RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-implicit-bias-house-of-cards

In the Wall Street Journal, Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin recently published “Why DEI Training Doesn’t Work—and How to Fix It,” a defense of implicit-bias research in the guise of a critique of current corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Banaji is one of the two inventors of the concept of implicit bias, and of the related implicit association test (IAT). She and Dobbin hope to acknowledge the flaws of DEI trainings while preserving implicit-bias research—and the associated program of political activism. The authors lament that DEI trainings elicit shame in their subjects, and that they are largely being used to bolster workforce-management policies against possible litigation. Their problem with DEI trainings is not that they are discriminatory, but that they do not strike the right tone:

Reminding managers that they can use these tools to suss out problems and nip them in the bud helps them to feel capable of managing biases and microaggressions. When managers use these skills, they retain women and people of color for long enough to come up for promotion. . . . training isn’t designed to blame people for their moral failings. Instead, it’s galvanizing them to support organizational change by arming them with knowledge.

The problems with DEI trainings are not in their tone, however, but in their substance. The implicit-bias theory (also called unconscious-bias theory) on which these trainings are based has no scientific basis, as years of examinations have consistently demonstrated. Lee Jussim puts it politely in his “12 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Common Claims About Implicit Bias,” but the Open Science Foundation’s archive of Articles Critical of the IAT and Implicit Bias renders a harsher verdict. In 2011, Etienne LeBel and Sampo Paunonen reviewed evidence that measures of implicit bias possess low reliability. In other words, when you test for implicit bias multiple times, you rarely get the same result. Their conclusion was that some part of “implicit bias” is really “random measurement error.” In 2017, Heather Mac Donald’s intensive examination of the theory and its empirical basis (or lack thereof) concluded that the “implicit-bias crusade is agenda-driven social science.” And Bertram Gawronski’s 2019 review of the scholarly literature on implicit-bias research also concludes that there’s no proof that people aren’t self-aware enough to know what’s causing their supposedly “implicit” or “unconscious” biases; and that you can’t prove that there’s any relationship between how people do on the test and how they behave in the real world.

As far back as 2009, Hart Blanton and colleagues reexamined research data on implicit bias. They found that 70 percent of whites who supposedly displayed implicit bias against blacks actually discriminated in favor of blacks.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/05/our-establishments-alternate-realities/

One common denominator that explains why previously successful societies implode is their descent into fantasies. A collective denial prevents even discussion of existential threats and their solutions.

Something like that is happening in the United States. Eight million illegal immigrants have entered the United States by the deliberate erasure of the southern border.

Apparently, the Biden administration sees some unstated advantage in destroying U.S. immigration law and welcoming in would-be new constituents.

Yet, the more the millions arrive, the more Joe Biden and his Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas flat out lie that “the border is secure.”

They both live in a world of make-believe, passed off to the American people as reality.

And the more the Americans are lied to that the border is secure, the more they poll—currently 77 percent—that it is not.

Biden apparently has reversed course and begun using the former pejorative “Bidenomics” as a term of pride.

He now praises this three-year effort to borrow $6-7 trillion, and spike interest rates threefold to 7% on home mortgages—even as prices on essentials like food and fuel have spiked 25-30% since he entered office.

The more that Biden brags about what he did to the economy, the more people poll—over 60%—dissatisfaction with his alternate reality of “Bidenomics.”

Do we remember the humiliation in August 2021 in Afghanistan?

The more Gen. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Joe Biden assured that the American military presence was stable, the more swiftly it crumbled and descended into the worst mass flight of an American army since Vietnam.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/ending_feudal_slaveryagain.html

The ruling class would have us believe that the most dangerous threats to our security and happiness are Russia, global warming, and unapproved speech.  In actuality, the lethal threat of our times and for the foreseeable future is the unconstrained power of the State.  State control versus individual liberty is the conflict that will eventually lead to war, social upheaval, and revolutionary change.  Everything else is either ancillary or a psychological distraction.

The Marxist globalists know this.  Everything they do is engineered to steal personal freedoms and expand government’s oppressive control over the living.  They seek a centralized power structure in which as few people as possible own everything, while everyone else lives as a serf.  To that end, the small cabal of globalist oligarchs continue to siphon wealth and power from ordinary people, strengthening themselves and making their enemies — us — weaker with every thieving pass.

Ordinary people increasingly understand what is happening.  However bad the government’s COVID tyranny has been, it has had the salubrious effect of pulling the wool from the eyes of a great many people.  A primary reason that COVID tyranny has backfired is that it relies on a premise that normal people can see is not true — that the danger from the Wuhan Flu is so great that it justifies lockdowns, censorship, and forced injections of experimental “vaccines.”  Had people been dying in the streets in horrific and ghastly ways, these monumental violations of human rights and personal liberties might have been understood, if not condoned. 

However, ordinary people armed with nothing more than an elementary-school-level comprehension of the Scientific Method and medical ethics know that such radical programs to fight disease are inexcusable unless absolutely necessary.  Once people learned — despite the government’s embargo over such essential information — that young and healthy people had almost no risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from COVID, they also knew that it was unethical to force any kind of experimental treatment upon the unwilling.  Once people learned that the government’s twofold promise — that the “vaccines” prevented both viral infection and transmission — was an easily proven lie, then they knew that there was nothing scientifically rational behind the government’s imperious commands.  Once the government chose to defend its actions — including forced masking and isolation — as critically necessary, despite mounting evidence that these policies did more harm than good, ordinary people began to realize that the whole exercise had nothing to do with public health and everything to do with State control.  Once government scientists started speaking in infantile gibberish — such as, “We’re working at the speed of science!” — the jig was up.  The propaganda had become just too obvious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-would-frederick-douglass-regard-todays-left/

Frederick Douglass was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. This man began life as an illiterate slave — nearly all slave owners prevented slaves from learning to read — and rose from slavery to become, along with Abraham Lincoln, the greatest orator of his time, and one of the wisest and most eloquent writers in American history.

He became the great black leader of his day, honored by multiple American presidents who frequently sought his counsel. If you read his autobiography, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” you will experience English language writing that has few peers in any nonfiction writing in American history.

Every American child and adult should read this book for many reasons. First, it should be read to appreciate the inhumanity of slavery. The physical abuse, and perhaps worst of all, the human degradation inherent to slavery are depicted in understated yet riveting language. Second, it should be read as a document of history. Third, it should be read for its wisdom about the human condition.

Frederick Douglass may be one of the few figures in American history revered by Left and Right, and by nearly all blacks and all whites.

In light of that, it is worth pondering the question: Are Frederick Douglass’ views more consonant with today’s Left or today’s conservatives? It is fair to say that nearly every leftist believes that Frederick Douglass is one of them. But if you read his “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” you will discover a man who, with regard to race, the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and related matters has virtually nothing in common with today’s Left. In fact, leftists would identify every one of the following quotes from Douglass’s autobiography as “white supremacist” and/or “racist.”

Frederick Douglass: “When an unknown man is spoken of in their presence, the first question that arises in the average American mind concerning him and which must be answered is, Of what color is he? and he rises or falls in estimation by the answer given. It is not whether he is a good man or a bad man. That does not seem of primary importance.”

This Douglass quote runs completely counter to the virtually universal left-wing (not liberal, left-wing) claim that race is important and that to ignore it — to attempt to be color-blind — is racist.

The Atlantic, Sept. 13, 2013: From an article titled, “Color Blindness Is Counterproductive”: “How many times have you heard someone say that they ‘don’t see color,’ ‘are color-blind,’ or ‘don’t have a racist bone in their body’? Maybe you’ve even said this yourself. Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of color blindness as an ideology.”