[This.Is.the.Police.2.Update.v1.0.4-CODEX Tool
Iberio Ralda
"There are a number of other phrases that did not make the Oregon list, but that some realtors avoid nonetheless for fear of liability, including the following: master bedroom (either sexist or purportedly evocative of slavery and therefore insulting to African Americans), great view (allegedly expresses preference for the nonblind), and walk-up (supposedly discourages the disabled)."
I didn't say that they violated the law. My exact quote was "even terms like 'great view' and 'walk-up' have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs." I didn't say that these terms were ever found to violate the law. It's in keeping with one of the main arguments from the book, which is that stuff that is technically legal might still be thought to be problematic, creating a chilling effect. So what realtors think you're allowed to say or not say is relevant to the discussion. And the fact that government has to cite them as ok tells you far the restrictions on speech go. If these are your border cases, the civil rights regime is a massive infringement on liberty.
As for the Yale claim, Traldi doesn't provide a link, so I don't know how much the hospital staff affects things. But this article says that there's a 45% increase in administrators in less than two decades, and it doesn't appear to count hospital staff. It pegs number of administrators as about 80% of the number of students without counting the hospital.
So the statement ends up technically true, and also not very misleading unless you think that hospital administrators shouldn't count (which is arguable) and you think there's some massive difference between a huge increase in administrators that leads to them being 80% as large as the student body or 101%. Hospital staff are also doing a lot of DEI stuff too, so I don't know why you should exclude them if they're part of a larger story of bureaucratic bloat.
At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.
Was this a game of telephone where the defendant's attorney makes an inflammatory statement about the sought relief that gets included in poorly-sourced blurbs, which Scott repeated as the focus of the whole case? The chain of attribution is pretty shaky here
Story seems to be that as Step 1 in the suit is that the EEOC needs to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, and that it relied on an expert report to do so. Problem was, the expert report sucked really bad, was excluded by the trial court, and Freeman moved for a summary judgement that was ultimately granted. EEOC tried to submit an amended report but it sucked too. Case dies in the crib and any argument about the sympathetic Black applicant or the mis-aimed relief is irrelevant. EEOC appeals, appellate court narrowly holds that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the report, and that's whole ballgame.
I have some expertise in harassment cases in California. The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue. See: California Civil Jury Instruction (abbreviated CACI for reasons not immediately clear to the casual observer) 2521A. Further different workplaces can have different standards; (see the Friends case - Lyle v. Warner Brothers (38 Cal.4th 264)). "FEHA is not a civility code."
I think in a book that's being critical of civil right's laws as an institution should point out that the history of this is a little more nuanced when you remember that we never have had a true neutral point in terms of civil rights. Her response:
I think the original paragraph definitely hides the fact that white / non-white was a pretty bad binary to be on one side of socially, but you needed to be on the other side of it for legal protections to apply.
The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.
I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.
There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.
Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.
I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.
My admittedly anedotical 0.05$ as a generic office drone. *Every* white collar job I've heard of uses patently IQ test-like screening. I'm not talking about Google or Jane Street, I'm talking about big4 consultancies, mid-sized accounting firms etc. Places where productivity is not nearly high enough to justify resisting the acrimonious persecution Hanania posits, and that yet are happy to ask their applicants to submit Raven matrices or quirky plane geometry problems (the joke is even that the only thing those working there got out of grad school/MBA was prepping for the GMAT/GRE, since once hired they'll end up filling excels anyway).
As for wokeness driving the soulness of workplace, I worked under a boomer boss who openly made (admittedly funny) "I hate my wife" and "women amiright" jokes in front of the HR lady, confident that suing for harassment was something you see in media much more than in real life. The place was as soulless (or, I'd rather say, soulful in the modest and self contained way you can expect an office to be) bc people just wanted to do their work and then go live their lives.
I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.
I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.
This DEFINITELY happens with the parts of the federal bureaucracy that I am involved with. I have daily contact with federal bureaucrats, and the recent hires/promotions are wildly more "diverse" (out of all proportion with the population honestly), and of very poor quality. So you have a lot of 55-65 year old white male civil servants of very high ability and intelligence, being replaced by pretty low capacity 30-40 year old minority women of startlingly poor intelligence and ability. On paper they have similar credentials, but they are not similar caliber people. In general obviously, there are exceptions in both cases. The preference HR policies clearly have *something* to do with it.
In the off chance some skilled white or Asian man finds his way into the civil service, you often find them leaving to go make more money as a consultant because their career is going nowhere and they are getting passed over for promotion by their idiot admin with the right diversity characteristics (I am only half exaggerating). So now you have this ineffectual federal staff who does little work, and is surrounded by a cloud of not very diverse consultants who are needed to get things done (due to procurement rules/preferences typically the owners of the consulting firms are also fairly diverse, but the consultants/SMEs themselves less so...after all somebody needs to know what they are doing).
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