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1) why is it a moral imperative to have 50/50 gender balance in a company?

2) why is it wrong to have a non-diverse company?


Google (or any other company I can think of) is not trying to have 50/50 gender balance. They are trying to have the same percentage split as the pool of applicants, which I think is fine. Looks like lot of people do not understand how gender diversity programs work or their purpose and hence all this misunderstanding.


Here's the minority's perspective: 1) Why is it required that there can be no more than 20% women in a tech company? 2) Why is it required to have a minimally diverse company?

If you look at these two questions and just say "hah! that's not the same thing at all!", then that's why.


Well, they're not the same thing, because nobody is claiming 20% women and minimal diversity is a moral imperative. There aren't executive-level staff in major corporations who are paid handsomely to ensure a 20% female staff. If you're arguing there is some kind of secret covenant amongst the shadowy bro-network for a fixed 20% women quota and minimal diversity, you'd need to provide some proof of that. Aside from that you haven't really addressed the questions I asked.

I've noticed a real inability (or perhaps disinclination) to speak about these issues in a straightforward way.


Women aren't a minority.


The fact that we don't know means that we must depict Celts as black, just in case. After all, it's a possibility.


There could have been one black Celt, no? People did get around.


Why not red? I mean, how do you know there wasn't one?


I'm not sure what you mean by "red". But as I've said, people did move around. And really, "all Celts were white" is arguably far less likely than "some Celts were not white".


Except no one is saying that. They are questioning the portrayal of a "typical" celt family.


OK, so the cartoon features two people. One light, and one dark. But are the authors claiming 50% dark? And how would they represent 1% dark?


The point of depicting a "typical" scenario is that you don't represent the 1% dark. In the same way that a representation of a "typical" household doesn't include a homeless man, a billionaire, and someone in between. The billionaire and the homeless man are not included because they are not representative of what is typical.


Sure, I get that. But it's been the rule to never show blacks in contexts where we know they existed, and were even common. So a little balance doesn't seem unreasonable.


Lying is still lying, even if you feel that the lie accomplishes some political agenda that you happen to believe in. In this case, if you say that this is a typical family when it is not, then the fact that you lied for what you think is a nobler purpose doesn't make this OK.


Taleb is correct to call out this cartoon as the politically correct nonsense that it is. A saner society might agree with him and ask itself why, in the current day, history needs to be rewritten to be completely fictitious.

Taleb's persona, however, does not lend itself well to open debate over such issues, as he champions himself as being a lone iconoclast against the "IYIs". All we can do is enjoy the show, I guess.


> Taleb is correct to call out this cartoon as the politically correct nonsense that it is.

Agreed -- it's a bullshit attempt to re-write history.

> why, in the current day, history needs to be rewritten to be completely fictitious.

For example complaining the recent Dunkirk film has mostly white men in it... when that was true of the historical event it depicts.


If anything the need to distort history is even clearer now, since it can be employed in devastatingly effective media narratives


in what way is Camp of the Saints an endorsement of genocide?


Come on. The main idea of that book is that not massacring all the arriving brown people is a mistake.

Of course, seeing as your username has an 88 in it, I really doubt your comment was sincere.

Passages from the book: http://emptylighthouse.com/camp-saints-most-hideous-passages...

Analysis: http://theweek.com/articles/611274/dystopian-antiimmigration...


Is speaking to the Russian ambassador somehow illegal? It seems that the accusations here are whether Sessions had contacts with Russia during his time as a Trump campaign surrogate. He did not. So it's not clear to me what the controversy is here.


Of course speaking to them isn't illegal.

Lying about it during a confirmation hearing? Now that's illegal.


Apparently speaking to any Russian in this political climate is illegal.

At this rate they'll introduce a resolution soon enough that if you have eaten pierogi in the past 10 years you can't hold a public office.

There are plenty of reasons why one would not disclose a meeting on a public record, from even forgetting it happened to the fact that having it in the open might jeopardise negotiations/operations/assets etc.

It's much easier to get things done in many cases when they are shrouded by secrecy while people might not like it but if we need something from the Russians or want to send them a message sometimes it's best not to be done as an official state visit and vise versa.

Every negotiation at some point started as a non-official meeting in the kitchen of some restaurant somewhere or a hotel lobby.


Sessions had contact with the Russian ambassador as a member of the Armed Services Committee, not as a campaign surrogate. This is a non-issue.


Correct. America is not a giant shopping mall for the world, it's a country. "Love it or leave it" is an entirely appropriate and necessary statement.


So what? America's history is overwhelmingly white and Christian. The vast majority of immigration to the US has been from white, Christian nations, even more so at the time when the Statue of Liberty was erected. Is the US a nation of Yemeni immigrants? It's silly to simply treat all potential immigrants as if they are the same. Also, it's disingenuous to reference the Statue of Liberty as some kind of justification for unlimited immigration from all nations of the world. The USA is not a dumping ground for the world's poor.


“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

:D


You can make your immigration policy tighter for residency/naturalization, it's within country's right, but tying that to where people are born is pretty sad.


Sadly, this justifies what trump was/is doing.


> The word for expelling large numbers of people who were born in the country but not of the dominant ethnicity is "ethnic cleansing".

In London, if population trends are any indication, this sentence applies just as well to English people...


Lol. Care to comment on the many bannings/suspensions of prominent right-wing commentators/journalists on Twitter (Milo, Ricky Vaughn, Chuck Johnson, James O'Keefe, to name a few), the practice of "shadowbanning", as well of Facebook's well-documented history of deleting/censoring of posts about refugee crime in Europe and outright censorship of anti-refugee comments in Germany (under the guise of calling it "hate speech" of course...)?


I was kidding fam... I even used 'Correct the Record' in my comment...

C'mon son.


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