Who, literally, does she think she is?
I really would like to know if it’s normal for an administrator at a healthcare network to lie and threaten and rage at patients and/or employees of the network who don’t believe men can be women and who don’t subscribe to the new religion that underlies that claim. If it is normal it obviously shouldn’t be. What business is it of Chandra Berkan-Hozempa’s if patients or employees or both attend a protest? Or participate in it? Or have opinions she dislikes? How is it her job to send out furious denunciations and warnings about a protest that has nothing whatever to do with the body she works for?
She’s the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Island Health, by the way. It’s becoming all too apparent that DEI is not what it says on the tin, and is a massive threat to the rights and freedoms of people who have the nerve to say things.
DEI administrators are Soviet-style political commissars, there to ensure that everyone toes the woke party line.
Diversity: Everyone must have an identical opinion, holding “equity” as the highest goal.
Equity: Everything is subsumed to the woke ideology of enforcing equal outcomes.
Inclusion: Exclusion of anyone who dissents; off to the gulag with them.
Didn’t Orwell warn us about this sort of thing?
Meanwhile, in the EU, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, etc, new laws against “hate speech” (aka “anything I disagree with”) coupled with connivance between the state and big tech, along with woke-driven advertising boycotts, is relegating dissent to samizdat fringes.
Which makes one value any tech baron who thinks a bit differently, however imperfect they might be.
No it doesn’t. Musk is a damn commissar himself.
I realise now that I was very naive to think, as I did for a long time, that the puritan impulse couldn’t survive in a pluralist culture. I’m not sure how the managerial mindset is related to puritanism beyond the fact that they both love putting things (and thus people) into boxes but the two certainly find it easy to make common cause in promoting authoritarianism. Orwell is certainly relevant here but so is Mill. Without a willingness among the ordinary population (which is to say everyone who doesn’t see themself as a “thought leader”) to tolerate ideas they personally find disagreeable it is all too easy for the managers to appoint themselves priests. (“Don’t worry about the mysteries. You’ll never understand them but we’ve got it for you. We have a direct line to God/Stonewall”.) The totalising impulse, which I think is the puritan impulse in another form, claims that all values can be reduced to one value and thus the work of determining how those values can put in practice can easily be outsourced. Just find someone/some organisation that “shares your values” as if it didn’t actually work in the opposite way. (Billy Bragg apparently wants that job and seems to imagine that having written a few so-so songs is a suitable qualification but he really should have gotten an MBA or gone into the public service if he wanted to be really successful.)
I have to say I’m scared. It’s almost as if we’ve jumped back a hundred years and the only alternative to one authoritarianism is the other authoritarianism. I just hope that this time we find something less destructive than a World War to demonstrate that the boring rule of law (and agreed norms – I’m looking at you Trump) is preferable to the thrill of being an ideological warrior. (Maybe we could just exile all the flag-wavers to some MMORG. The Metaverse might turn out to have some use after all.)
[…] a comment by Francis Boyle on Who, literally, does she think she […]
There’s a remarkable abundance of quotables in that comment, Francis.
–they both love putting things (and thus people) into boxes
–it is all too easy for the managers to appoint themselves priests
–The totalising impulse, which I think is the puritan impulse in another form, claims that all values can be reduced to one value and thus the work of determining how those values can put in practice can easily be outsourced
–we’ve jumped back a hundred years and the only alternative to one authoritarianism is the other authoritarianism