The Chronicle of Higher Education looks closely at the DEI orthodoxy-sniffing at UCLA:

Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.

At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.

But his skepticism wasn’t (and isn’t) about the value of diversity, it was simply about the efficacy of diversity statements. A difference of opinion on that seems like a mind-numbingly stupid reason to petition the university not to hire someone. It’s like firing a carpenter for pointing out that this power saw doesn’t work.

The situation illustrates how diversity statements have become a live wire nationally, with several university systems and states banning their use in hiring over concerns about their legality or potential use as a “political litmus test.”

What is a diversity statement? Google answers:

A diversity statement is a polished, narrative statement, typically 1–2 pages in length, that describes one’s accomplishments, goals, and process to advance excellence in diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging as a teacher and a researcher in higher education.

It’s not at all clear why an opinion on whether such a statement does or does not advance excellence in DEI should be a litmus test for hiring.

[Inbar] told the hosts of Very Bad Wizards [last Tuesday] that his meeting with the diversity-issues committee was one of several “strange things” that happened while he was on campus. At the end of the meeting, in which the committee asked standard questions about his approach to diversity in his teaching and research, Inbar said he had been asked about a December 2018 episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers.

In that episode, Inbar said that diversity statements “sort of seem like administrator virtue-signaling,” questioned how they would be used in a hiring process, and suggested “it’s not clear that they lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups.”

Well, is it clear that they lead to better outcomes?

The committee asked: Was he prepared to defend those comments now?

“To be honest, I wasn’t, because this episode is like, four and a half years old,” Inbar said on Very Bad Wizards. But he explained his current stance: “The very short version is, I think that the goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.” …

The UCLA faculty members “seemed satisfied” with Inbar’s answer, he said. “Then one of them said, kind of almost apologetically, ‘Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?’” Inbar said he didn’t know what he’d say beyond explaining his views, as he had to the committee.

Not good enough! Ostracize that man!

On Tuesday, during the Very Bad Wizards episode, Inbar said the graduate students who opposed his hiring had missed the nuance in his remarks about diversity statements.

“You can pull out selective quotes that make me sound like I’m a rabid anti-diversity-statement person, which I’m really not,” Inbar said. His main concern is with their effectiveness, he said: “What you want is somebody who’s going to be able to teach and to mentor people from diverse backgrounds. But what you get is somebody writing about what they believe, and perhaps what they’ve done to demonstrate that.”

Saying you’re not convinced X works is a long long long way from saying the goal of X is worthless. Really really long.

Now people who know that men are not women are having their bank accounts closed.

Wings Over Scotland:

Well well. The head of “financial tracking” at HSBC, the bank that just closed all my accounts for no reason, isn’t just a transwoman, but he and his transman partner are the top two names on the list of Patrons of controversial under-investigation trans “charity” Mermaids.

We’re done.

The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.

As envoys gathered in Bonn in early June to prepare for this year’s annual climate talks in November, average global surface air temperatures were more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for several days, the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

These “climate talks” are a weird charade when we can all see that nothing is being done and nothing will be done.

Though mean temperatures had temporarily breached the 1.5C threshold before, this was the first time they had done so in the northern hemisphere summer that starts on June 1. Sea temperatures also broke April and May records.

“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climatologist at Australia’s University of New South Wales.

China is cooking. The US is cooking.

Parts of North America were some 10C above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the U.S. East Coast in hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million metric tons.

Well let’s have a meeting. That will fix it.

Still refusing to report the subject accurately:

A woman who lost out on a job after tweeting gender-critical views is to get a £100,000 payout after a decision from an employment tribunal.

She didn’t “lose out on” a job; she lost the job she had. She lost her job.

Ms Forstater, the founder of campaign group Sex Matters, believes biological sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.

She doesn’t “believe” sex is immutable, she knows it is. Knowing that people can’t change sex isn’t a “belief”; it’s just awareness of a reality. [Yes, philosophically speaking knowledge is justified true belief, but the BBC isn’t speaking philosophically, to put it mildly.]

Casting it as “belief” isn’t just sloppy, it’s a massive elbow on the scales.

Ms Forstater was congratulated in a tweet by Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has courted controversy with her own statements on trans issues.

That’s a snide and stupid thing to say. We don’t “court controversy” when we reject claims that men can magically become women; we make an effort to get the truth out there.

Commenting on the July 2022 ruling, charity Stonewall said the decision did not “change the reality of trans people’s workplace protection”.

It added: “No-one has the right to discriminate against, or harass, trans people simply because they disagree with their existence and participation in society.”

Why quote Stonewall? Why insinuate that women who know men are not women want to discriminate against or harass trans people? Much less “disagree with their existence”?

But this never happens and never will happen.

A boy has been arrested by police investigating reports of serious sexual assaults in a gender neutral toilet at a school. Essex Police said it was working closely with the school and local authorities while inquiries continued.

The boy, under the age of 16, has been bailed with conditions. Essex County Council confirmed it was working with police and relevant authorities on a “safeguarding matter” at a school.

No, on a series of sexual assaults. The kind which never happen.

Originally a comment by James Garnett on It’s not about being a disruptor.

Sort of a side-note, but: it’s practically a truism among those of us who are involved in dangerous activities that it’s “never the gear that fails”. That is, it’s human miscalculations that lead to accidents and death. It’s not snapped ropes or slipped gear or failed parachutes, it’s almost always a bad decision somewhere along the line. Of course, yes, sometimes it’s failed gear, but it happens so rarely in our highly regulated and tested worlds that the exceptions just serve to prove the rule. There’s an entire publication dedicated to analysis of climbing accidents in North America that is published each year, “Accidents in North American Mountaineering” and time after time after time it’s a bad human decision that leads to the accidents. Even when the gear fails, it is usually traceable to a bad decision, like the death of Todd Skinner in October, 2006: Skinner, a famous Yosemite pioneer climber, died when the belay loop on his harness snapped, on a climb just before which he acknowledged that his harness was over-worn and dangerous and should be replaced. Yes, the harness failed, but the real failure was Skinner’s decision to risk one more climb on a piece of safety gear that was past its usable lifetime–and he knew it.

Similarly, the real failure here was Rush’s belief in his own opinions at the expense of the certification of the gear that he was using. After SAR missions, we hold debriefings in which we try to determine what decision was the trigger that led to the callout. What human decision started the chain of events that led to us being out in the field trying to rescue a person, or worse, trying to recover a body? There is always something. The skier who decided to make tracks in the backcountry even though he knew that NWAC has predicted “extreme avalanche hazard” in the skier’s preferred area, perhaps. Or the climber who decided to climb one more time on a rope that had suffered too many factor-two falls and was beyond its usable life. Or the amateur submariner who didn’t understand materials science who thought that those people who did were all Chicken Little.

The fact is, reality doesn’t care. Reality doesn’t give a dry fart about anyone’s bloated opinions of themselves and their presumed expertise. At the risk of introducing levity where perhaps there shouldn’t be any this soon, I like to tell my mountaineering students (when I had them, as I don’t teach those classes at the moment) that reality is like a cat: we conform to its ways, it doesn’t change to fit our expectations.

Here’s why Elon’s cunning plan is so stupid:

Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.

In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day.

If you don’t use Twitter that might sound reasonable, like the Guardian and the Washington Post and similar saying you can read X number of articles for X price. (They don’t do that, but they could.) But Twitter doesn’t work like a newspaper, because what you see is what Twitter decides to show you. It mostly works because what Twitter decides to show you is shaped by what you’ve liked in the past, but this is new Elon Twitter, and lately it’s been regularly showing me garbage that seems purely random. The future will be “here are your 600 random garbage tweets, there you go, see you tomorrow.”

So everyone will leave, and Elon will be saying “What just happened?”

The New Yorker has an in-depth piece on the recklessness of the amateur Let’s Make a Submersible guy. It’s like reading an in-depth piece on why the Challenger exploded. Spoiler: he was determined to go ahead, safety be damned.

Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

But Rush went right on thinking it is about being a disruptor as opposed to the laws of physics. It’s weird when people do that.

Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”

The same kind of mistake, in a different form. It’s not about business, it’s about the laws of physics. You can’t “access it” because it’s water and humans evolved on land. We can swim, but we can’t just move into the deep ocean and stay there.

“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”

Also:

Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV. He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, “need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project. “The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me.

You don’t want to do your wild n crazy innovating thousands of feet under water.

The director of marine operations handed in a report containing a long list of design flaws, and so he was fired. Yes that’s the way to fix design flaws.

McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly. “You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place,” he e-mailed. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.”

There is is again – instead of treating safety as its own thing, he treats it as a rival to “innovation.” Innovate shminovate: you can’t innovate your way out of the laws of physics.

People who know better do this. NASA did this with the Challenger. Mountaineers do this when they get within sight of the summit of Everest too late to reach the summit and get down again. They know it’s too late but they keep climbing anyway.

He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he wrote.

So he imploded himself and four other people.

But who says that’s even a thing?

A controversial policy change that bars teachers from using a student’s preferred pronouns without parental permission will soon go into effect in New Brunswick despite pushback. It has caused political turmoil in the Canadian province.

See the way that’s worded suggests that “preferred pronouns” are the normal everyday established form of pronouns when in fact they’re the invention of crazed magic-gender ideologues. There’s no such thing as “preferred pronouns.” That idea is a new and stupid invention. Teachers shouldn’t be paying any attention to them at all, and neither should students.

In May, under Premier Blaine Higgs, New Brunswick announced that a policy to create a safe space for students who identify as LGBT in schools will be amended, with the changes coming into effect on 1 July.

The amendments to the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity policy – also known as Policy 713 – removed explicit mention of allowing students to participate in extracurricular activities, including sports teams, that reflect their gender identity.

Notice how careful the BBC is to be unclear. The issue there is boys ruining girls’ sports by invading them, but the Beeb pretends it’s just a vague neutral “sports teams” versus “gender identity.” If they were clear about it, most people would think “Well obviously boys shouldn’t be ruining girls’ sports.”

More controversially, the changes – as explained by the province’s education minister Bill Hogan – also forbid teachers from using [to use] the chosen preferred names and pronouns of a student under the age of 16 without the consent of their parents.

Again, the casual normalization of the absurd. There’s no such thing as “chosen pronouns” because we don’t get to tell other people what pronouns they can use. We get to tell people what name to call us, because that relates just to us. We don’t get to tell people what verbs or conjunctions or pronouns to use because that’s way too broad.

Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in, igniting a debate on the issue at the federal level.

At a Pride event earlier in June, Mr Trudeau said that “trans kids in New Brunswick are being told they don’t have the right to be their true self, that they need to ask permission”.

But it isn’t their “true self.” That’s the whole point. It’s their imaginary, fantasy, pretend self. People are allowed to have such fantasies – I even think they’re a good thing in a lot of ways, especially for kids. Use your imagination by all means. Share your fantasies in like-minded groups if you want to. But demanding that the whole world join in is demanding way too much.

Don’t miss Jesse Singal’s piece on the grotesquerie at UCLA when a handful of fanatics decided Yoel Inbar is not Perfected enough to be on the faculty.

There was a little bit of weirdness when, during one meeting with a small diversity committee now enmeshed in the UC hiring process, Inbar was told that it had been brought to their attention that (four and a half years prior) on Two Psychologists Four Beers, he’d expressed skepticism of the mandatory diversity statements the University of California system had adopted around that time for anyone seeking to get hired as faculty. Inbar is a political liberal and very much favors making campuses inclusive; he just thinks diversity statements are unlikely to accomplish anything, and are much more about a sort of easily faked signaling that one has the “correct” political values. He explained these views and thought the conversation was fine, even if he was surprised to be discussing a very old podcast episode. His interlocutors also asked him what he would say to the department’s “very passionate” (Inbar’s paraphrasing) grad students who might be upset about this. Inbar responded that he wasn’t sure — he’d probably just explain his views as he just had.

“Very passionate” meaning fanatical and determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good. He has some reservations about diversity statements, while still being a fan of diversity, but it seems that’s just not good enough for the Cathars of UCLA.

Despite these minor hiccups, Inbar flew home to Toronto confident he’d be offered the job. Not long after, he got an alarmed email from one of his allies within UCLA: a letter was circulating, signed by dozens of psychology grad students, urging UCLA to not offer him a job.

Why? I’m sure you can guess. Inbar was deemed Problematic. According to this counter-letter disagreeing with the original one, students received the don’t-hire-him letter at 1 a.m. and were told they had to choose whether or not to put their names on it by 4:00 p.m. that day — and they knew that decision, which was being framed as an urgent matter of social justice, would be public to their classmates. Grad students tend to be overworked and overscheduled; it’s basically impossible anyone unfamiliar with Yoel Inbar (which most of the students would have been) could have possibly checked all the letter’s claims in time.

But they signed it anyway, not wanting to be the next bodies on the pyre, so there’s this letter with a great long list of signees, which makes it look as if Inbar is the worst thing since Donald Trump.

Read on.

For those who can still see tweets…

Maya’s statement is way better than Center for Global Development’s.

[Updating to add summary:

CGD basically just says here’s our statement, with a link.

Maya replies with “Here’s mine” with her image from the deck of cards, and text saying CGD was ordered to pay etc.

Maya’s basically saying neener neener haha; it’s quite droll.]

The CGD statement:

London – Today, The Center for Global Development (CGD) released the following statement, in relation to the Employment Tribunal judgment in the case brought by Maya Forstater against CGD:

“Following the Employment Tribunal’s remedy judgment, the case brought against CGD, its President, Masood Ahmed, and CGD Europe by Maya Forstater will come to a close.

“CGD has and will continue to strive to maintain a workplace that is welcoming, safe, and inclusive to all.

“The resolution of this case will allow us once again to focus exclusively on our mission: reducing global poverty and inequality through economic research that drives better policy and practice.”

That’s it; that’s the statement.

Too bad they didn’t manage to maintain a workplace that is welcoming, safe, and inclusive to all including women who know that men are not women.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on One law for the rich and.

When ProPublica asked Alito questions, he instead responded with a defensive, pre-emptive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Does this mean if someone asks me an embarrassing question, I get to not respond by writing an opinion piece in a compliant publication? Cushy!

Boss: Did you remember to lock the door before you left?

Me: Read my latest in the Globe and Mail; that should explain everything.

Boss: What happened to the $2000 that was in the cash register?

Me: Check out my op-ed in the Free Press.

Boss: Why are you carrying a suitcase?

Me: See my column in tomorrow’s Star. Gotta run!

The serfs must continue to be serfs.

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down President Biden’s plan for federal student loan forgiveness. Millions of federal borrowers will not see their debts decreased or erased.

…

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the “disappointing and cruel” ruling “shows the callousness of the MAGA Republican-controlled Supreme Court.”

“The hypocrisy is clear: as justices accept lavish, six-figure gifts, they don’t dare to help Americans saddled with student loan debt, instead siding with the powerful, big-monied interests,” he said, referencing the court’s recent string of ethics scandals.

The rich get richer and the poor get…ever-increasing debt.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez similarly homed in on the controversies surrounding the justices, specifically Justice Samuel Alito.

He was accused last week of failing to disclose a 2008 luxury fishing trip with hedge fund Paul Singer and not recusing himself from cases Singer later had in front of the Supreme Court. When ProPublica asked Alito questions, he instead responded with a defensive, pre-emptive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Ocasio-Cortez said the court’s “corruption undercuts its own legitimacy by putting its rulings up for sale.”

Trump wins again.

Nice cartoon.

Uh oh – Just Stop Oil v Pride. Is it wrong of me to hope to see them claw each other into tiny pieces?

Just Stop Oil has threatened to disrupt this weekend’s London Pride event over its headline sponsor United Airlines.

Ahead of the event on Saturday, Just Stop Oil issued a list of demands for the organisers to consider in order to stop any protest disrupting the event.

Blah blah blah but who has signed the oath swearing that men are women if they say they are, and who hasn’t? Focus, people.

We saw the pretend mother in the ITV News item several hours ago. Some hours before that Rosie Duffield commented on the pretend mother.

The TUC claimed that the man pretending to be a woman was being subject to abuse “because he is a mother.” But he’s not a mother, because he’s not a woman. Also, saying a man is not a woman is not “abuse.” I suppose it can be if you accost the man in public and scream in his face and so on, but just saying that a man who called himself “a mum” in a news item is not in fact a mum is not abuse.

Owen Jones went ballistic.

The People’s History Museum grovels in apology and self-chastisement for allowing disobedient women to hold a meeting on its premises.

People’s History Museum (PHM) is committed to creating a fairer world for everyone and we represent all those working to achieve this.  The PHM team works tirelessly to create an inclusive and welcoming space.  We stand in solidarity with trans and non-binary people.

But not women. Women are the Bad People.

We never want these values, or the trust that exists between us, to be undermined.

The past few days have been deeply troubling as our trans and non-binary allies, team members and collections have been at the centre of a hostile environment on social media.  We are deeply upset by the situation, which arose from an external board meeting being held in a room hired at PHM by an organisation that we feel does not share our values.  We did not do sufficient due diligence and we will learn from this.  We are truly sorry for the impact this has had on the people and communities that we work with and our own staff team.

The organisation in question is Sex Matters.

It is a great museum. I happened on it while walking around in Manchester that time I was there for the QED conference. I’d never heard of it, so it was just luck that I spotted it after touring the Rylands Library. It is or was a great museum; now it seems to have decided women are the brutal ruling class and men are their battered starved tormented slaves.

And in conclusion:

We want to be clear that we are and always will be an inclusive space for trans and non-binary people, the wider LGBTQI+ community and all people who face marginalisation.  We do not take relationships with our partners and communities for granted, we know it will take time to rebuild this trust and we are deeply committed to doing this.

But not an inclusive space for feminist women eh?

You sniveling cowards.

Keir Starmer claims to be down with the lesbians and gays but…

Labour did what?

January 11 this year:

Lesbian Labour were in Liverpool this week handing out leaflets and speaking to delegates at the annual Labour Party Conference. Our concerns include the loss of single sex spaces and provision in public life, which particularly affects us same-sex attracted women.

Unfortunately we were literally and metaphorically left out in the cold given the Labour Party’s refusal to tolerate diversity of opinion over same-sex attraction and single sex services, after refusing stall applications from same-sex champions The LGB Alliance, the feminst charity Filia, as well as the Labour Women’s Declaration. This of course only made us more determined to get our message out there, and with our pop up stall we did!

Lesbian Labour’s Carol had this to say:

Delegates and visitors to Conference took our leaflets and some stopped for a chat but how much better would it have been to be out of the wind and rain inside Conference for those exchanges. Lesbians fear the loss of our protected rights from Labour’s willingness to accept gender identity instead of sex based rights, we need that dialogue urgently.

So not those lesbians, eh? Only the ones willing to pretend men can be lesbians need apply?

Trump’s Supreme Court gets another win:

Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.

And yet the Constitution was fine with race-based slavery for all those years. Funny how that works. You’d think “people from Africa are destined to be enslaved by people from Britain” would be at least as much “employing race in a negative manner” and “involving racial stereotyping” as giving the grandchildren of those enslaved people a leg up in education.