculturalism always leads to a low trust society and petty squabbles that ultimately distract fro work. Microagressions? Its much easier to aaavoid walking on eggshells with coworkers by simply getting rid of that scenario altogethe than any number of DEI classes. You cant realistically screen every candidate for being "based""
The Alleged 'Happiest Countries On Earth' Are Also All White
FischerKing on Twitter - "For every white guy denied an academic post, a tech job or a government position, there are several more who don’t go down such career paths b/c they observed this. Lack of meritocratic hiring has downstream effects, so lack of competence will get steadily worse for some time."
Meme - "Liz Truss's cabinet is Britain's first without white man in top jobs
First time no white man in any of four most senior posts
Kwarteng takes finance portfolio, Cleverly to foreign office
Diversity now 'normal' in Britain, says expert
Liz Truss resigns after six weeks as UK prime minister"
Clifton Duncan (She/Her) on Twitter - "Audiences don't hate diverse characters. What they hate is being slammed as bigots for rejecting bad work from pretentious, unskilled activists posing as writers. If the demography of your characters becomes more important than the story, your story will probably suck."
Meme - "Science doesn't care who is running the experiment. Anyone can di science.
MomeNTS IN SCIENCE THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED
MY EXPERIMENT FAILED, AGAIN!
I THINK THE KIND OF GENITALS I HAVE ARE INTERFERING WITH IT"
Why Do We Want What We Can’t Have? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: “Dear Stephen and Angela, I am a full-time Ph.D. student. I’m also a Black-Latina mother. Being immersed in academia, I am constantly having conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). I feel like I’m speaking or emailing or zooming every day with someone about how I can feel included and valued as a graduate student, as a parent, as a person of color — almost to the point of virtue signaling. The thing is, despite all these conversations, I still feel like I get ostracized. And, ironically, it is by the people who are supposed to be part of my small communities. It’s the women that make snarky comments about my availability in light of the fact that I have a baby. I’ve been shamed by the Black community for having a lighter skin tone and by the Latinx community for not being fluent in Spanish. Yet we all band together in front of the majority, be it men, Caucasians, et cetera. My question is, why is it that even in communities that are considered minorities, do we feel it necessary to still pick on the “other” person? Why do we need to form groups within these small communities and establish an even smaller group of acceptable people? Why do people who have been “othered” decide to “other” their own people? Is this deeply rooted in our biology and/or are we just inherently cliquey?” ... I think it is a deep-rooted tribalist instinct, a kind of “we” versus “them.” And I think this increasing fragmentation — as she says, it’s not only that there’s “we” versus “them,” it’s that even in the “we” group, then all of a sudden there becomes a subgroup, and on and on. I think that’s because we come from a primate line, evolutionarily. And primates are, like many other animals, tribal. You know, there is territory, and there’s, kind of, “we” versus “them” built into survival...
One of the studies I remember learning about is called the robbers cave experiment... The study was done in the 50s or 60s by Sherif, a psychologist whose name I never knew how to pronounce, and therefore could never remember his first name. But the study itself is so clever. You’ve got prepubescent boys — like, 10, 11 years old. And they’re at a summer camp. The group of boys is divided into two. And unbeknownst to each other, there are two adjacent summer camps that are physically isolated enough that when you go off to your camp, all you know is the boys that you’re assigned with, and you don’t even think about other boys at an adjacent camp. They do all these kind of, like, in-group exercises, or these interventions, to actually consolidate your identity with your group of campers. You pick a mascot, and then you make T-shirts with the picture of your mascot on it. And in this very famous study, one group of campers decide they’re going to be the eagles, and the other one pick the rattlesnakes. And they pick colors, and they do all these things to consolidate a kind of “we” identity. And then these boys are told about each other. Like, “Did you know that there’s a camp really close to here? And they have a different name and they have different colors?” And then they put these boys into conflict situations like, “Let’s do tug of war.” “Let’s tell one group that the other group doesn’t like them.” What the scientists behind this wanted to know is, what is the nature of tribalism, and what is the nature of conflict? And also, how do we actually figure out how to resolve this kind of tribalistic conflict when it comes about? And the intervention that seemed to be the most effective, in a series of studies that were done with this camping paradigm, is that: you tell the boys that they have a common enemy. You tell the boys that there’s another group: vandals. And they are sabotaging the drinking water. And then, what you find is that people band together — at least in this very, very small sample, the boys put aside their differences, and now they’re just trying to defeat the common enemy. And so the conclusion is that one of the ways that we can deal with this tribalism is to find some kind of superordinate goal that we can all be loyal to, and now to expand the circle of “we” to be both of us, both of our groups, and then to make some common enemies the “them.” When the pandemic hit, I did wonder — because, of course, our country was already fast on its way to being extremely polarized. It was hard to imagine that we could be any more polarized than we were. And I remember thinking, this is like a science fiction movie where the aliens attack Earth, and finally we set aside our differences and we take up arms together to fight the common enemy. I mean, what was [more] common than a global pandemic?...
I actually thought to myself quite explicitly, “This is gonna create a ‘them’ so that we can all be an ‘us’ together.” And it did not happen. In fact, maybe you could argue the opposite happened, you know, with mask-wearing, with vaccines, with pretty much everything that could go wrong politically, with our response in terms of lack of unity."
DEI will never end, because liberals will always look for new enemies - new "bigots" to virtue signal against
Meme - Niche Gamer @nichegamer: "Final Fantasy XVI won't have or POC characters, as its game world is modeled after medieval Europe"
Shock to the System @nooulives: ""He notes he understands this might disappoint some fans, but states that their diversity goes beyond appearance, noting the characters are "diverse in their natures, backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, and motivations.""
Ah, so ACTUAL diversity"
‘Friends’ creator apologises for show's lack of diversity with $4million pledge - "Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman has pledged $4million (£3.2million) to African American studies as an apology for the show’s lack of diversity... Kauffman said she had a change of heart on the diversity criticism against the show following the death of George Floyd in 2020 by Minneapolis police – which sparked worldwide protests... Co-creator David Bright has previously addressed the show’s lack of diversity, saying they did not intend to have an all-white central cast... "Obviously, the chemistry between these six actors speaks for itself.”"
How Much Does Discrimination Hurt the Economy? - Freakonomics - "HUBER: Jews were generally very well integrated into the top levels of the German economic system. They ran all types of firms, firms that we still know today. B.M.W., Daimler-Benz, Allianz — these are all firms that had important Jewish executives. Deutsche Bank, still the largest bank today, had a Jewish C.E.O. called Oscar Wassermann...
The Jewish population share in 1930s Germany before the Nazis came to power was just under one percent, around 0.8 percent. But Jewish individuals held around 15 percent of senior management positions in 1932, so way larger than their population share. In Berlin, about five percent of the population were Jewish, but Jews paid over 30 percent of the taxes in the city...
DUBNER: You Germans and your record-keeping, it really comes in handy, doesn’t it?
HUBER: Yes, it’s somewhat sad to say, because obviously the purpose of this record-keeping was very evil. But it did help us for scientific purposes later on... In the paper, we analyze firms that were directly harmed by discrimination because they lost their Jewish managers. And we show that firms were unable to replace the top characteristics of dismissed managers. In particular, the number of managers with a lot of experience in the firm, the number of managers with higher-education degrees such as a master’s or a Ph.D., and the number of managers with many connections to other firms fell significantly when the Jewish managers left the firms... Share prices of companies that expelled Jewish managers fell sharply once they dismissed the managers and stayed low for at least 10 years... We find that profits went down. We find that efficiency of the firms went down. And to give you a number, the share price of the average affected firm declined by about 10 to 12 percent after 1933, which is a huge effect.
DUBNER: You write that German G.N.P., gross national product, fell by 1.8 percent as a result of this Jewish removal — which, on the one hand, is huge. On the other hand, how relevant was G.N.P. during a war like this?
HUBER: When the Nazis came to power, the war was still relatively far away. The Nazis came into power on an economic agenda. People wanted unemployment to go down. They wanted to achieve recovery from the Great Depression that had plagued the global economy. And so, economic factors were relatively important at the time. And so, our paper, in a sense, goes to show that the Nazis harmed their economic agenda by expelling some of the best people in the economy... We think of our setting as an extreme case of taste-based discrimination, where people just forgo all economic logic and just really dislike a group and therefore exclude them from the economy.
DUBNER: Is there any sense of whether taste-based or statistical is more damaging?
HUBER: These are very sensitive questions that you’re asking me. In the U.S., all types of discrimination is illegal. And so, even if you believe for good reasons you are discriminating, you’re not allowed to do that. People have sometimes sold statistical discrimination as a softer or rational form of discrimination, but neither of them are okay. I’m hesitant to put a good versus bad label on them because for moral reasons — and for legal reasons, in fact — they’re both very dangerous. It’s just that there’s an economic motivation to one and a non-economic motivation to the other...
The student population was a relatively diverse mix of men and women from various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Calder-Wang found that when students could choose collaborators for themselves, the groups were significantly less diverse than when the algorithm created intentionally diverse groups. Given how human beings work, you probably don’t find this surprising. So how did the organically chosen groups perform, compared to the randomly assigned groups — or what Calder-Wang calls the “forced diversity” groups?
CALDER-WANG: What we find in a randomly assigned cohort, one standard deviation increase in diversity leads to about 15 percent degradation in their performance, whereas in the organic formation teams, one standard deviation increase in diversity is only about three to five percent degradation in performance... When people were allowed to choose on their own, diverse teams performed just fine. The problem lies when you are forced to work together in the diverse team. And that’s why I’ve manufactured this word “forced diversity,” as opposed to organic diversity. We always have this notion that diversity might lead to better performances and we were actually fairly annoyed because we found the coefficient to be negative...
In an analysis of venture capitalists — and that’s a field that is overwhelmingly male — she found that “parenting more daughters leads to an increased propensity to hire female partners.” She also found that greater gender diversity — not forced by an algorithm, but driven by the experience of having a daughter — “improves deal and fund performances.”"
Jewish privilege means the Holocaust was good because it was punching up
Looks like diversity was a losing strategy in Nazi Germany, since forcefully making management reflect the makeup of the general population better made them perform worse
Diablo IV devs work long hours, bracing for June 6, 2023 release date - The Washington Post - "Several current and former employees also found the representation and depiction of women in “Diablo IV” to be uninspired, particularly the game’s antagonist, Lilith, Queen of the Succubi. Some women in the game are relegated to traditional gender roles, or undermined by their proximity to a man. “The story is just mid when it comes to diversity topics,” said a current Blizzard Albany employee, using slang meaning mediocre. “It doesn’t really do anything special there at all, or much of anything. I had complaints about the way we handle Lilith, I think we’ve turned her into someone who’s less interesting as a villain than she could be, if handled by a better writer.”"
They don't care about pushing a political agenda. Looks like it's going to be a good game
Genesis messing on Twitter - "Audiences don't hate diverse characters. What they hate is being slammed as bigots for rejecting bad work from pretentious, unskilled activists posing as writers. If the demography of your characters becomes more important than the story, your story will probably suck."
Racism and Self-hate: Why Africa Is Not Innocent, By Majeed Dahiru - "in expressing solidarity and support for black Americans against racism in America, black Africans appear to be conveniently forgetting their own problems of broken intra-race relations, which has manifested in the form tribalism; a problem that is no less prejudicial than racism. While, there is no denying the reality that America has a big problem of institutional racism on its hands, Africa has a even bigger problem of entrenched tribalism. And tribalism is worse than racism because the latter is hate for others, while the former is hatred for one’s own self. Whereas the white race appears united in its racism against other people of colour, the black race is divided along tribal lines in acrimony, prejudice and hate for each other, as expressed in the most bestial form of discrimination ever known to man. The problem of tribalism in Africa, which predates the coming of the white man to the continent, has been at the core of a weakness that served as enabler of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism... The evil trans-Atlantic slave enterprise was a joint venture between white merchants and black African tribal chieftains. The culture of slavery in Africa predated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as black Africans had been enslaving their fellow black Africans of different tribes from time immemorial. And as the demand for human cargo exported to work the plantations of the new world increased, so did the ceaseless wars of black African tribal chieftains against their neighbours escalate in order to capture more people for sale to the white man. Therefore, the guilt for the trans-Atlantic slave trade is a shared one between the white slavers and their collaborating black African tribal war lords. This tribal division among black African peoples wto be further exploited by Europeans in the colonisation of most of continental Africa. Just as it was an enabler of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, tribalism has also manifested in post-colonial Africa in the form of divisive, exclusionist, conflicting and destabilising politics of ethno-geographic identity, which has proven to be an anathema to the collective development of black African states in the contemporary world. Identity politics has left many a black African state divided and destabilised due to acrimony, discrimination and marginalisation arising from ethnicity, and resulting in violent armed conflicts across the continent. The tribal wars between the Dinka and the Nuer in South Sudan; Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda; Hawiye and Marehan Darod in Somalia; Luo and Kikuyu in Kenya; the Fulani, Tiv, Jukun, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, etc. in Nigeria, have resulted in the slaughter of more black Africans than the white racists have done in the entire history of America. As a direct consequence of the social instability brought upon black African states by the entrenched culture of tribalism, not much economic progress has been achieved in post-colonial Africa. Tribalism has bred nepotism, cronyism, favouritism, influence peddling and all other forms of corrupt practices, thereby reducing the region and its peoples to a dark condition of socio-economic destitution. This situation has created a huge army of economic refugee out of black Africa, desperately trying to escape the impossible living conditions back home, through the land, air and sea, into the more prosperous Europe and North America. In addition to colour differences, the economic destitution and prevailing conditions of social savagery in black Africa is robbing off negatively on the image of black people all over the world. A people steeped in self-hate will stand on a weak moral ground and be pointing accusing fingers at other people for hating them. When the Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Itsekiri, Ijaw and Urbobo tribesmen hate each other, it is in reality black African people hating themselves... many black African countries are retrogressing from inter-tribal to intra-tribal conflicts. While America has extended civil rights to descendants of freed slaves and immigrants, black Africans of the ancestral slave heritage are still socially ostracised, derogated, demeaned, discriminated, marginalised, excluded and treated as outcasts in the most inhuman manner in their home continent. Whereas America achieved a major milestone as a leading racially inclusive nation in the world, when in 2008 Barack Obama, a black American, was elected president of the United States, black African states are still plagued by indigene/settler dichotomy and minority/majority tribal supremacy. That is why it was easier for Obama, a black American, to be elected president of white majority America, than would have been possible for Obama, an ethnic minority Luo, to be elected the president of his majority ethnic Kikuyu native country of Kenya. Racism is bad but tribalism is worse, as there is no greater tragedy that can befall a people than self-hate. Due to the low level of integration and assimilation of the people of Black Africa, Ilhan Omar had to take refuge in faraway America, following the destabilisation of her native Somalia due to protracted intra-tribal/clan wars, where her success story as a refugee-turned-congress-woman is only possible. The story of Sesugh Uhaa, the black American wrestling superstar who was born to Nigerian parents of Tiv ethnicity in America, where his talents and potentials have been nurtured to success, may have been different if he was born in Taraba State in Nigeria. In that place, where ethnic Tiv people from neighbouring Benue State are regarded as non-indigenous settlers with very limited political and economic rights, his accomplishments in life would have been severely hampered. And that is if he is not mowed down in the perennial Tiv/Jukun tribal wars. Black Africa must begin to take full responsibility of what has become of its pitiable socio-economic conditions of strife in the midst of poverty. Africa is not innocent of its own problems and there has to be a shift from “how Europe underdeveloped Africa” to “how Africans are under developing Africa” as the theme of confronting this monster of self-hate. The inability of many black African states to outgrow their primitive tribal territorial stratifications into more inclusive nationhood has secured for the African continent a permanent place at the bottom of the pyramid of human evolution."
Clearly it's the fault of colonialism. Before colonialism, Africa was a paradise
We kept getting told that Africa is very diverse (which is why they can't live in the same nation with people from other tribes). So does it make sense to group them all as "black African people"?
Revealed: Rotherham rape gangs cover-up councillor holds senior diversity and inclusion NHS role - "A former Labour Party politician who resigned his cabinet position at Rotherham Council in 2015 amid reports that he 'pushed back' discussions on the ethnicity of grooming gangs now works as a senior diversity and inclusion manager in a major NHS body, GB News can reveal. Mahroof Hussain was embroiled in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal in 2015 when Dame Louise Casey’s review into the council named him and went on to conclude that the authority was in 'denial' and warped by a culture of bullying, sexism and cover-ups... Casey’s report named Hussain and then Deputy Leader Jahangir Akhtar as it criticised senior Pakistani members of the council for wielding “disproportionate influence”. The inspection found that Hussain and Akhtar both rebuffed a police officer when he proposed an initiative to target abusers after a pattern emerged that the abusers predominantly worked as taxi drivers and were from the Pakistani community. That pattern was borne out showing that males from Pakistani backgrounds were vastly over-represented in group localised child sexual exploitation. In 2015, Times reporter Andrew Norfolk wrote that Hussain was involved in another incident of deflecting attention away from predominantly Pakistani rape gangs when he made a false allegation of racism against a fellow Labour councillor “with the aim of preventing a discussion about sexual exploitation of children.” The Casey report found that council staff felt that Hussain had “suppressed discussion” of the issue. From 1997 to 2013, which includes the period that Hussain and other councillors were found to have stifled investigation, a “conservative estimate” of 1,400 girls were sexually exploited, trafficked, raped and tortured. Some of the victims were as young as 11. The National Crime Agency has since revised the number of victims during this period to 1,510. Hussain, who was a Rotherham councillor from 2002 and was almost selected as the Labour candidate for the 2012 by-election that Sarah Champion went on to win, resigned his cabinet role and his public office with immediate effect when Casey’s report was published. From May 2005, Hussain had been the cabinet member for Community Cohesion. GB News can now reveal that Hussain’s role in the Rotherham cover-up has not denied him a career in the public sector, with the disgraced politician now working as the National Diversity, Inclusion & Participation Manager for Health Education England... GB News has uncovered footage of Hussain repeating anti-semitic stereotypes that Jewish people exert control in society due to their “financial resources” while appearing on an Urdu-language news network since he resigned in disgrace from his Rotherham council role. On the Noor TV network in 2016, Hussain discussed the claim that “Jews control this and that,” responding to himself by saying “but why not?” adding that Jewish people have ‘control’ because “they have the ability, financial resources and the capability and the brains and the strategy.” Mahroof, who was made a Member of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2008, was previously appointed as an advisor to a Home Office working group on “Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation.” But Hussain has cultivated relationships with extremists since he was forced out of local government politics in 2015, with the CEO of Iman FM Mohammed Shabbir attending his daughter’s wedding in Sheffield in 2016. Iman FM was suspended and then banned by Ofcom in 2017 after it broadcast a series of speeches by Al-Qaeda preacher Anwar Al-Awlaki advocating violence against non-Muslims. Since his resignation from Rotherham, Hussain has also rebranded himself as an Islamophobia activist, describing himself on his LinkedIn as a consultant to charity Faith Matters and appearing at several events hosted by Tell MAMA, an organisation that monitors anti-Muslim hate... Labour did not confirm if Mahroof Hussain was still a Labour Party member."
The Failure of Democrat’s Identity Politics to Catch Fire Among the Electorate - "all six of those making their pitch were white—#debatesowhite, as the hashtag called it. Worse yet, half of those Caucasians are old enough to be carrying Medicare cards. As Frank Bruni wrote in last week’s Sunday column, “for a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, that’s a freaky, baffling turn of events.”... all the nonwhite candidates—except Yang, who has explicitly disavowed identity politics—are either going or gone... By the logic of identity politics, this shouldn’t have happened. Blacks make up 21 percent of the Democratic party. That should be enough, some might think, to guarantee substantial support for at least one of the black candidates, but it hasn’t worked that way. Joe Biden is the favorite among black Dems... Latino voters, making up 12 percent of the party, have proved even more indifferent than blacks to the rules of identity politics... Harris, who dropped out of the race due to lackluster fundraising and falling poll numbers, is the most striking example of the failure of identity politics to catch fire among the electorate. No one drank from the diversity well more deeply than Harris... in the end, her diverse identity and policy ideas appealed more to political and media elites than the Democratic hoi polloi... “Even at her campaign’s peak, polls showed she held more support from white liberals than from black voters”... And what about the much-hyped women’s vote? The Tao of identity politics teaches us that women should feel a sense of solidarity with their sisters, but that’s not the way they’ve been acting. Kirsten Gillibrand, the campaign season’s star avatar of women’s issues, was best known for her fight for paid leave and against sexual abuse in the military and on college campuses. Those efforts didn’t help her in a national campaign. Though almost 60 percent of self-identified Democrats are women, Gillibrand could never break 2 percent support, and she failed to meet the donor threshold for September’s debate. She ran as a “white woman of privilege,” telling voters, “I can talk to those white women in the suburbs and explain to them what white privilege actually is.” Evidently, women of color were unimpressed, while white ladies were not amused; her candidacy deflated like an old balloon... There’s little evidence that women as a group gravitate toward female candidates... “What looks like women voting for women is usually just women voting for Democrats”... Even women avowing a strong sense of shared gender identity were no more likely to come through for [Hillary]... And what about Andrew Yang, the candidate who, in a last-minute save, helped the Dems escape a dreaded optics of white supremacy at the Democratic debate? Ironically, the political establishment has been hellbent on ignoring Yang’s impressive candidacy even though he is nonwhite. MSNBC and CNN have “forgotten” to include the Taiwanese-American in graphics and polls on several occasions, even as he was polling better than other minority candidates who producers were able to remember. Other outlets got his name wrong, an error that would have given competitor networks chyron material for days if he were a black or Latino or female candidate. Does anyone doubt that Yang’s invisibility is because he is Asian, an uncomfortably ambiguous status within the metaphysics of identity politics? Because Asians, particularly the Taiwanese, have been immensely successful in America, they cloud any simple narrative of crushing white power and racism. Finally, we come to Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay person to make a serious showing in a presidential primary season. That has not been enough to protect him from attacks from progressive Democrats, some gay, who are ordinarily the most vociferous supporters of LGBT causes. Progressives have been enraged with the mayor of South Bend for his stint at McKinsey, the global consultancy firm. They have been equally incensed about a photo of Buttigieg raising money with members of the Salvation Army, in their view a homophobic organization. He has been canceled from some homosexual circles for not being “gay enough.” Nation contributor David Klion retweeted a thread accusing the mayor of showing off a “token black woman” at campaign events. “Mayor Pete is an exploitative twerp” is the sort of description popular in Twitter’s more progressive precincts."
From 2019. Minorities care less about narcissistic diversity than liberals claim
