New research proves inclusive advertising boosts sales and brand value - "A new global study led by Saïd Business School proves that inclusive advertising and positive gender portrayals can drive sales and business growth. The Unstereotype Alliance, an industry-led initiative convened by UN Women, today published a first-ever global study which empirically proves inclusive advertising - content which authentically and positively portrays a full range of people and is devoid of stereotypes - has a positive impact on business profit, sales and brand value. The study was conducted with leading researchers from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and leveraged proprietary data provided by Unstereotype Alliance members Bayer Consumer Healthcare, Diageo, the Geena Davis Institute, Kantar, Mars Incorporated, Mondelez International and Unilever."
The marketing material calls this "irrefutable data" and the 36 page PDF claims the "study irrefutably demonstrates" its claims, confirming suspicions that business school methodology is dodgy. Naturally, the study glossed over how they established causality, describing methodology that might potentially do that on page 13 (15) but never reporting the results, let alone the effect sizes, and just kept going on about their correlational results. The data being proprietary means that no one is ever going to be able to even try to replicate this study, even if the full methodolgy and results were disclosed. Convenient.
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Ever wondered why advertisements heavily feature Black actors when they're just 12-14% of the population? I might have an explanation: Black viewers have a strong preference for seeing other Blacks in media, whereas Whites have no racial preferences. These results are derived from a meta-analysis of 57 pre-2000 and 112 post-2000 effect sizes for Blacks alongside 76 and 87 such effect sizes for Whites. If you look at them, you'll notice that Whites' initial, slight preference declined and maybe reversed. It's worth asking if this is explained by publication bias. It's not! Neither aggregately (as pictured), nor with results separated by race. This study also plotted an alternative measure of racial preferences: differences in thermometer ratings. These are ratings of how "warm" people feel towards other groups. For Blacks, a persistent, consistent in-group preference. For Whites, in the past, yes, but now, no. The hypothesis that Black media overrepresentation is due to catering to higher propensities for Blacks to spend, all else equal, is interesting, but it fails on the merits (less total spending). It seems plausible that advertisers and media creators are just catering to demand. Of course, people could just ask. We do see this crop up in many other areas too. There is usually a Black in-group bias, and at the very least, no/a small White net disdain for Blacks or preference for Whites. Accordingly, identifying Black-owned businesses benefits owners:"
This won't stop white people from being slammed for being racist
Elon Musk on X - "Who is pushing this? To the best of my knowledge, there is no effort to put White people in TV ads in non-White countries. That would be considered ridiculous. It isn’t even discussed. Why is diversity only pushed only in historically White countries? Real question."
𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 on X - "Yes, few people know that in Ragin v. New York Times (2d Cir. 1991) the Second Circuit found that advertisements for real estate discriminated against black people because there weren’t enough black models in them. Diversity in ads is actually legally mandatory, in practice."
Samantha Smith on X - "The Oxford Union used to host the brightest minds on earth. Now it’s a cesspit of screaming children who can’t hold a basic conversation."
memetic_sisyphus on X - "An Oxford Union debate, but it’s women in hijabs screaming incoherently about their native tribal conflicts."
Josh Dehaas on X - "Glad to see Alberta is planning to get rid of mandatory DEI training in regulated professions. I wish Ontario would do the same. Your ability to practice medicine, law or any profession shouldn’t hinge on whether you’ve undergone political indoctrination."
Whyvert on X - "The Stockholm School of Economics tried an experiment: use an entrance exam instead of biased school grades. But the % of women admitted declined. Not acceptable! They are ending this experiment in impartial evaluation and going back to admitting who school teachers like."
Emil Kirkegaard on X - ">Be Sweden
>damn, the people on college are getting worse
>it's because of grade inflation used for entry
>so let's just add a required standardized test
>diversity decreased (fewer women)
>shiiiiet
>removes the tests again"
Of course, the left wing cope is that the entrance exam is biased and unfair to women
Dr Kareem Carr on X - "Additionally, people are increasingly taking those credentials less seriously precisely because they are increasingly held by women and people of color."
vittorio on X - "no. people take credentials less seriously because the people flaunting them are often the least competent, and the credentials themselves have become cheap. the fact that credential flaunting is increasingly done by women and people of color is totally unrelated"
Daniel Friedman on X - "If you believe in a progressive legal philosophy, you are painfully aware of how badly the Democrats fumbled the Supreme Court. First, establishment Republicans got Trump to nominate a very boring Bush administration lawyer. He likely would have been a fairly squishy moderate justice like Roberts or even Kennedy, until Democrats came after him during confirmation hearings with outlandish personal attacks designed to destroy his reputation. Trump stood behind Kavanaugh when many presidents would have withdrawn the nomination, and, as a result, Kavanaugh was confirmed to a lifetime appointment and is now much further to the right, much angrier and much more loyal to Trump than he would have been otherwise. Then, Biden came into office with conservatives holding six seats on the Court and poised to sweep away decades of liberal precedents. He knew his next appointment would have to be a persuasive advocate for a liberal view of the law, articulating a set of progressive principles in dissents that would undermine the legitimacy and persuasiveness of the jurisprudence the Right was building and lay the groundwork for liberals’ return to power. He needed to nominate someone who would write dissents so powerful and blistering that it would make majority opinions by Alito and Gorsuch too embarrassing for John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett to sign onto. There were a number of jurists and scholars that the progressive legal establishment believed were up to the task, but Biden vowed instead to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court — he said this not with KJB in mind, but promised to nominate a black woman before he had done any vetting of candidates. This eliminated the judges many people believed were best-qualified for the job. KJB is a generally smart and competent person, but she was chosen on the basis of identity characteristics for a very difficult if not impossible job, and she is doing poorly. When excerpts from her dissents are posted on social media, they are less likely to be rallying cries for progressives than objects of right-wing mockery. If you believe progressivism and its theories of law and jurisprudence are silly and hollow to begin with, then maybe this isn’t KJB’s fault — she’s doing the best she and perhaps anyone could do after being dealt a very bad hand. But if you believe that there is an alternative world where a progressive justice could routinely win arguments against Alito and write barnburner dissents that could lay out a persuasive alternative vision to the majority’s — KJB hasn’t been it."
Meme - Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan: "I remember seeing this as a teenager, and thinking “What a great country, and what a great ideal: skin colour should matter no more than hair colour”. For a while, things seemed to be moving that way. Then came the Great Awokening from 2015, and the demented BLM summer of 2020, and the dream of a colour-blind society suddenly seems more distant than ever."
"With the Conservatives, there are no'blacks, no'whites, just people. Conservatives believe that treating minorities as equals encourages the majority to treat them as equals. Yet the Labour Party aim to treat you as a 'special case', as a group all on your own. Is setting you apart from the rest of society a sensible way to overcome racial prejudice and social inequality? The question is, should we really divide the British people instead of uniting them?
WHOSE PROMISES ARE YOU TO BELIEVE?
When Labour were in government, they promised to repeal Immigration Acts passed in 1962 and 1971. Both promises were broken. This time, they are promising to throw out the British Nationality Act, which gives full and equal citizenship to everyone permanently settled in Britain. But how do the Conservatives' promises compare? We said that we'd abolish the 'SUS' law. We kept our promise. We said we'd recruit more coloured policemen, get the police back into the community, and train them for a better understanding of
your needs. We kept our promise.
PUTTING THE ECONOMY BACK ON ITS FEET.
The Conservatives have always said that the only long term answer to our economic problems was to conquer inflation. Inflation is now lower than it's been for over a decade, keeping all prices stable, with the price of food now hardly rising at all. Meanwhile, many businesses throughout Britain are recovering, leading to thousands of new jobs.
Firstly, in our traditional industries, but just as importantly in new technology areas such as micro-electronics. In other words, the medicine is working. Yet Labour want to change everything, and put us back to square one. They intend to increase taxation. They intend to increase the National Debt. They promise import and export controls. Cast your mind back to the last Labour government. Labour's methods didn't work then. They won't work now.
A BETTER BRITAIN FOR ALL OF US.
The Conservatives believe that everyone wants to work hard and be rewarded for it. Those rewards will only come about by creating a mood of equal opportunity for everyone in
Britain, regardless of their race, creed or colour. The difference you're voting for is this:
To the Labour Party, you're a black person. To the Conservatives, you're a
British Citizen. Vote Conservative, and you vote for a more equal, more prosperous Britain.
LABOUR SAYS HE'S BLACK.
TORIES SAY HE'S BRITISH."
Left wingers keep claiming that we must stand against those who would divide us, but left wing ideology thrives on dividing people. While pointing out the real problems caused by left wing ideology is supposedly divisive
Marvel Comics just debuted a white Black Panther. You can guess how that’s going over 😂 - "The wokies told us that these are fictional characters, and that no one should care that much about things that aren't real. Meanwhile, the meme lords started swapping skin colors of black figures/characters to make fun of the trend: The wokies laughed and said they wouldn't care. But now Marvel has gone and actually introduced a new Black Panther named Ketema who is the son of the original Black Panther, King T'Challa. In the comic (spoiler incoming), he challenges his father in tribal combat for the throne and defeats him... It turns out the wokies DO care after all — a lot:"
U. Wisconsin med school admits black students at 6 times rate of Asians - "The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health accepts black applicants at a rate six times higher than it does Asian applicants, despite lower average Medical College Admissions Test scores, a medical advocacy group recently reported. However, the public university denied that it accepts applicants based on their race when contacted by The College Fix. The report “Skirting SCOTUS Part III: How Medical Schools Continue to Practice Racially Conscious Admissions” by Do No Harm analyzed 2024 admissions data from 23 medical schools, including the University of Wisconsin’s. At the Wisconsin medical school, it found that “a black applicant has nearly 10 times the odds of admission compared to an Asian or white applicant with the same MCAT score and GPA.” Admitted black applicants averaged MCAT scores in the 62nd percentile, while white and Asian admits averaged scores in the 86th percentile, according to the report. A page on the medical school’s website states that “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are top priorities,” and that it aims to build programs that “reflect” the communities it serves. Its admissions page also highlights that 28 percent of the students who are admitted are “underrepresented in medicine.”... “Students with stronger academic credentials (i.e. GPA and MCAT scores) tend to perform better through the medical school pathway (i.e. medical school and residency). Deprioritizing objective measures of merit in service of racial goals is extremely foolish”... 22 out of 23 public medical schools exhibit a trend of admitting underrepresented minority students with lower test scores over more academically accomplished white and Asian candidates. The report also found “evidence that a number of medical schools continue to pursue identity politics and employ discriminatory, racially conscious admissions policies”... over 70 medical schools maintain offices dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion, despite federal orders to end these programs"
Mark W. on X - "Diversity isn't your strength. It lowers your wages, marginalises your culture, increases your crime, fills your hospitals, occupies your housing, ruins your schools, consumes your taxes, tightens your laws, restricts your freedoms, endangers your children, and calls you racist."
Claudine Gay’s DEI Empire - "Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution. Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice. While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendations the following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment. In 2022, Gay implemented an initiative at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “denaming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration. According to the report, commissioned by then-president Lawrence Bacow, these decisions would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values.” In other words, Harvard would use the standards of present-day social-justice activism to pass judgment on men who lived hundreds of years prior—at best, an ahistorical and deeply ambiguous method. As part of this project, Gay sent an email to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community soliciting “requests for denaming,” promising to address the situation “through the lens of reckoning.” Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president. As president, Gay leads a sprawling DEI bureaucracy—officially, the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—that seeks to influence how students speak, think, and behave in relation to race. Though the university deleted nearly all DEI materials from its website following President Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony related to the Hamas terror attack, I have recovered some of these documents through an Internet archive. Harvard’s DEI administrators encourage students to internalize the basic narrative of critical race theory: America is a nation defined by “systemic racism,” “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.” In another resource, students were invited to “unpack” their “white privilege” and “male privilege,” and to consider their “white fragility,” which stems from “the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.” What is one to make of Gay’s record as a whole? She is hardly a “scholar’s scholar,” as the university magazine tried to portray her, having published, according to her curriculum vitae, just 11 academic papers—nearly half of which include plagiarized material. Nor is she a competent administrator, having botched the response to rampant anti-Semitism on campus and, by one estimate, lost the university more than $1 billion in donations. But she plays one role perfectly: the dutiful racialist, skilled at the manipulation of guilt, shame, and obligation in service of institutional power. For instance, she wrote last year in a message to the campus announcing a report on Harvard’s historical connection to slavery: “We have been excluded and denigrated for centuries from an institution where we now work, study, and lead. Our presence here should not feel so extraordinary. But now we see it was anything but inevitable.” The irony: Gay was, in fact, somewhat inevitable. In the long season of racial guilt and animus that followed George Floyd’s death, the university was desperate to recruit a “first,” as Gay put it in her inaugural address, and disrupt the university’s nearly 400 years of whiteness. As Harvard is now learning, however, naming as president someone who sees race and sex not as incidental human attributes but as ideological constructions that must be imposed on the institution comes with a significant downside. Consequently, Harvard’s trustees find themselves in a bind: they hired Gay in large part for her identity and cannot fire her for the same reason. They seem resigned to muddling through the “racial reckoning,” however long it lasts and whatever further damage it inflicts on America’s oldest university."
From 2023
Meme - i/o @avidseries: "A higher percentage of black and Hispanic women attend college than white men, despite the fact that white men significantly outperform these groups on the SAT. However, the black and Hispanic female college dropout rates are higher than that for white males, so a higher percentage of white males ends up graduating than black and Hispanic females."
Proof that the SAT is useless because it can't predict college admission! The reason black and Hispanic women dropout of college is due to sexism and racism
A Hungry Bear on X - "Honestly, "put Black and Hispanic people in positions they will fail at and then slap them with $200k un-bankruptable debt on top" sounds like a systemically racist system disguised as equality"
The Alex Nowrasteh on X - "Good policies matter most. A diverse population reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different."
'Red flags': Disagreement erupts over Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim's plan for Filipino cultural centre : r/ilovebc - "Personally, I think the government should only provide cultural centers for all residents (like libraries, swimming pools etc). If an ethnic community wants their own cultural centers, they should fund that themselves privately."
The UK is now a sectarian state - spiked - "Diversity, for so long championed as the source of our strength, is rapidly proving the UK’s undoing. There can be little doubt now that Britain is becoming a sectarian state. The signs are everywhere. Flags on streets demarking ethnic enclaves, communities living parallel lives, ‘community leaders’ assuming the position of fiefdom chiefs, areas in our towns and cities becoming no-go areas for certain ethnic groups, police dictating where and when which groups may or may not assemble… these were the hallmarks of Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s. The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attending a Europa League fixture with Aston Villa has felt like a tipping point. It has confirmed the fears of many that Britain is now a country in which the authorities feel powerless to prevent intra-communal violence, or that they have surrendered to the demands of one ethno-religious group at the expense of the safety of another. Britain’s apparent fragmentation has numerous, oft-cited causes. Many point the finger to the increased and unsustainable levels of immigration since the 1990s. The craven capitulation by the authorities in Birmingham points to another: the ingrained cowardice of our liberal elites, who fear to speak about or act upon grave problems for fear of being called racist. Yet a crucial factor, and one that often goes overlooked, is that those who for decades have promoted multiculturalism have never seemed to understand what ‘culture’ actually means. Those liberals who parroted the mantras of multiculturalism have been prone to think of culture as something superficial or fleeting. For them, multiculturalism refers merely to different food or exotic customs. Given time, these types assume, all immigrants and their children will turn out just like them: tolerant, enlightened, secular humanists. The free-market fundamentalists who have consistently pushed for higher immigration likewise think of culture as cosmetic. But their philistinism differs slightly. Beneath it, they say, we are all global, footloose economic units who shouldn’t be constrained by such trivialities as borders or the nation state. Over the decades, the powers that be have viewed the issues facing our multiethnic society foremost from sociological or economic perspectives, when our approach should also have been anthropological. Culture is not just about chicken tikka masala or celebrating Diwali. Culture is about values. And the values we inherit, hold and transmit shape our thinking and behaviour. There are some values that have been intrinsic to these islands over the centuries: freedom of speech and action, equality before the law, and tolerance of others who think and believe differently. This is why the mass gang rape of children by disproportionately Pakistani men, or demanding special treatment on account of one’s race or religion, or hounding and killing others because of theirs, is so unacceptable to most Britons. These actions are not only illegal: they violate our values.
Why can’t we celebrate Ncuti Gatwa for his talents? - spiked - "The Doctor, the lead character in the BBC’s Doctor Who, is a shape-shifting, time-travelling humanoid alien. The Doctor is not bound by his physical biology or by conventional notions of time and space. And yet the casting of even this potentially limitless character is now viewed and discussed through the narrowest lens imaginable – that of identity politics... Predictably, the media focus turned almost instantly from Gatwa’s talents to his race. NPR hailed the ‘historic casting selection’ of Doctor Who’s ‘first black lead’. The Times similarly noted the ‘landmark’ casting of a black man as the Doctor. For the past five years or so, the identity of the Doctor – in the superficial sense of race and gender – has dominated commentary of the show. When Peter Capaldi announced he was stepping down as the Doctor in 2017, the Guardian insisted that his replacement ‘can and must’ be a woman, black or both. Producers had an ‘urgent’ duty to avoid casting another white man, it said. The BBC duly announced that Jodie Whittaker would play the first-ever female Doctor, to much identitarian celebration. During the Whittaker era, Doctor Who also had its first black incarnation of the Doctor – the Fugitive Doctor, who was played by Jo Martin and appeared in several episodes. From then on, the identitarian die was cast and it was all but inevitable that Gatwa would be celebrated and talked up primarily as the ‘first black lead’. On the face of it, such celebration is silly. We are talking about casting the new lead in a children’s TV show here, not picking the next pope. But there is a nasty undertone to some of this ‘celebration’, too. No doubt there will be a tiny number of bigots who will have been up in arms over news of a black Doctor. But not for the first time, woke types are currently posturing against a racist backlash that hasn’t actually materialised, celebrating Gatwa’s casting as a brilliant blow to the imagined gammon hordes... The effect of all this is to strip Gatwa of his humanity and to undermine his talents – to turn him into a cipher of his race and a tool of the culture war. And it undermines creativity, too. Whether we are talking about Doctor Who, James Bond or other iconic shows and franchises, identitarian concerns now either drive casting decisions or surround the discussion of them. Showrunners, actors and filmmakers can’t escape this even if they wanted to. Popular culture is being reduced to a means of sending the ‘right’ message about diversity, as if casting decisions are all that stand between us and utopia. It’s all rather tragic – in both senses of the word."
