Anarchy in the U.K.

The Sex Pistols song if it were remade today it would be called "Diversity in the U.K.".  The U.K. is a once slow-rolling, now hurtling along disaster.  Diversity should mean diversity of opinion, not diversity of ethnicity. Whether the U.K. recognizes that in time is becoming increasingly clear; they won't.  I mean, a lot of people have but it hasn't translated to votes or the parliament and won't likely in due time.

Sweden's failed multiculturalism

Below is a good review of Sweden's failures, for when you have to discuss diversity with a leftist who claims Scandinavia is an example of the positive impact of multiculturalism. 

GOP congress in limbo (pt. 2)

The drama continues as no speaker has been selected yet.  Democrats and the leftist media have mocked the GOP for not getting this right, but it's really just one more sign that the party is more diverse in ideas than the Democrats.  That's. A. Positive.

Diverse Multicultural Canadian trucker protests

 Breitbart helps debunk the racist Canadian truckers myth.

Real diversity vs SJW diversity

Diversity. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Today, people who call themselves liberals insist that America (or the West in general) is not diverse enough.  They claim that we are not diverse enough with respect to gender (no really, there are more than two genders. Okay.) or ethnicity or sexual orientation, or religion.   The problem with their claims is actually two distinct problems: (1) that's not really diversity and (2) it goes against actual liberal principles.

Real diversity means diversity of thought.  The way liberals classify diversity by identifiable categories like race and gender is literally, superficial.  Real diversity - the diversity that makes America a great country - is diversity of thought. Making sure that society is a certain percentage gay, a set percentage female, an exact ratio Muslim and an equal proportion of African American, Hispanic, Asian, White or otherwise does absolutely zero.  The ultimate question is what does that offer?  Next to zero benefit will arise from the supposed fairness this offers. I'll save the fairness argument for another time. Instead let's look at viewpoint diversity.

Tackling a problem with viewpoints from the left and right, from a passive or aggressive viewpoint, a scientific and humanitarian perspective concurrently, allows for a greater possibility of a comprehensive and successful solution to a problem than one developed by a visibly diverse but otherwise homogeneously-thinking group.  Without ideas being challenged they do not get tested before being put in place.  That's a recipe for failure.  But that's exactly what social justice warriors want to happen.

This is where the other problem of incongruity with liberal principles comes into play.  As a reminder, here's what classical liberalism actually is:

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology belonging to liberalism in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government.

The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States.

It advocates civil liberties with a limited government under the rule of law, private property, and belief in laissez-faire economic policy.

"Securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of government".  Social Justice Warriors want the government to impose equality on everyone. And by that they mean equality of outcome, not of opportunity.  They mean equality of visibility based on visual identifiers.  That comes at the expense of ideas.  There will be no diversity of ideas under that model and that means that individual freedom of thought is superseded by these visual markers.  That represents the death of liberty and true classical liberal ideals.

The problem for the country is that leftist leadership are adept at using that social justice warrior thinking to increase the preponderance of that sort of thinking. And while they have had a lot of success at doing that, they have simultaneously tried to tamp down individual thinking within these identity groups; if you are African American you have to be a Democrat.  If you are gay and are a Republican you need to have your head examined.  If you don't use the pronouns people choose to identify themselves by, you are a racist, misogynist homophobic neanderthal. 

The synergy of progressive liberalism with the consolidation of superficial identity groups is a recipe for totalitarianism. Classical liberalism it is not.

Google: Do as we say, not as we do

Proof for liberals that those who claim to espouse your values do not actually share your values comes again; this time in the form of Google duplicity;

Google has spent much of the past 72 hours insisting its commitment to diversity is “unequivocal” after the internal publication and subsequent leak of an anti-diversity polemic by a Google engineer. The unidentified software engineer argued, among other things, that biological differences between men and women account for the extreme gender imbalance at Google and other technology companies.

...Google might prefer the discussion to end there, but the reality is there is a lot more to say about the company’s commitment to diversity.

The public relations blitz may be a corporate necessity given the virulent backlash against the document by many of Google’s own employees. On Monday night, Bloomberg reported that the engineer said he had been fired; Google declined to comment on individual employee cases.

But public commitments to diversity from Google executives do not tally with the company’s workforce data.

Window Dressing?

Google’s workforce is, by its own accounting, 69% male and just 2% African American. Just 20% of technical jobs are held by women. Google may be unequivocal in its “belief” about diversity, but the figures make its shortcomings clear. The company tends to hire white and Asian men over women and other racial minorities.

What a terrible indictment of the liberal tech giant. Or is it? The point in sharing this story is not that Google is not diverse enough - I expect a huge swath of progressive sites to focus on that, and while they may well be right, it's not relevant to my points. My points are twofold; (1) don't necessarily believe Google as an example, when and they espouse open borders on morale grounds because they don't necessarily do themselves what they demand others do and/or (2) question the foundation of the story - maybe the percentage of the population who go into technical roles who are female is only 30% and Google may not be out of line with the industry as a whole. In that case it may not their fault if there are just not enough females applying to work for Google.

In other words, don't just swallow media story lines without actually thinking about what's behind them first. If the population of America did that, there would be far less progressives running around trying to destroy the country.

Flawed Common Core Commercial

Yesterday I saw a commercial about Common Core that proved to me that liberals are either blind to its implications, or trying to blind the public about it.  Unfortunately I have not found an online version of it to include in this post (as reference) but I will add it if I do find it.

If you are not familiar with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, Wikipedia defines it this way:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an educational initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent educational standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit-bearing courses at two- or four-year college programs or enter the workforce.

In the commercial, in order to snuff the opposition argument about local control, the commercial actually makes the argument that local teachers have autonomy on how to teach the Common Core program.  But that really doesn't get to the core of the problem.  Pardon the pun.

The problem IS NOT whether there is local control of how to teach to the Common Core.  The problem is the content of the Common Core.  True local control means that local teachers and school boards decide what to teach, not how to teach what they are told to teach. If the Common Core required teachers to teach the merits of Nazi Germany, it doesn't matter how you decide to teach that, you are still teaching something bad.

Common Core is rooted in the progressivist idea that a group of centralized planners are better at deciding what is best for everyone than people themselves would be.  That didn't work in Soviet 5-year plans and it won't work in Washington D.C.  What makes sense in learning in Alaska may not make sense in Texas or Florida.  The fact is that diversity of ideas is what makes America great.  That is as true in education as it is in business.  If there were indeed one clearly superior way to teach students (with respect to both what and how), then it will evolve on its own anyway, out of necessity.  So far it hasn't because it is not clear what is the one best way that every state and district has just got to adopt.  It's just like the Solyndra debacle all over again.  The government is picking winners and losers, in this case in education.  It's because they want to control the agenda.  But the real problem is that if they were best at picking the best, every decision they made would be correct.  Obviously that is not the case.