AF Post on X - "New Zealand’s first lesbian ship captain sees first warship sink since WWII. The vessel was worth $61 million. Follow: @AFpost"
$100 Million Naval Ship Under Command Of Lesbian Captain Runs Aground, Catches Fire, And Sinks - "Critics on social media immediately noted that Captain Gray had no ship command experience on her resume... Some speculated that the commander had been hired to satisfy diversity concerns despite her lack of experience."
Meme - *Yvonne Gray*
"Barbie, is this Captain qualified?"
"She's better than qualified, she's diverse"
"New Zealand navy ship with Lesbian Captain runs aground, catches fire, and sinks."
Women leaders in Royal New Zealand Navy | The Australian Naval Institute - "For the Royal New Zealand Navy, the 2023 International Women’s Day offers more reasons to celebrate than most. It coincides not only with the highest percentage ever of women in the RNZN (27.4%) but the largest number of women taking command of RNZN ships and shore units, with four in command of ships and three in command of shore units. For the Chief of Navy, Rear Admiral David Proctor, all of these numbers are significant milestones. “International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate the diversity of our personnel and recognise the value women bring to our organisation,” he said. “But we also need to walk the walk and demonstrate that women have just as much opportunity to succeed as men. Having wāhine (women) as commanding officers on more than 60% of our ships, as well as heading up shore units and other important portfolios, is a realisation of that goal.”... Captain Maxine Lawes, who joined the RNZN in 1985, notes the change that has occurred in Navy culture over the years – particularly with the focus on diversity, equity and respect for personnel. “Our Navy had to adapt to a changing world,” she said. “It wasn’t easy initially but nothing worth doing is. I now look at the confident, well-supported, motivated and highly trained women in our Navy and feel enormously proud that they don’t just serve in the Navy, but they thrive in it and are in command of it.”"
Oops
Enhancing the participation of women - New Zealand Defence Force - "Accompanying the support of our NZDF senior leadership, the Wāhine Toa Programme of work has a number of overarching strategic commitments that shape and influence its focus, such as the United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles (UN WEPs), which NZDF formally adopted and signed up to in 2020 – becoming the first military in the world to adopt the UN WEPs."
John Ʌ Konrad V on X - "I interviewed a female veteran who served as an officer on 🇺🇸 ships about this incident, and she shared an intriguing perspective I’ve never heard before. She said that it took men centuries and thousands of shipwrecks to master commanding ships without major incidents, and we should expect some losses as women, who think differently, learn the ropes and gain that experience too doing it their way. She said losses are to be expected and they are ok especially if there’s no loss of life. She said we shouldn’t try to investigate this from a male perspective but learn lessons from a female perspective. I didn’t include this in the article because I couldn’t figure out how to present it without sparking a DEI firestorm, but it’s a thought-provoking take nonetheless. I kinda agree. Women do think different and this could become be a major tactical advantage for us but testing new methods and systems of thought comes with risks, especially at sea. The question is, with our @USNavyCNO saying to be prepared for war in 2027… can we afford to test new methods and lose ships while mistakes are inevitably made in the learning process? Or maybe with possible war looming on the horizon and so many great women already in command across our fleet… can we afford not to let them do things different and make mistakes?"
Weird how women cannot learn from men's mistakes
The costs of diversity get ever higher, but of course it makes us stronger
HMNZS Manawanui Sinking: Hard Grounding, Fire, and a Broken Royal New Zealand Navy - "the loss of this ship represents a significant blow, constituting at least 11% of New Zealand’s tiny naval fleet. This comes at a time when regional tensions and geopolitical instability are at their highest levels this century. A captain’s duty is to protect as many lives as possible, and Commander Gray clearly took decisive and effective action to save her crew. However, unlike merchant ship captains, naval commanders bear additional responsibilities. They must also safeguard the lives of convoys, carrier groups, and citizens they’ve sworn to protect. “What if an island faces a major catastrophe and the New Zealand Navy doesn’t have enough ships to respond?” asked a former senior US Navy officer, speaking anonymously. “Sure, she saved her crew, but how many lives might be lost in the future because damage control teams stay aboard and try to save this ship?” According to this source, praising commanding officers for saving a small number of lives at the expense of broader strategic goals is a problem common in navies today. He cited the USS Bonhomme Richard incident, where the captain was allowed to celebrate the ship’s decommissioning ceremony after watching it burn. Meanwhile, the admiral who rushed to the docks and organized fire parties to fight for its survival has faced numerous inquiries and a delayed promotion. “James Lawrence’s dying command in 1813 aboard USS Chesapeake—’Don’t Give Up The Ship‘—remains a bestseller at the Naval Academy gift shop, but I’m not sure midshipmen truly grasp the weight of his iconic words,” said our source."
Is a Diversity Hire to Blame for the Sinking of a $100 Million New Zealand Navy Ship? - "The New Zealand incident brings to mind the USS Fitzgerald crashing into a container ship off the coast of Japan in 2017 under the leadership of a young female officer. It was later determined that Sarah Coppock, the 26-year-old officer of the deck, who was in charge of the destroyer at the time of the crash, "In a panic... ordered the Fitzgerald to turn directly into the path of the Crystal." According to shipmates, Coppock was standoffish and refused to dine with her fellow sailors. "Sixteen minutes after the collision, at 1:46 a.m., [Navy Cmdr. Bryce] Benson [who was asleep at the time of the crash] staggered onto the bridge," the report continued. "Adrenaline, fear and anger shot through him. The ship was listing, wheeling in the dark uncontrolled. The electricity was out. The screens were off. Only emergency lanterns and moonlight illuminated the bridge." Benson found Coppock "sobbing." “Captain, I f**ked up,” she told him. "The Navy’s investigators concluded that sailors bore the primary blame for the collision," ProPublica reported. "Benson, Coppock and the bridge and combat information center watch teams had failed to use basic seamanship skills to escape an “avoidable” accident. They had been “excessively fatigued” and had not taken steps to rest. Coppock had ignored basic rules of the road and the captain’s orders. Coppock ultimately pled guilty to one count of negligence in a 2018 court-martial proceeding and was reprimanded and sentenced to three months reduced pay."
USS FITZGERALD Collision Cause Revealed—Woman Driver (Who Cried During Court Martial That Gave Her A Slap On The Wrist) - "Coppock's lawyer, it says in Stars And Stripes described a tattoo Coppock got on her wrist after the collision. It contained the coordinates of the ship at that moment, framed by the phrase “Protect Your People” above it and seven clovers beneath it. (You can kind of see this in the picture above.) One man said "But she got a commemorative tattoo, so all is forgiven", and when another man pointed out that tattoos in that style are against Navy regulations, a third said Not joking, my command would have punished me more harshly for that tattoo than she got for wrecking the ship. causing someone else to say Did she just give herself kill mark decals like an ace pilot in WW2?"
Frigate sank after rules were broken - "Fully 53 of 88 applicable safety rules and “barriers” were broken before one of Norway’s five frigates collided with an oil tanker near its home port nearly two years ago. The Norwegian defense department’s own report also noted that the crew on the bridge of the KNM Helge Ingstad had little experience... There was also “too little experience and competence among the crew and weak coordination among them.” Even though the crew on the tanker sent out repeated warnings and frantically asked the frigate to turn, communication between the two vessels was described as “imprecise” and the frigate’s crew simply didn’t grasp the looming danger. The captain of the frigate was not on the bridge in the early morning hours when the collision occurred on November 8, 2018. The frigate later sank slowly after all crew and officers on board had to abandon ship. Naval officials vowed to learn from their mistakes, which have proven very costly for Norwegian taxpayers. The vessel was valued at around NOK 5 billion, would cost much more than that to replace, and is now being scrapped."
Another item in the diversity tax ledger
A warship doomed by ‘confusion, indecision, and ultimately panic’ on the bridge - "She didn’t know the name of the hulking merchant vessel looming out of the night off the coast of Japan, but it was the Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal, and it was going to spear into the smaller guided-missile destroyer, tearing a gash in the hull before continuing into the darkness at 18 knots. Coppock’s fellow watchstanders on the bridge also had succumbed to “confusion, indecision, and ultimately panic,” according to an internal Navy investigation into the Fitzgerald disaster obtained by Navy Times. Helmed by Rear Adm. Brian Fort, a surface warfare officer with more than a quarter-century of service to the Navy, the secret probe was sent up the chain of command 41 days after the collision. It was designed to both candidly describe to senior commanders what went wrong while helping federal attorneys defend against lawsuits from the ACX Crystal’s owners and operators and, indirectly, the families of the seven sailors drowned in the berthing spaces below the bridge. The Navy has paraded out a series of public reports addressing both the Fitzgerald tragedy and the Aug. 21, 2017, collision involving the John S. McCain and the Liberian-flagged tanker Alnic MC that killed 10 more American sailors. But none of those investigations so starkly blueprinted the cascade of failures at all levels of the Navy that combined to cause the Fitzgerald disaster, especially the way the doomed crew of the destroyer was staffed, trained and led in the months before it the collision. Fort’s team of investigators described a bridge team that was overworked and exhausted, plagued by low morale, facing a relentless tempo of operations decreed by admirals far above them, distrustful of their superiors and, fatally, each other. And Navy officials knew all of that at least a year before the tragedy.
Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, rolls back DEI under pressure : r/business - "As someone who does regional hiring for a major international mega corp, the number of times we've literally removed top-qualified white guys from our hiring consideration Excel trackers because we had "enough white people" is very high. Literally every single hiring cycle we cut half of our top candidate list or more because they are white. And under economic pressure, we have for two years in a row now told people publicly that we were not hiring any roles, only to quietly offer back channel, zero-resume/zero questions asked interviews for black and hispanic women specifically. Zero interest in their qualifications. Just literally "Get one or two black/hispanic women and tell them they have offers pending a brief character interview". That shit wasn't for an administrative assistant position. That was for a $200k role that we only hire Ivy League for. Again I work at an F100 company that I won't disclose and I'm covering hiring for one of our busiest global regions. I am entirely certain that if it's this egregious here with us, that is this way at most large companies."
"Imagine not being able to find or recruit a qualified black or Hispanic woman in all the United States. It’s oh so “hard.”"
"Not sure what to tell you. I'm entirely supportive of equal opportunity and hiring based on that. I'm just personally not a fan of the "equitable" hiring we do. Some of our absolute best and brightest hires are black and hispanic women and race shouldn't matter at all--they are incredible people and if we want to talk race, some of my favorite black/hispanic hires are way more mature and intelligent than some of our recent white hires. The issue arises when we are given quotas and when we structurally contrive something. When we say "We have 10 slots, 5 of which must be diverse", it feels arbitrary to me. Even worse? We have a list of what even counts as "diverse". If you are white you get a 0 in that column. If you are Asian (of any kind) you get a 1 in that column. If you are Native American or Pacific Islander you get a 2. If you are black or hispanic you get a 5. Then if you're male you get a 0 added, and female you get +3 added. This leaves us in scenarios like the following: We approach an Ivy or near-Ivy school. We look at the top 1% of their class. Some years it's very mixed, ethnically. Other years, often it's dominant white + Asian. In those years instead of continuing to take the top 1%, we skip the top 1%, 2%, often even the top 5% to scrounge deeper into the student population simply to find the right number of people of a desired ethnic mix, regardless of quality. This has led us to hire some very mediocre folks who go on to either leave the company due to work pressure, or who don't get promoted/don't last and end up frustrating our ethnic balance metrics anyway. Equal opportunity hiring is vital. I love things like blotting out applicant names to avoid racist hiring practices. What I don't like is when I'm forced to skip people who are the wrong race, or to offer free entry tickets to someone based on race alone. When I was volunteering to help admissions back at my master's, we literally waived GRE scores for women and people of color. It was appalling. White? Male? You fight tooth and nail based on GRE score to get in. Female? Black or hispanic? Just make a 3 minute video application stating your excitement to attend the school and you're in. And that's on top of already having entire scholarship programs for you just because of your sex/race (which isn't bad--I support scholarships for systemically disadvantaged peoples). There is such a thing as taking things too far..."
Left wingers will just continue to lie that DEI is just about having a level playing field
Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, rolls back DEI under pressure : r/business - "Real world example: Non-minority executive gets fired specifically so they can be replaced by a minority person. Fired employee sues, company is found liable for employment discrimination"
"That’s an example of illegal employment practices, which were already illegal. Novant was dumb to break the law. That’s also not really a definition of DEI."
"You asked for real world examples and he provided one. You didn't ask for the ideal and conceptual example of what it's supposed to mean. You asked how it was manifesting in the real world and he provided one example exactly as you asked."
NASA Baffled At How Elon Managed To Succeed Without As Many Gay Non-Binary Muslim Dwarfs Of Color As They Have | Babylon Bee - "SpaceX's historic achievement occurred despite not making diversity and inclusion its top priority, leaving NASA in awe that such a feat could be pulled off without the mandated involvement of underrepresented people groups... Decision-makers at NASA reportedly held emergency closed-door meetings this week to discuss the widening gap between their work and the things being done at SpaceX. "It doesn't matter what we do, he just keeps pulling further ahead," a NASA insider said. "We're going to keep trying to incorporate more diversity, equity, and inclusion to everything we do, but it's like this guy has cracked some code where he just puts the most brilliant and qualified minds to work on his projects. That sounds crazy, but I guess it's working out for them." At publishing time, NASA sources still expressed skepticism that Musk would be able to successfully land a human being on Mars without the help of any gender-fluid atheist amputees of mixed racial descent."
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "This person owns a company that contracts with businesses and organizations to "remove white dominance and supremacy" from their operations via diversity training and other "antiracist" services. Fittingly, she has one of the ugliest and most disorganized websites I've seen recently."
365 Diversity @365Diversity: "I block white people. There is nothing white people can say and do that is creative, profound, and intimidating."
Diversity is about hating white people
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "Meta-analysis of 87 studies finds that ethnic diversity decreases social trust. [Dinesen et al, 2019] This finding is robust to a variety of covariates. Social trust is highly correlated with wealth and well-functioning societies."
Meme - Élie Cantin-Nantel @elie_mcn: "Like "LGBT," the DEI acronym is now also growing..."
Jonathan Kay @jonkay: "they keep adding letters It’s no longer EDI @WesternU now calls it EDIDA"
Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Congress gave The National Endowment for the Arts *207,000,000*, and then told the NEA to fund projects focused on "the history of Systemic Racism" Let's look at what the NEA did with your money. A thread🧵
Congress has the power to fund agencies and tell them how to spend their funding, and Congress told the NEA to "Continue prioritizing diversity" and to prioritize increasing diversity among "NEA staff, the National Council of the Arts, Discipline Directors, and Peer Panelists" In 2021 the NEA said they were "centering equity and justice along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation, geography, poverty, and the infinite ways these intersect in everything we do" So this isn't something new.
The NEA funds wokeness several ways, one of which is the artsHERE program. artsHERE provides support and grants to "organizations that have demonstrated a commitment to equity within their practices and programming." So this is funding for explicitly woke organizations. artsHERE handed out 112 grant totaling*12.3 Million Dollars* to organizations who "demonstrated commitment to equity within their practices and programming." This means the NEA handed out grants to organizations that adhered to the Social Justice politics of the left.
So, why is this happening? In 2021 the NEA created a new strategic plan which stated that the NEA was going to "model diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts through all its activities and operations." So DEI is quite literally part of the plan. According to this plan, one of the goals is to "Invest in the Capacity of Arts Organizations and Artists to Serve a Broader Public through Digital or Emergent Technology." The reason for this is because tech artists engage with "climate change and racial justice."
To be clear, I don't oppose artists who make political art, I'm in favor of free speech. But this is different. The NEA is only funding art that agrees with leftist Social Justice politics. So in effect they are advancing their politics using taxpayer money.
The NEA also says that it is going to implement racial quotas in selecting panelists. This is basically intersectional bean counting. IT is to hire people are select them for roles because of their race or ethnicity, rather then their qualifications. This is tokenism."
Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "At the NIH, the Distinguished Scholars Program hires scientists who show a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Through a public records request, I’ve acquired redacted NIH hiring documents that show what this criterion looks like in practice. 🧵
Note, the NIH's former chief DEI officer emphasized that this program does not limit hiring based on race or sex—because, as she puts it below, “legally we cannot.” Instead, it purports to boost diversity by proxy, hiring scientists who value DEI. But... ...the records I acquired show—first of all—that NIH applicant reviewers repeatedly highlight gender and minority status. Here's an example, in the section soliciting positive and negative comments on the potential NIH scientists.
“Female [redacted] physician scientist,” “URM scientist,” “URM female scientist.” These references appear consistently throughout the records, raising obvious legal questions. Again, the NIH's chief DEI officer said the program cannot legally limit hiring based on race/sex.
Scientific excellence, moreover, clearly takes a backseat in the program. A reviewer says of one candidate: “Excellent scientist but not particularly distinguished in the area of diversity in science.” Another: “Unimpressive diversity statement, good scientist…” Another candidate mentored several minorities, but in their application, their “details on mentoring focused mostly on scientific accomplishments rather than diversity commitment.” They were deemed a "mediocre" candidate.
Downplaying scientific excellence is bad enough. But here’s the bigger program: the records reveal an ideological bias. Throughout, scientists are lauded for using the language of identity politics, and punished for not espousing the right understanding of diversity. “The fact that she has [redacted] shows a lack of sensitivity to issues central to diversity,” one comment notes. The program is “not solely focused on women,” another notes cryptically.
At times, the ideological orientation of these NIH assessments becomes explicit. Here, a candidate is praised for understanding “structural racism" and "intersectionality." (Well, specifically, the "impace" of intersectionality). Reviewers praise another scientist for engaging in diversity and inclusion “activism,” and another for espousing the right understanding of “structural inequities.”
“Passionate re intersectionality of minority statuses.”
The NIH deemed this program such a smashing success that it created a grant program to spread these practices around the country. NIH FIRST has dolled out a quarter-billion-dollars in grants for universities to hire scientists who show a “commitment to DEI.” I've reported extensively on the NIH FIRST program. As it turns out, it emulates the Distinguished Scholars Program pretty closely. A few examples.
First, here's the DEI assessment rubric several NIH FIRST recipients have used. Clear ideological undertones. Second, the NIH FIRST heavily emphasizes a commitment to DEI. Universities and med schools hiring faculty through the program must require and heavily weigh DEI statements. It also explicitly prohibits using racial preferences. Third, documents acquired through public records requests show, universities ignore the on-paper rules against discrimination and blatantly hired based on race. One grant recipient said in an email, "I don't want to hire white men for sure."
The NIH intended to create a career pipeline for underrepresented minorities by screening scientists for their commitment to DEI. In practice, its programs used racial preferences while also screening out scientists based on their commitment to a social cause. As I wrote in WSJ, the distorted priorities of American academia often have roots in the federal government. In the end, the NIH has helped fund the thriving scholar-activist career pipeline... Some of the remaining redactions raise yet more questions. With the NIH, you often have to go the legal route, and Russ is pushing for more."
Clearly, if you oppose DEI, you just want to say the n word, and DEI is just about ensuring a level playing field
Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "At the University of Michigan, a large-scale hiring program only recruits scholars who show a “commitment to DEI.” In practice, its a career pipeline program for scholars in activist disciplines—like “trans of color epistemologies” and “queer of color critique." 🧵🧵🧵
After the New York Times published on Michigan’s DEI bureaucracy, the university scrubbed (❗️❗️) the Collegiate Fellows Program directory from its webpage. But I saved archived links. Here’s what the much-celebrated initiative looks like in practice. 1⃣ A gender studies professor hired through the program studies how “transgender Latinas are racialized and sexualized in sexual economies of labor and the US nation more broadly.” Her book project shows “how sex working trans Latina ways of being and knowing not only defy racist-cisgenderism more broadly, but also offer potentialities beyond transnormativity and normative Latinidad.” Now a tenure-track professor via administratrive side-door loophole.
2⃣ Another fellow studies "interracial solidarities, policing, and American global power, with special attention to Latinx and Arab American radicalisms." UM courses she's taught include "Race, Solidarity, and the Carceral State" and "Latinx Freedom Dreams."
3⃣Another, now in the philosophy department, studies the “the epistemic exclusion of diverse practitioners within the academy.” Her most recent article “conceptualiz[es] the genealogy of structural anti-Blackness.”
4⃣Another former-fellow-now-tenure-track-professor studies film as a “medium for racial formation” informed by “women, queer, and trans of color epistemologies” as well as “decolonial thought.”
5⃣was "trained in literary and critical theory”
6⃣examines the "white supremacist" roots of Southern wife beating laws
7⃣offers “antiracist and queer revisions" to "Aristotle's ancient theory of rhetorical ethos”
8⃣specializes in “critical translation theory"
9⃣Another, a scholar of modern France, “broadly focus on the intersection of race and religion (or religion as race).” That’s a bit vague. In practice, he too is laser-focused on intersectional analysis. His edited collection, Queer Jews, Queer Muslims, aims at “triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dad with a third variable: queerness.”
🔟 Another, in her course on “Black Feminism(s),” prompts students to ask “How have Black women pushed back against and attempted to reshape traditional, Eurocentric, ‘white feminist’ politics?”
1⃣1⃣An anthropologist recruit is currently exploring how debates over vaccines “are intimately tied to broader questions about gender, race, and nation.” Drawing from “critical refugee studies.”
1⃣3⃣Jessica Kenyatta Walker, meanwhile, is a practitioner of critical food studies. Walker illustrates how these faculty recruitment have a downstream effect on culture. When Quaker Oats scrapped “Aunt Jemima,” Walker was interviewed by NPR as an expert, pushing the company to bring about “structural change.”
These are just a few examples. The list goes on. A few takeaways are in order.
1) This program give the chosen few a side-door onto the faculty. It works like this:
➡️Fellowship applicants are screened by the DEI office and hired as postdocs.
➡️They are then guaranteed tenure-track positions, bypassing the normal rigors of a competitive faculty search.
2) As a whole, the program has a massive—and distorting—effect on the university’s research agenda.
Of the 31 former fellow now teaching in non-STEM disciplines, all but one specialize in issues of identity—race, gender, sexuality, and so on. Fourteen of them employ what can be described as critical theory, including:
➡️“critical race theory"
➡️“critical translation studies"
➡️“critical food studies"
➡️“queer of color critique"
➡️“trans of color epistemologies,"
and various forms of systemic oppression.
3/ Amazingly, according to DEI proponents, the Collegiate Fellows Program stands out as an exemplar. A faculty petition circulated last week, which opposes any attempt to reform DEI by the Board of Regents, cites it as an example of DEI done right.
4/ For years, critics have argued that DEI evaluations—through diversity statements, or any other tool used to assess a scholars’ “commitment to DEI”—serve as an ideological litmus test, raising serious constitutional issues at a state university. The Collegiate Fellows Program lends credence to this argument.
6/ But the ideological gloss might well just be a side-product. In records I acquired, UM’s chief diversity officer boasted that screening faculty for their “commitment to DEI” serves as a near perfect proxy for racial preferences.
In other words, UM sought to create a career pipeline for underrepresented minority scholars — and it ended up creating a scholar-activist pipeline. Demographic diversity via viewpoint conformity. I suspect I’ll get comments that raise the question so I’ll go ahead and say: Faculty should be allowed to espouse controversial views. They should be allowed to teach controversial classes. These faculty should not be fired. But that’s not the real issue. This is the issue: Universities, foundations, and federal agencies have funded a career path for those who hold an activist vision for higher education. This is a bad thing, and there’s no reason to continue funding the scholar-activist pipeline."
