“'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away, just makes me
wanna cry.
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?” - Nick Lowe
I lived a good bit of my life before “Diversity,
Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) was anything but a laughable pipedream. Going back to the “bad old days” when America
was rapidly fading into mediocrity (the “A’s” in MAGA) is one of the dumber
ideas coming from a batch of people who are known for being “The
Party of Stupid.” The only people who are, and should be, alarmed at a
national policy of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” are unskilled,
unintelligent, uncreative, entitled, and mostly-useless and obsolete white men
and their even more obsolete subservient housewife/waitress/baby-mommas. These excess humans are rightly afraid of
being left behind because they are so far behind the best-and-brightest that
they have no hope of ever catching up or even being relevant outside of cannon
fodder. Even MAGA’s billionaire hero, Leon
Musk, wants to import engineering talent using the dreaded H1-B program.
Musk isn’t really interested in “people who are super talented engineers AND
super motivated in the USA,” despite his claims. Musk
wants as much talent as he can get, as cheaply as possible with the “cheaply”
part being the most important criteria. The
H1-B program makes virtual slaves out of those immigrants, paying about 50-75%
of the going rate for equivalent US-born talent. And based on the lousy reliability and safety
record of Musk’s Tesla
and SpaceX
products, he’s getting what he’s paying for in terms of engineering talent.
Take a look at the typical demographic of the US competitors (and winners) of the International Academic Competitions (IAC) and STEM academic competitions. See any of the usual football team characters here? Of course you don’t because those fools were focused on dominating the small-scale, instant gratification high school scene making their high school years the pinnacle of their sad, brutal lives. The DEI students represented in the academic and STEM high-achiever contests are looking at long-term gratification and success, knowing high school is a momentary blip in an adult’s life and a high school diploma is about the lowest bar a successful human will need to hurdle in life.
Girls and women, boys and men of all races, but predominately non-white, are achieving at the highest levels in K-12 schools and universities around the country (and world). All the while, traditional European usual-suspects are still pretending that high school football, basketball, and other sports matte. The best and brightest kids are leap-frogging the high school social scene into higher education and lives with security and that make a positive difference in the world. White men are still the predominant group in our university STEM programs, but our foolish tax system is pulling too many (most in critical areas) into useless and destructive activities like the lucrative hedge fund quant pool and the rest of the financial gambling casino world. Sadly, instead of drawing the nation’s best minds to medicine, research, engineering, and public service, Reagan’s dribble-down tax system has syphoned off far too much talent into chasing money for money’s sake, sacrificing the nation’s competitiveness for generations.
The dreaded and hated DEI program’s purpose is
“promoting fair treatment and full participation of all individuals, especially
those historically underrepresented or discriminated against.”
How awful!
When I began my work life, in 1961 at 13, management almost everywhere (except my step-grandmother’s flooring company) was white-men-only. Every manager I suffered for the next twenty years was a white man and, for the most part, every one of those managers was incompetent, lazy, often-drunk, and corrupt (like every member, regardless of sex or race, of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party). They obtained and held their positions only by the power of relationships (with other powerful white men) and inheritance and being white men/ Mismanagement was usually an older white man whose “talents” were long-obsolete, if they ever had any. Large American companies were being run into the ground by incompetent, short-sighted, and overpaid white male managers like Jack Welch (GE), Lee Iacocca (Chrysler), Roger Smith (GM), Archie McCardell (Xerox), Henry Ford II, Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Frank T. Cary (IBM), John Harper (Alcoa) and far too many others. Today, Leon Musk would be the neppo-boy posterchild for the offspring of that batch of useless white men.
Middle managers weren’t much different then, either. My Rat’s Eye View blog has a bunch of my own stories with management and middle management and few of those stories are anything more than “how not to” examples. I’ve worked for and with abusive, drunk, incompetent, lazy, absent, and corrupt managers and every single member of that group was a white man. The first woman I worked for was in the 1980’s, a middle-30s, Yugoslavian immigrant who was a trained (in Russia) as a mechanical engineer and who, by consensus, was “appointed” Engineering Management in a small southern California audio products company where I’d been working for a few years. Nobody in the five-person department (including her) wanted the job and we all asked her to save us from the responsibility. She was a terrific, compassionate, efficient manager and someone who helped move the company from struggling and barely surviving to a profitable, growing company. The company was still, essentially, a good-ole-boy club and she left for more money in Reagan’s Southern California aerospace boom and a shorter commute.
Thanks to the curse of DEI and the obvious failures of old white men an considerable encouragement from the Carter Administration, the late 70s was when American companies made a burst of quality improvements and much of that was driven by the people Republicans would call “DEI hires.” Reagan quickly worked to reverse all of those gains and refocused the national economy on financial gambling, extending the Nixon Vietnam era recession another decade. His claim to economic recovery came by making the rich far richer and giving them the power of the media.
Look at the latest demographics of graduate-level STEM program degrees. Women are rapidly becoming the majority higher-level skilled talent and that group of men and women in the first picture of this essay are not among any of those high-achievers. And it pisses them off that just being white and male is no longer a qualification, even though it never really was.
The most important credential for the current crop of Republican political candidates appears to be a history of business failures. Trump, of course, is the poster child for failed “businessman,” but J.D. Vance is close behind with an equally squalid history as an employer and a dismal record as a businessman and investor. Likewise, every single Trump Administration cabinet appointment is being handed to people with low success rates, high corruption records, and a distain for everything the real American Dream represents. Their only “credential” is being filthy, morbidly rich. And they all got there the “hard way,” by inheriting their wealth and position; luck, relationship opportunities, and personal corruption filled in the rest of the zeros. The whole DEI rampage is based on protecting jealousy, incompetence, and a nation-wide epidemic of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Currently, every doctor (on average) in the USA is serving about 320 patients and those numbers are bound to get much worse since somewhere around a quarter of today’s 1,109,460 active physicians are planning on retiring in the next two years rural areas are already impacted by the physician shortage and will be far more effect as it continues to increase. The Republican administration will likely accelerate that retirement rate, too. In 2024, women account for “approximately 38% of active physicians, a significant leap from just 26% in 2004. Meanwhile, male physicians comprised about 62% of the medical workforce, reflecting a decrease from 74% over the same span. With the right wing emphasis on re-establishing discrimination they are likely signing their own personal and community death warrants. It’s hard enough to get doctors and nurses to work in rural areas, but if the only people who become doctors are white men the quality will go down dramatically along with the quantity. Same goes for nurses, engineers, scientists, and other skilled occupations nation-wide. But the MAGA movement is not about making the United States a better, more fair, more equitable place, it’s about white entitlement, revenge of the bullies, and resentment over people who have actually worked to earn their success. No time in history has “greatness” ever happened from that kind of motivation.
At one
time, during the Arab Golden age of 10th to 14th centuries, Arab nations were
the pinnacle of civilization. They were leaders in technology, science, and
even democracy. Islam
took a fundamentalist turn in the 14th Century and has been in
decline ever since. Women went from being community leaders and full
citizenship to today’s sad situation where they are not only full human beings
but are barely more than the possessions of men whose minds have “shrunk to the
size of a pea” due to superstition and misogyny. The United
States is the most superstitious/religious nation in the 1st world
with 69% believing in angels and 79% believing in God as of a
2023 PBS poll. This is a majority of
the country who are incapable of participating in any sort of serious
scientific discussion without wandering off into “belief” vs. evidence. That is
not a good look for the future of the country, especially in light of how that
kind of misplaced “faith” misled Arab nations.
