Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Zelandakh]

If the person does it because he has researched the issue and found that on average the costs for handling discrimination suits, even for "good" employers, was $133 per employee for white people but $372 per employee for black people, and the two people were otherwise exactly equal, then he is making a business decision.

Sorry Kaitlyn but here you are falling into another classical trap. Let me start with a clearer example. Company C has a Recruitment Manager X with "alt-right" views. Because he rejects every non-white individual sent to him for interview regardless of their qualifications, it leads to several law suits. An analysis shows that the cost of non-white interview candidates is 5 times that of white candidates. Does it seem reasonable to you for the company to reject all non-white candidates in this case on financial grounds? Clearly (I hope!) not. The correct response would be to educate or fire the Recruitment Manager so that the recruitment process stops being racist.

 

The same is true of your example. If the costs for black employees are so much higher than for whites then it highlights an issue of racism within the company that needs to be addressed, not that that racism is reinforced an supported. Your "business decision" is simply taking the position that racism in the workplace is acceptable.

 

Perhaps this goes back a little to your response to my post on covert racism, where you mentioned that you were previously unaware of just how much racism is still around in society. Now that you are aware it would be helpful for you to be vigilant for where it pops up that perhaps you did not expect. If something appears to be racist but you have a line of reasoning that makes it not so, perhaps you need to go back to the basic facts of the case and see if there really is an underlying issue. I suppose it might be that company C just got extremely unlucky with its black employees bringing frivolous lawsuits but it is far, far more likely that these employees encountered such clear and obvious racism that bringing a lawsuit seemed to them the only reasonable solution. In that case the best business decision is clearly to eradicate that racism and be able to hire the best candidates. If nothing else it will save money as blacks and women typically earn considerably less for a job than an equivalently qualified white man. But that is another aspect of racism (and sexism) that is ingrained and unlikely to change any time soon.

[helene_t]

If the costs for black employees are so much higher than for whites

If my aunt had balls she would be my uncle.

[nige1]

If the costs for black employees are so much higher than for whites then it highlights an issue of racism within the company that needs to be addressed, not that that racism is reinforced an supported. Your "business decision" is simply taking the position that racism in the workplace is acceptable.

If my aunt had balls she would be my uncle.

Reasonably, Zelandkh and Helene_t reject Kailyn's premise that the hiring company believe costs are higher for black employees.

• Can you imagine circumstances where that assumption could be true, without wrongdoing by the company?
• Would it still be racist for the company to take this belief into account when hiring?
• What should the company policy be, if it estimates that an altruistic non-racist approach would bankrupt the company, with adverse effects on current workers, customers, and share-holders?
• You can dismiss this scenario as impossible if you like, but surely it is closer to Kaitlyn's example?

During Apartheid, I guess that South African employers were sometimes faced with starker quandaries.

 

 

 

[Kaitlyn S]

If nothing else it will save money as blacks and women typically earn considerably less for a job than an equivalently qualified white man. But that is another aspect of racism (and sexism) that is ingrained and unlikely to change any time soon.

Wow. I would have guessed the opposite. If I'm an employer and I have a black person who can do the job well, and his mere presence will probably help me if a different black person sues me, I'm really going to pay him less and risk him leaving and have my competitor have that advantage?

 

Yes, I realize how racist that probably appears to you. But again, simply thinking of the bottom line. In this case, I would think the racial component shoukd favor minorities (and that is not even figuring in possible future mandated quotas.)

 

But if it is true, and I believe it probably us because other posters would have jumped on you if it wasn't, thus is a terrible situation and I would be in favor of taking steps to get people of all races paid the same. For whatever I say about the bottom line, if I was hiring, I'd like to think that fairness was a goal in wage discussions.

 

Some companies aren't into fairness. So if they can hire women and minorities for less, why aren't they doing so in most cases?

[helene_t]

Can you imagine circumstances where that assumption could be true, without wrongdoing by the company?

I can imagine anything. So: Yes. For example, it might be that his skin colour would make him more likely to become a random crime victim which would of course be inconvenient for his employer.

 

Suppose I have a choice between two candidates of different skin colour and I expect the white guy to be more expensive because the statistics say that white guys are more likely to come back with a "your competitor offered me 10% more, can you match that?" after a few months of employment.

 

Suppose I hired the black guy for that reason. Would I be a racist?

 

You don't need to answer because 1) it is a silly hypothetical scenario and 2) even if it was not entirely hypothetical I still don't care whether it should be classified as racism or not.

 

But the hypothetical scenario which we are discussing is even more silly. Frankly, I would rather discuss the scenario that my aunt actually had balls.

[mikeh]

Wow. I would have guessed the opposite. If I'm an employer and I have a black person who can do the job well, and his mere presence will probably help me if a different black person sues me, I'm really going to pay him less and risk him leaving and have my competitor have that advantage?

 

Yes, I realize how racist that probably appears to you. But again, simply thinking of the bottom line. In this case, I would think the racial component shoukd favor minorities (and that is not even figuring in possible future mandated quotas.)

 

But if it is true, and I believe it probably us because other posters would have jumped on you if it wasn't, thus is a terrible situation and I would be in favor of taking steps to get people of all races paid the same. For whatever I say about the bottom line, if I was hiring, I'd like to think that fairness was a goal in wage discussions.

 

Some companies aren't into fairness. So if they can hire women and minorities for less, why aren't they doing so in most cases?

This is yet another in a seemingly unending series of posts in which your (edited) lack of awareness come through. In what universe do you exist in which you are unaware that women, blacks, and other 'minority' groups get paid less for the same job than do white males? I put minority in quotes since it seems to me silly to call women a 'minority', but I don't know of any other word that similarly captures 'women' as a group that faces wage discrimination compared to 'men'.

 

I don't care how selective your google search is: it is easy to find actual studies on this. It isn't necessary to rely upon your (edited) biases to (mis)inform you about reality. You may not realize that your biases (edited) affect your view of reality: your posts make it clear that they do. Of course, mine affect mine as well, but I try to check my facts before posting

 

 

Edit: I realize, having read the polite, restrained and informative posts by Helene and Zel, that it is possible to point out that Kaitlyn remains unaware of the extent to which her reality is unreal without the strong language I often employ so I have edited this post, to soften the choice of words while preserving the message intended. Time will tell if I can keep to this in future.

[helene_t]

Wow. I would have guessed the opposite.

I really appreciate your open mind about this.

 

I also think (and it sounds like you are aware of this) that you fail to appreciate the degree to which black people face discrimination. I think this is very common among white people regardless of political orientation. It is of course understandable. The few black friends that you and I have are probably our friends in part because they are not typical of the black community and therefore their stories are not that horrific.

 

When I moved to the Netherlands, I (as a newly outed transsexual) found myself at the very bottom of society, frequently being denied housing, jobs or even hotel stays (and several times victim of violence and sexual harasment) explicitly because of my gender identity. I emphasize "explicitly" because whenever someone is rude to me without explicit reference to my gender identity I will just attribute it to something else (after all, WASPs get harrased, too), but there have been enough incidents where the reason was explicit, sometimes by people who have never seen me in person. That experience taught me something which to some extent makes it possible for me to imagine how it might be like to belong to an ethnic, religious or racial minority group that is associated with low social status. I emphasise "to some extent" because I am just a single individual belonging to a completely different type of minority in a different society. So my imagination about racial discrimination is almost certainly biased in a many ways.

 

I once read an article in Scientific American about the mysterious phenomena of hypertension in black americans. The author seemed to have ruled out socioeconomic, nutritional, medical and genetic explanations and came to the conclusion that the enormous excess rate of hypertension in black americans is probably due to the constant psychological stress associated with racial discrimination and prejudice. At first, I found that implausible because at that time I thought that skin colour in itself was a non-problem and any disadvantage of being black was an illusion caused by socioeconomic confounding. Today I think differently. How awful it may sound, the authors conclusion is, if not anywhere near proven, certainly plausible.

[mikeh]

jonottawa has seen fit to send an email to all of my partners, accusing me of defaming him and suggesting that my partners take action against me. He has threatened to report me to the Law Society. He even addressed the email to one of the associates, effectively one of my employees.

 

Now, I am not overly concerned about this. I am happy to stand by my opinions as voiced herein, buttressed by the fact that my opinions of him are apparently shared by many others.

 

However, I thought that you might be interested in the fact that jon thinks it to be appropriate to take disagreements voiced here into the personal and business lives of those with whom he disagrees.

 

Frankly, repugnant tho I find him and his views (the former because of the latter) it would not have occurred to me to go beyond the WC to mention him. Oh well.

[jonottawa]

jonottawa has seen fit to send an email to all of my partners, accusing me of defaming him and suggesting that my partners take action against me. He has threatened to report me to the Law Society. He even addressed the email to one of the associates, effectively one of my employees.

 

I wasn't going to mention that email here, but since Mike is bringing it up ... I warned Mike to delete the defamatory libel. He didn't. [deleted]

 

I would urge Mike to post my email in its entirety and let the forum participants be the judge if my position is unreasonable.

 

I'm curious what action Mike thinks I suggested his partners take against him.

 

Since Mike's misconduct ultimately reflects on his entire law firm, I don't see why his associates wouldn't be entitled to know about his misconduct. So I CC'd one of them.

 

Anyway, glad to hear the email went through. I was worried it might end up in a spam filter.

Edited December 9, 2016 by diana_eva

[hrothgar]

I wasn't going to mention that email here, but since Mike is bringing it up ... I warned Mike to delete the defamatory libel. He didn't. [deleted]

 

I would urge Mike to post my email in its entirety and let the forum participants be the judge if my position is unreasonable.

 

I'm curious what action Mike thinks I suggested his partners take against him.

 

Since Mike's misconduct ultimately reflects on his entire law firm, I don't see why his associates wouldn't be entitled to know about his misconduct. So I CC'd one of them.

 

Anyway, glad to hear the email went through. I was worried it might end up in a spam filter.

 

Goodbye Jon,

 

Somehow, I doubt that we will ever be hearing from you again...

Edited December 9, 2016 by diana_eva

[diana_eva]

Jon has been banned from the BBO Forums.

[Kaitlyn S]

jonottawa has seen fit to send an email to all of my partners, accusing me of defaming him and suggesting that my partners take action against me. He has threatened to report me to the Law Society. He even addressed the email to one of the associates, effectively one of my employees.

Defamed someone in an internet forum? Really?

 

Jon, I know you will probably be back under a different username. Contrary to what some of the other posters thought, I thought your posts were well within what I would expect to see posted on an internet forum; i.e. where others thought you were crossing the line, I thought you were simply exercising your free speech right.

 

This act - contacting other people associated with a poster - is just wrong. I suspect that it's a lot to expect you to apologize to Mike but my hope is that if you see this, you will consider not doing this again. All posters have the right to free speech and the expectation that they can give their true opinion without any repercussions beyond having mean things said to them by other posters. If you somehow start a trend and people fear that their life could be negatively affected by posting their honest opinions, people will stop posting honest opinions and a credible exchange of ideas can't happen anymore.

 

The mere fact that this happened has made me even further doubt the sanity of posting honest thoughts on BridgeWinners where one must use their true identity. Is that what you want?

[MrAce]

Goodbye Jon,

 

Somehow, I doubt that we will ever be hearing from you again...

 

Oh you will...with a different name and account.

[Winstonm]

Guy like that should be more careful, could have some kind of an accident, if you know what I mean.

[Kaitlyn S]

deleted post, thought better of it :D

[nige1]

Guy like that should be more careful, could have some kind of an accident, if you know what I mean.

Some condemned Jon for crowing.

[ggwhiz]

Jon has been banned from the BBO Forums.

 

Well now I can admit to being in Ottawa and knowing the guy over many years. Most of our interaction came during my 7 year stint as Conduct and Ethics Chair for Unit 192 where he was (surprise) a frequent flyer.

[hrothgar]

Some condemned Jon for crowing.

 

Nigel, your holier than thou act is wearing a bit thin

 

You engage in exactly the same sets of behaviors that you are constantly complaining about.

You single people out by name, you condemn some posters while letting others slide.

 

The only difference is your choice of targets...

[Winstonm]

Some condemned Jon for crowing.

 

Nope, just for being an incredible jerk.

[kenberg]

Being academically trained, I am sometimes unbearable. I think it would be fair to say that I did object to the crowing. So "some criticized his crowing" is probably right, if I get included in the "some".. Condemned? Oh, I dunno. I wouldn't get too huffy if someone said I condemned it. Condemned the crowing. I don't have, or want, the power to condemn him. Probably it was clear that he is not on my Christmas card list. Nor me on his.

 

More to the point, or more to my point, I am very ready to move on.

[y66]

Crowing once or twice may be bad form but it's not a big deal. Crowing incessantly is too boorish which is unforgivable even on the bacon thread aka the official hijacked thread. Ditto for trolling. Not suggesting trolls make good bacon.

[y66]

Guest post from Alexandra Zapruder who lives near Comet Ping Pong:

 

WASHINGTON — On any given day, locals flock to Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint here not far from where I live, to eat, talk and, of course, play Ping-Pong. But last Sunday, a man armed with a military-style assault rifle and a pistol turned up for an entirely different reason: to see for himself whether the restaurant was indeed, as right-wing fake news reports and conspiracy websites have declared, the hub of a vile child sex-slavery ring masterminded by Hillary Clinton.

 

The absurdity of this story would be laughable if it hadn’t led a man to bring a rifle to a restaurant filled with families. And if it hadn’t resulted in an army of online terrorists harassing the owner, his employees and others along that block of Connecticut Avenue, accusing them of unspeakable crimes and even issuing death threats.

 

I’ve seen my share of conspiracy theories. My grandfather, who accidentally took a home movie of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — now known as the Zapruder film — was implicated in some of the most delusional stories about that event: He had colluded with the C.I.A. to allow his film to be altered just days after the assassination; he had secret ties to Lee Harvey Oswald through a co-worker who later married Oswald’s close friend; and, wait for it, he was the one who pulled the trigger through an elaborate gun-as-camera mechanism at the bidding of the Jewish Mafia.

 

The government’s failure, in the historian Art Simon’s words, to come up with “a coherent and believable account of the assassination” left many gaps to be filled. While early assassination researchers performed a valuable function by making important information public, later conspiracy theorists relied on association and innuendo and cherry-picked details to build increasingly wild narratives.

 

If one outcome of Kennedy’s assassination was a loss of trust in government and the news media, we have now entered an era in which such suspicions have mushroomed into something far more dangerous — a rupture in the very idea of shared truth.

 

The crisis at Comet was averted when the gunman surrendered to the police before anyone was hurt. But the deeper problem remains. We are no longer talking about a relatively small group of Kennedy conspiracy theorists trading notes and publishing articles. We are talking about millions who are reading Reddit and 4chan, imbibing fabricated stories attributed to fictitious publications like The Denver Guardian and getting whipped into a fury of self-righteous anger that — given the easy access to guns in our society — may well result in violence.

 

Is there any way to reverse this trend? The mainstream news media can’t do a thing. If I learned one thing from trying to understand the Kennedy conspiracy theorists, it’s that it is impossible to dispel the amorphous cloud of suspicion. If you try, you are either a dupe or part of the cover-up — the cloud simply grows to include you. Nor, needless to say, is anyone from the Democratic Party going to be able to reason with those who are convinced that Mrs. Clinton is organizing a child sex-slave network through a pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington.

 

The president-elect, on the other hand, could make a difference. But Donald J. Trump and his team have legitimized rather than repudiated this kind of speculation. He embraced the so-called birther movement, claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating after the Sept. 11 attacks and tweeted that millions voted “illegally” for Mrs. Clinton. Just before the election, his pick for national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, fanned the flames of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy by tweeting about Mrs. Clinton and sex crimes and providing a link to a fake-news article.

 

If Mr. Trump does nothing, could our new neighbor, Mike Pence, speak up? How about the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell; the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan; or Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and future chief of staff to the president? Surely they see that assaults on truth are harmful to all of us, regardless of our political orientation. Why haven’t they and other responsible conservatives condemned these lies on the grounds that no one is safe in a world in which facts no longer have merit?

 

They should. And they should do it at Comet Ping Pong. They should stand in front of the restaurant and say that no matter how vehemently you disagree with Mrs. Clinton’s politics, there is no justification for accusing her of child trafficking. They should condemn “fake news” — which is a weak term for deep hatred that takes the form of a story — and encourage their supporters to do the same.

 

Is there any world in which this could happen? It depends on whether Republicans think vilifying Mrs. Clinton serves their interests. It depends on whether they accept that there is such a thing as truth and that we are morally obligated to defend it. This may be a political problem for our Republican friends, but it shouldn’t be a moral one.

 

They should stand up for the truth. Then stay for the pizza. And let’s put this madness behind us.

[Winstonm]

I think this thread should end just as the Trump presidency will end: as a disaster for everyone involved.

[y66]

From Truth and Lies in the Age of Trump by the NYT Editorial Board:

 

Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.

 

The institutions that once generated and reaffirmed that shared reality — including the church, the government, the news media, the universities and labor unions — are in various stages of turmoil or even collapse. Because Mr. Trump himself has little regard for facts, it was easy for him to capitalize on this situation. But even as Americans gobble up “fake news,” there is the sense that something crucial has been lost. A North Carolina man told The Times that while he regularly clicked on links to stories claiming that Hillary Clinton was indicted or that Mexico built a wall along its southern border, he missed the days when Walter Cronkite delivered the news to the nation.

 

He’s not alone; it was different then. Americans knew that whatever they were hearing on the news, their neighbors were hearing, too. Cable TV fractured that shared experience, and then social media made it easier for Americans to curl up in cozy, angry or self-righteous cocoons.

 

The rise of social media has been great in many ways. In a media environment with endless inputs and outlets, citizens can inform and entertain one another, organize more easily and hold their leaders accountable. But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.

 

That’s what Mr. Trump has done. For him, facts aren’t the point; trust is. Like any autocrat, he wins his followers’ trust — let’s call it a blind trust — by lying so often and so brazenly that millions of people give up on trying to distinguish truth from falsehood. Whether the lie is about millions of noncitizens voting illegally, or the crime rate, or President Obama’s citizenship, it doesn’t matter: In a confusing world of competing, shouted “truths,” the simplest solution is to trust in your leader. As Mr. Trump is fond of saying, “I alone can fix it.”

 

He is not just indifferent to facts; he can be hostile to any effort to assert them. On Tuesday, Chuck Jones, a union boss at Carrier Corporation, told The Washington Post that Mr. Trump was wrong when he claimed to have saved 1,100 of the company’s jobs from moving to Mexico — the real number will be closer to 730. Rather than admit error, the president-elect instead attacked Mr. Jones, a private citizen, on Twitter, saying he had done a “terrible job representing workers.”

 

In other words, Mr. Trump’s is a different kind of lying, though it has been coming for some time. When Bill Clinton, during the Monica Lewinsky meltdown, defended his public contortions of the truth by saying, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he provided a sort of coda for the era of spin. In those days, politicians pinched and yanked at facts like Play-Doh, trying to shape them to their ends, but they were still acknowledging, and working with, the same shared underlying realities.

 

During the Bush years, the administration saw itself as racing ahead of a faltering media. In 2002, one of President George W. Bush’s top advisers mocked a Times reporter as living in the “reality-based community.” “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he was quoted as saying. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

 

By the time Mitt Romney was running for president a decade later, politicians recognized that they could treat the news media not as some sort of arbiter of the facts but simply one side of a he-said-she-said debate. As one of Mr. Romney’s aides put it, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

 

Mr. Trump has changed this game. He has exploited, perhaps better than any presidential candidate before him, the human impulse to be swayed more by story than by fact. As one of his surrogates said recently, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

 

Right now, Mr. Trump has his story, and he’s sticking to it — and he’s increasingly carrying the Republican party along with him. It’s bad enough when a truth-defying president-elect uses his megaphone to shout the lie that millions of illegal votes were responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s large popular-vote win. It’s even more ominous when the vice president-elect, the speaker of the House and the chairman of the Republican National Committee — all people who should know better — repeat that fiction, or refuse to disavow it.

 

Without a Walter Cronkite to guide them, how can Americans find the path back to a culture of commonly accepted facts, the building blocks of democracy? A president and other politicians who care about the truth could certainly help them along. In the absence of leaders like that, media organizations that report fact without regard for partisanship, and citizens who think for themselves, will need to light the way.

[Kaitlyn S]

I think this thread should end just as the Trump presidency will end: as a disaster for everyone involved.

I tried starting a new thread for a new topic and got chastised for it.

 

EDIT: Upon further review, it's possible that my posting style was criticized and not the fact that I started a new thread.