Friday, December 9, 2022

Woke and Stupid

Assuming that we need an explanation, what explains the success of the long march of wokeness through  America’s institutions. What began in the media and the schools now infests the Biden military, not to mention a slew of asset managers and corporate honchos.

Now Daniel Greenfield offers the best explanation I have seen. (via Maggie’s Farm) These institutions are being directed by people who are failing at their jobs, and who therefore decide that they are going to compete in another arenas. The American military failed against the Taliban, so it has redirected its attentions to the problem of white supremacists in the ranks. Don’t even think that its grand and glorious virtue signaling will bring it great success against the People’s Liberation Army.


As Greenfield has it, visions of wokeness in an organization signal a basic incompetence.


As a rule of thumb, the less innovative and functional an organization is, the more likely it is to disguise its innate worthlessness through virtue signaling. Executives go woke when they have no idea how to move a company forward. Employees who don’t want to do their jobs descend into identity politics and demand that the company reflect their values. Those values, apart from all the right racial and sexual politics, will eventually come down to not doing their jobs.


These are not, I would say, necessarily the wages of sin. Today’s staffing is not about hiring the best; it is about hiring the most diverse. And the most diverse seems invariably incapable of doing the job.


Either you hollow out your enterprise, a la Elon Musk, or you adopt more woke policies. You declare war on the weather and defend your hiring on the grounds of diversity.


And  then, you will spend no small part of your time railing against companies that do not have enough diversity. Misery loves company….


And  then, how well was the Associated Press functioning when it reported a nonevent, a Russian missile strike within Poland:


One of the most astounding stories of media malfeasance is how the Associated Press ran a story claiming that Russian missiles struck Poland after a 10 minute Slack chat with a reporter who told colleagues, “I’m actually at a doctor’s appointment.” Nobody at the AP, including its Arab correspondent running the European desk, did any kind of follow-up or got confirmation.


Buy the rumor; ignore the details.


The media has been far ahead of other institutions in diversity hiring. How has that been working out?


The media’s research methodologies are roughly about those of a college freshman trying to finish a term paper due the next day after a night of heavy partying. Material is thrown together in 10 minutes or less based on some casual googling or Slack chats by people who only have the job that they do because of their parents, which professor they befriended in journalism school or because of their race or other incidental attributes that qualify them for nothing.


Greenfield describes the American media thusly:


The media is a giant Ponzi scheme run by incompetents, staffed by radical dilettantes and patronized by cultural lefties who subsidize the media the way that they do the ACLU.


And under those conditions, mistakes are bound to happen.


It’s not just that they lie. The problem is: they cannot distinguish between truth and lies.


It’s not just that the media lies all the time in the service of its cause, but that its wretches no longer have the skill or even understanding to tell the lies apart from the truth.


And so they simplify matters in the timeless fashion of extremists by declaring everything they believe to be the truth and everything that they disagree with to be a lie. Or disinformation.


Greenfield concludes:


Like their old Pravda predecessors in Moscow, they don’t know anything except the party line. Woke generals can’t win wars, but can recite equity pledges. Woke CEOs lose money, but talk about their commitment to ESG. Woke journalists don’t know whether the story they’re about to work on is true or false and have no concept of any objective truth. Only the party’s truth.


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5 comments:

Cappy said...

It's hard to hire for credentialed jobs when a big part of credentialing is fealty to the Siegfried Oath of DEI.

IamDevo said...

One cannot help but notice that current events bear a striking resemblance to the goings-on at the end=stage of other empires throughout history. As the Roman Empire in the West was fading, its leadership turned to squabbling with each other for the fewer and fewer remaining crumbs of advantage available as the outside world encroached on what remained of its former glory, power and influence. As the French Revolution progressed, it more and more resulted in its own adherents taking that final ride in a tumbril as they had exhausted their ready supply of aristos. So too, as the Allies pushed closer and closer to Berlin in 1945, the Hitlerites turned inward and engaged in palace coups to see who could hold on to shrinking pieces of the crumbling Third Reich. So now we see that the Obama Cabal (tm0 that rules in Washington, DC is engaging in battles to reduce traditional America to smaller and smaller pieces of isolated redoubts of resistance while they fight with each other to see who will wind up sitting on top of the pile of rubble that was once the United States of America. Our national flag is supplanted by the rainbow flag of celebration of degeneracy; the armed forces are still armed, but have been reduced to a gaggle of degenerates arguing over how best to wear lipstick and high heels during combat. Politicians fall all over themselves congratulating each other on their success in providing incentives to kill the babies for the sake of "reproductive freedom" and elderly in the name of "personal autonomy," while encouraging and providing financing for the sexual mutilation of children in the name of "choice." Of course, they also dine on wagyu beef and foie gras while impoverishing the former citizens over whom they rule so as to reduce them to eating bugs. They scream "Slava Ukrainie" and send tax dollars we don't have to the corruptocrats in Ukraine (being careful to scrape a bit off the top as the money streams by) while tearing down every possible impediment to the invasion of the country by millions of illegal aliens. They take money from law enforcement and give it to criminals in the name of "equity" and want to take more to pay off the black miscreants who commit the majority of all crime as "slavery reparations." I could go on, but won't because the litany of our national disgraces is too overwhelming to contemplate. Have a nice day.

Anonymous said...

Assuming that we need an explanation, what explains the success of the long march of Day-care sex-abuse hysteria through America in the 1980s?

Anonymous said...

IamDevo: Your comment would be a lot easier to read if divided up into smaller paragraphs.

LordSomber said...

"The less innovative and functional an organization is, the more likely it is to disguise its innate worthlessness through virtue signaling."

"Leaders of inept and dying organizations tend to focus on the symbolic." -- J. Gutts