Elsewhere (309)
Christopher Rufo on Victoria’s Secret and social-justice lingerie:
The company presented the new spokeswomen not only as representatives of their intersectional identities — the original line-up included an African refugee, a pink-haired lesbian, an obese biracial woman, and a male-to-female transsexual — but as social-justice activists committed to “systemic change.” […] It would be a ghastly faux pas to point out that some of the women… are, to put it delicately, not as beautiful as their predecessors. To the contrary, the public must affirm [“LGBTQIA+ activist” Megan] Rapinoe and [overweight “body advocate” Paloma] Elsesser as at least equally beautiful as the outdated and oppressive standards embodied by Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. One cannot point out, either, that the Collective’s social-justice activism is mostly a self-serving scam.
Needless to say, the results of this woke rebranding have not been entirely positive.
And Mr Rufo again, on woke Disney:
The core of Disney’s racial program is a series of training modules on “antiracism.” In one, called “Allyship for Race Consciousness,” the company tells employees that they must “take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism” and that they should “not rely on [their] Black colleagues to educate [them],” because it is “emotionally taxing.” […] White employees, in particular, must “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed.” Disney recommends that employees atone by “challeng[ing] colourblind ideologies and rhetoric” such as “All Lives Matter” and “I don’t see colour”; they must “listen with empathy [to] Black colleagues” and must “not question or debate Black colleagues’ lived experience.”
Or put more simply, “You are guilty by default, so just stand there while we scold you.” With seemingly unintended irony, employees are also informed that thoroughness and punctuality are “white-dominant” values and products of “white supremacy culture,” and therefore, presumably, bad. As a measure of woke perversity – one might say, unhingement – a pretty good indicator.
From the comments here, this:
A Connecticut social worker has filed a race and employment discrimination lawsuit against Bridgewater State University after it asked her to “defend her whiteness” in a job interview.
Pale skin being regarded by the University as “a common obstacle” to both social work and teaching.
And Not The Bee on creepy teachers and woke journalism:
You can always tell how insular a person has become in their politics when a term that has been used regularly regarding a topic that has been in the news for years strikes them as something “new”:
“Fans of Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill have a new favourite word: ‘grooming’”
Of course, people who don’t share [Washington Post columnist] Monica Hesse’s… value system have actually been using the word for some time… To understand the disconnect you have to understand that they start with the premise that you are anti-gay (whatever that means) and then move on from there… And so, opposing a bill that would prohibit teachers from talking about sexual matters with kids 4 to 7 years old makes you “squeamish about gay people.”
If an adult’s erotic preference and/or niche sexual ‘identity’ somehow requires the involvement of, and validation by, children, including pre-schoolers, this isn’t exactly a basis for reassurance. That this should apparently need saying is itself quite a thing.
Or, put another way, “Good morning, class. Today, I’d like you to entertain thoughts about my private life and sexual activity.” I paraphrase a little, but not, I think, wildly.
There’s no such thing as other people’s children.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
With seemingly unintended irony, employees are also informed that thoroughness and punctuality are “white-dominant” values and products of “white supremacy culture,” and therefore, presumably, bad. As a measure of woke perversity – one might say, unhingement – a pretty good indicator.
That.
That.
Well, it’s the thought that in order to be pious in woke terms, in order to conform, you must somehow not notice the obvious implications and contradictions, and the obvious motivations in play, to which you’re being subjected. Or at least you’d have to pretend they aren’t there. Which sounds like a morally and psychologically corrosive experience. An insult, a form of abuse.
It would be a ghastly faux pas to point out that some of the women… are, to put it delicately, not as beautiful as their predecessors.
He’s not kidding.
He’s not kidding.
It occurs to me that if you’re oppressed by lingerie adverts, if you’ve been “really harmed” by them – and if you imagine that a product won’t be presented in a best-case scenario – then you probably aren’t very good at the task of living. I mean, despite the curvaceous babes and agreeably proportioned footballers, they only sell the knickers. The sex appeal isn’t actually included in the box. You have to provide that yourself, wherewithal permitting.
And on the subject of bras.
What?
It’s all so wearying, isn’t it? Can’t we just learn to nod, smile, and then get on with our lives while ignoring the crazy people?
Or will that simply provoke them to even greater absurdities?
And so, opposing a bill that would prohibit teachers from talking about sexual matters with kids 4 to 7 years old makes you “squeamish about gay people.”
A commenter at Instapundit said that the left is now equating “gay” with “groomer”, and that if he were gay he would be very nervous about this.
There’s no such thing as other people’s children.
That does seem to be the prevailing attitude of the entire left: There is no private sphere; everything is the business of the State and leftist NGO’s.
A commenter at Instapundit said that the left is now equating “gay” with “groomer”…
Well, indeed. As if all gay people should somehow find this preoccupation with children at all reassuring. And it’s worth bearing in mind that some transgender people, or formerly transgender people, find the attempts to blur customary boundaries quite worrying too.
In the spirit of Robert Graves, I want to write a book called ‘I, Pronoun’ in which a downtrodden everyday pronoun–ignored by all the rest of the self-glorifying, elite pronouns fighting for supremacy–rises up through the ranks to become the voice of normality, finally showing that a true pronoun is really very straightforward and isn’t some sort of tool of the insane.
Any good?
So, if I show up late for work every day and do a half-assed job, I’ll be a)Praised as an effective anti-racist ally, or b)fired?
‘There’s no such thing as other people’s children.’
I would cheerfully, when cleaning the excess from my kids’ nappies years ago (a time of dinosaurs and terry cloth nappies, non-disposable) have handed those duties over to kind-hearted lefties, leaving me more time to read bedtime stories and so on. Alas, when my lads were little, the kind-hearted lefties were not available for such assistance, preferring instead to set up The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire which I am sure would have benefitted me and mine enormously.
Alas the hoped-for Republic turned out to be nothing more than a fart in a bottle and the kids learned to use the toilet themselves. Thank goodness for both events.
I’ll be a)Praised as an effective anti-racist ally, or b)fired?
C) Promoted elsewhere?
Any standards whatsoever, of beauty, of grooming, of decorum, of timeliness, of work performance, are “oppression”–so say our betters. A “woke” lineup for Victoria’s secret is so insane one would think it was satire–poor Bee, being scooped by reality daily. Are we to aspire to be as, ahem, sexy as the obese model they have? Or to be as angry as the soccer player? Yet people are attracted to and aspire to be beautiful, to be successful.
As to timeliness and performance, I suppose sports stars need not worry about attending practice or getting the ball in the net, that would be slavery.
Disney says punctuality is bad? Yet if you show up late to work as a princess or to run one of the rides I bet you still get your woke ass fired.
So, if I show up late for work every day and do a half-assed job, I’ll be a)Praised as an effective anti-racist ally, or b)fired?
Previously and somewhat related.
Because brown-skinned employees shouldn’t have to do their jobs or be at all reliable, apparently.
I once worked for a very top-down rules type corp. A fad that came around was 360degree evaluations. After the training, we had a dept meeting and were asked to give our input on management and how things were run. Everyone knew that managers in this org would punish you if you crossed them, so no one said a word. Not a word. Hopefully, people recognize that timeliness IS required for their job and ignore this awful DIE training.
So, if I show up late for work every day and do a half-assed job, I’ll be a)Praised as an effective anti-racist ally, or b)fired?
Depends on what color you can effectively claim to be. If white, (b); if one drop sacred black, praised, then promoted.
I’m kind of glad VS had priced themselves out of my budget, because I thankfully wasn’t aware of the Borg Collective takeover of the company. Back in the ’90s, their catalogue models were shaped more like real women – not obese, but definitely not Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum, and they sold nice clothes as well as stylish and sexy undergarments. Then they added the PINK collection aimed at teenage stick figures, and their regular stuff got really expensive. I mean $25 for a bit of lace and silky stuff? $70 for a bra? The quality went down with the price increase, so it wasn’t even worth a splurge anymore. After everyone hid under the bed sucking their thumbs over covid, the in-store shopping pretty much died, and I guess the online market hasn’t kept them solvent enough.
Or will that simply provoke them to even greater absurdities?
Well, we are where we are for some reason.
“Allyship for Race Consciousness,”
Imagine spending decades trying to clear old Walt’s name of the taint of anti-Semitism and racism only to come up with this shit?
Boy, is someone going to have egg on their face before long.
“take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism”
So for those of us who are, well, less white, where do we stand? (or sit, as the case may be?)
Or is this just for you white folk?
Hmmm. This will occupy about .00027 seconds of thought today…
I don’t have children. If there is no such thing as other people’s children, I wonder why I am taxed to pay for their schooling.
My parents were mixed race.
My father preferred the 100 metres….
and my mother was Pakistani.
Stewart Francis… Canada’s gift to UK comedy.
Back in the ’90s, their catalogue models were shaped more like real women – not obese, but definitely not Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum, and they sold nice clothes as well as stylish and sexy undergarments. Then they added the PINK collection aimed at teenage stick figures
“Supermodels. Hah! Nothing super about them. Spoiled, stupid little stick figures with poofy lips who think only about themselves. Feh! I used to design for gods!”
–Edna Mode in The Incredibles
I still don’t get any of this. I mean, we know from close to a decade of this bollocks now that going all in on this garbage is devastating to a company’s bottom line. And yet it keeps happening. I have a theory that this kind of cancer can only take hold in a company/industry that’s already struggling, as management desperately grasps at straws to try to regain the Golden Age (most large companies have really, really poor awareness of where their actual money comes from). And yet what should be the inevitable course correction from shareholders/the board never materializes.
I know it’s silly of me to assume that large corporations operate in anything like a free market where screwing up this badly leads to creative destruction, but surely there are at least a couple of Red Bull CEOs out there?
social-justice lingerie
Does it make everyone look equally fat and unattractive?
most large companies have really, really poor awareness of where their actual money comes from
My experience rates this as 112% correct. It’s hilarious, really.
And speaking of creepy teachers.
And speaking of creepy teachers.
What goes on in the public school system makes the Catholic church sex abuse scandal look like a fart in a tornado.
If an adult’s erotic preference and/or niche sexual ‘identity’ somehow requires the involvement of, and validation by, children, including pre-schoolers, this isn’t exactly a basis for reassurance. That this should apparently need saying is itself quite a thing.
That.
My experience rates this as 112% correct
Of course it can go the other way. I used to work for a large contract electronics manufacturer that realized they had no hope whatsoever of competing with Foxconn et al. in the actual business of making electronics. But they had such huge business in supply chain that they’d hit on a different strategy: they insisted on Net 30 payment for all their customers, but Net 120 for all their suppliers. The entire company’s revenue was based on holding customer cash for 90 days, holding it in low-tax, high interest countries and collecting the interest on it. Fascinating dodge, really.
At one point I worked on a five year, $100 million project that was set up to fail because the only reason for its existence was to park that money in Canada so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it.
All things considered I’m not sure that’s better.
holding it in low-tax, high interest countries and collecting the interest on it
Hmm. Did a project for a well known brand that did the same. Their “hedge” earned more than sales. Until the day it didn’t. Thankfully their last check to me had cleared…
large companies have really, really poor awareness of where their actual money comes from
It’s not about where the money comes from. Much like a nation, there’s a lot of ruin in a major corporation. It’s who those people work fir. The SJW’s have been infiltrating the stockholders, first watering down the requirements for getting woke items on the proxy ballots, then buying enough stock via union or other ESOPs to get their issues passed. I started noticing these odd items on proxy ballots that I was being sent 25 years ago or so.
So, being lackadaisical & tardy is now ‘anti-racist’? Should make for some interesting performance evaluations.
I have a theory that this kind of cancer can only take hold in a company/industry that’s already struggling
I’ve seen that theory called “Going broke, get woke,” reversing the usual formula.
. It’s hilarious, really.
Just don’t laugh so hard you fall off the cattle car…on second thought..,
The real question is what won’t provoke them to even greater absurdities.
From the evidence, not much.
It is very difficult to juggle all the balls necessary to keep a big company profitable. There are 100 ways to screw up and go out of business. In clothing retail, very subtle changes in especially girl’s fashion can shut you down if you don’t surf the wave fast enough. Stores like Merry go round are gone for that reason. A really popular way to lose the plot these days is going woke (instead of improving your product). You can alienate half your customers, like the NFL–heck, who needs 50% of your audience? You can spend time in woke meetings instead of, you know, working. So much easier than finding out why your customers are complaining about defects. You can create internal anger and lawsuits. So so many ways to screw up a good thing.
The woke VS and statements suggesting that being on time (etc) is oppression and the “fat positive movement” suggests to me that there is a common thread through much of this: no one should ever feel bad about themselves ever for any reason. It is feel-good pop psych. Your response to seeing someone who is a great athlete can be: 1) wow, I admire or 2) that inspires me to workout more or 3) unfair!! #3 is so much easier. Anything in this world that is worth having requires effort and the motivation for that effort is always that you want to get something that you currently don’t have (including a wife or nice haircut). The hippies tuned out and dropped out and actually didn’t care about status and money (at least for a few years of youthful hippiness) but the modern don’t want to work people want to rail against the world that they shouldn’t have to work, to be on time, to wash their hair. The irony of course is that almost anyone can look better if they take care of themselves a little. I’ve known several people recently who lost 70+ lbs and they are much happier. I’m sure it was tough.
To pick up the theme from Mr Ream about the silliness of businesses…
Back when I was a manager (junior, second-class) I was exhorted to read books about management, to be either inspired or corrected or whatever. Then having read them I realised I was working for people who were hell-bent on not doing a single thing in them. Sort of one rule for the lesser and another for the greater.
Nor was any ability to look ahead part of their make-up. Example: the company I worked for decided to open a publication in another town. A trendy young managing director (stemming naturally from the sales side because sales were everything, whatever the quality of the final product might be) was duly appointed and he was told that, as it was a new market, he wouldn’t be required to show a profit for three years. The parent body would absorb any losses in the meantime. Go and get on with it.
The result was said young MD did very little for two years and six months and then worked like crazy to find himself another job. The result was just before the three year mark, he left the company for another lucrative position. I admit I have no idea how the then rudderless publication is faring now but chances are its spacious, well-upholstered and air-conditioned offices have one of those attractive ‘for sale or lease’ signs outside.
Canada, a ‘low tax, high interest’ country?
Who knew?
Fans of Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill have a new favourite word: ‘grooming’”
“Groomer” and “grooming” has been a term anyone in the criminal justice system has been familiar with for decades. Just because we have all picked up on the strategies of those dedicated to blurring the line between children and adults for their own sexual or ideological needs (vulnerable teens & adults are also “groomed” for cults in much the same way) doesn’t make it “new”.
Oops! The groomers and their supporters have been exposed! Hence the pivot to attack the noticers.
A commenter at Instapundit said that the left is now equating “gay” with “groomer”, and that if he were gay he would be very nervous about this.
I don’t see it much lately, but there was a clever Dark Side of the Moon parody image. “Normal, healthy people” passing through the prism of “being molested as a child”.
It really is a source of existential horror: knowing that your lineage ends with your kids. People are so broken that they don’t just let this happen to their families but publicly celebrate this genetic destruction and advocate for it to happen to others.
I’ve known several people recently who lost 70+ lbs and they are much happier. I’m sure it was tough.
I won’t claim to speak about all morbidly obese people. There are many with medical conditions that make it difficult to lose weight. But People magazine regularly profiles men and women who have lost half their weight, and their first step was usually along the lines of “I stopped eating an entire pizza and drinking a six-pack of Coke.”
As for the cluelessness of major corporations, I might have mentioned here that one reason multi-national businesses stay afloat despite going woke is because it takes a lot of losses for them to fail. If you look at the Hollywood studios during the golden age, you can count how often each studio came within one film from going bankrupt, only to be saved by Rin Tin Tin, or a cheapie movie that made 10x its production cost.
Cluelessness also comes from playing follow the leader. I remember on corporation exec talking about moving into China, despite the obvious risks, because they didn’t want to be left out. Sort of a reverse lobster pot.
It doesn’t help that business schools are incubators of stupid learning. Back in the 1980s, it was the fad to believe that MBAs were trained to run any business, which led to mergers of wholly incompatible industries, which had to be unmerged / destroyed years later at considerable cost on paper.
What kills many companies is their inability to change with the times. The institution becomes ossified in its thinking, especially after the daredevil founder leaves and are replaced by less imaginative CEOs who shrink from experimenting. Like Kodak that developed digital cameras before shelving it. Or Sears, seeing that Amazon was doing exactly what they did less than 80 years before, and having the warehouse and distribution facilities already in place, deciding to let their lunch be eaten.
(And before I get too smug, I remind myself I’ve been involved in computers since the 1980s and never invested in Microsoft nor Amazon, which is why I’m commenting under a silly name on a backwater blog.)
on a backwater blog
[ Weeps into handkerchief, slams door. ]
What kills many companies is their inability to change with the times.
…
Cluelessness also comes from playing follow the leader.
The second (mentioned earlier) generally happening because the daredevil founder leaves and are replaced by less imaginative CEOs who shrink from experimenting.
Step 1: Go to business school so you can run a company.
Step 2: “Run” a company in a stable or growing market.
Step 3: Run a different company into the ground because you’re really not a strong, imaginative leader. You’re just doing what everyone else is doing and your new company couldn’t tolerate the amount of failure you drove it into when compared to all the case studies you’ve been reading from all the activist and consultant parasites.
Not every company can maintain profitability after going woke like Disney, but that won’t stop most of them from trying after their CEOs read all the puff pieces.
And on the subject of bras.
https://youtu.be/B48ZpNcxBL0
Barring an unforeseen incident.
If grooming access to 4-7 year-old kids is the hill upon which they wish to die, so be it. I think they’ve been listening to each other talk for so long, they thought they’d dragged the Overton Window along with them. They didn’t.
If grooming access to 4-7 year-old kids is the hill upon which they wish to die, so be it.
Sadly, you will find a lot fewer people willing to die on the hill of denying them access. Pay no attention to the parents being banned from campus and school board meetings for voicing disagreement with hiring mental defectives to teach in elementary schools. Those police snipers on the rooftops are there for everyone’s safety, sir.
The trick is, sadly, to make this a very local issue because the various national orgs and parties aren’t willing to risk the political damage that comes from keeping your 9yo from being put on puberty blockers.
“Social justice lingerie” is surely an oxymoron fit to join the pantheon which includes “Microsoft Works”, “Vauxhall Frontera Sport”*, “elegant combover” and “Oldham Athletic”*.
*British things.
(And before I get too smug, I remind myself I’ve been involved in computers since the 1980s and never invested in Microsoft nor Amazon…)
Me too. I recall discussing this with friends but we all decided not to invest in Microsoft because various competitors (such as Borland and Lotus) made far better software. So much for business acumen and foresight.
on a backwater blog
[ Weeps into handkerchief, slams door. ]
If it’s any consolation, I am convinced that the relatively small size of the readership is one of the reasons this blog remains such a delight: If all the Instapundit readers started visiting here the threads would be inundated with acrimonious (and all too often bigoted) comments.