Ashlynn Warta on “diversity” versus competence:

Somewhat related, the third item here:

There is a category tag – Problematic Competence – via which you can find many similar items.

Also related, Heather Mac Donald on the stupefying effects of “disparate impact” ideology:

I stumbled across this tweet by American Conservative editor Helen Andrews, in which she remarks on pausing her commute at the local Metro, in Washington, DC, and counting the number of fare-dodgers that could be spotted within a five-minute period. An exercise she repeated, with an average of 22 fare-dodgers and a peak of 40. In five minutes.

What stood out, however, were the tweeted replies, often from blue-ticked progressives and self-styled creatives with many flags in their bios, and ostentatious pronouns, and which conveyed a kind of pre-emptive disapproval of any thoughts along such lines.

“Do you literally have nothing better to do?” asked one film and TV director, adding, “Why don’t you stand outside a bank and interview business owners who steal wages from hourly employees?” Some insisted that an escalation of fare-dodging has no victims or unhappy social effects, and that fares are a “classist, racist” assault on “poor and BIPOC folks.” Others, including lecturers and lawyers, added “who cares?” or deployed the terms “narc” and “snitch,” again suggesting that certain observations are not to be aired. One “Oscar-nominated screenwriter” expressed his “exhausted rage” at such things being noticed at all.

The general theme of the replies, and the air of annoyance, reminded me of Ms Claudia Balducci, a woman responsible for Seattle’s public transport network. Faced with evidence that up to 70% of passengers are now freeloading with impunity, Ms Balducci replied:

Which is progress, apparently. An achievement unlocked.

Update, via the comments:

In dangers-of-the-workplace news:

The grown adult quoted above is Professor Susan Jebb, employed by the University of Oxford to think deeply on matters of diet, and current chair of the Food Standards Agency. For our disapproving academic, the workplace is akin to a “smoky pub,” due to the occasional presence of cake, and therefore conjures – in her mind, at least – notions of “passive smoking.” Being offered a slice of cake during one’s coffee break is, it turns out, grounds for invoking victimhood. And because struggling with even the most routine self-possession has to be blamed on something:

Cauliflower enthusiasts will no doubt be gutted.

Professor Jebb insists that her desire to make workplace cake-bringing taboo – and seen as something harmful and antisocial – is “not about the nanny state,” or, dare I suggest, some personal inadequacy. You see, the advertising of cakes and other confections – and the fact that they may be accessible in the workplace – is “undermining people’s free will.” Free will being demonstrated only by compliance with Professor Jebb’s New Rules Of Cake-Eating. And which is why, one assumes, this grown woman, a professional intellectual, can’t say no to a bit of sponge.

Cakes in the workplace – and their allegedly unhinging effects on women – have, of course, been mentioned here before.

Via Christopher Snowdon, who, as you might imagine, has some thoughts.

Richard Vedder on a ratio of note:

Ah, but once you’ve conjured into being an Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, for instance, someone – most likely several someones – will have to run it, or at least sit around in a designated office while waiting to be paid.

Robert J Morris on race and medicine:

At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities. 

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here. 

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.