Surviving Diversity Training

If you work in a bureaucratic or enterprise organisation, the inevitable result of 2020’s bout of intellectual masturbation on the topic of Black Lives Mattering is going to be more "training" based on the apparent need to increase diversity in your organisation at all costs. One is reminded of the remarks of the great American satirist Tom Lehrer in the intro to his song "It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier”:

“...one of the many fine things one has to admit is the way that the Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion, in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on the grounds of ability.”

How then can we unenlightened peons “ride the wave” of diversity training so as to achieve the maximum benefit? Allow your humble correspondent to guide you.

Assuming that you're taking an in-person or video-driven interactive training session, the first thing to understand are your own objectives:

• Are you hoping to benefit from what’s being taught;
• Are you looking for the minimum interaction and distraction for your life; or
• do you resent the intrusion on your life and intend to resist actively?

All are valid choices, but make sure you pick one and plan for it. Are you aiming to avoid risk of being disciplined/fired? That's also an important factor to be aware of. If you're 63 and planning to retire soon, you might well not care at all, and in fact being fired could be a trigger for a lucrative constructive dismissal suit. If you've just accepted a job at another company which is not full of woke scolds, you can probably go to town. If you're 22 and just starting your career, your risk appetite is likely very small. Know before you go.

You also need to understand your “facilitator” (session leader), what they’re trying to achieve, and how they’re intending to do it. Unless they’ve just come down with the last shower, they will be mentally grouping their audience as above, and labelling each of you "learner", "holidaymaker" or "prisoner" - who says that stereotyping doesn't serve a purpose? Generally they try to focus on the first group and minimize contact with the others, but you might come across someone who is on an evangelical mission to convert everyone - in that case, holidaymakers and prisoners are no longer safe.

Course pre-reading and objectives

A tactic I've recently seen is to distribute “pre-reading” around the group. To make sure it gets done, they may also require everyone to prepare a small amount of pre-work based on the reading. This might be a form you have to submit before the course, or to assemble some written notes on your response to it, or to prepare a scenario for discussion in the group. (e.g. to answer: “what is a time that you felt uncomfortable in a racially charged situation? How did you respond? How did you think the other parties felt?”)

If your corporate training department is doing its job - and it’s quite possible that they aren't - the course description should come with some stated learning objectives. This will tell you a lot about what the course is trying to get you to do, and it will also clue you in to what evidence they might expect the course to produce. After all, the instructor can’t blithely claim "everyone is racism free now, that will be $5000 please!", or at least they shouldn't be able to. Therefore your company will be expecting objectives that are at least somewhat measurable, and expect to measure them.

The objectives will therefore tell you what the instructor wants you to be thinking or to have achieved by the end of the class, giving you a clear signpost to the topics under discussion. This can be a useful prompt to do pre-reading around the topics. For instance, if it requires "understanding the causes and result of implicit bias" then understanding the original study and the various debunkings can prepare you well for raising pointed questions.

Conducting yourself in session

If you intend to be a holiday maker, the worst thing to do is to make this apparent in the first ten minutes of class. Turn up a bit early, be chatty with the facilitator and others, take active part in the icebreaker activity (there's almost always an icebreaker). That should buy you some initial credit with the instructor, even though you disengage for the rest of the session. I'd also recommend doing the same burst of activity when you come back from each break. That way the instructor starts to get the impression that he or she is boring you, despite your best efforts to be attentive. Or possibly that you're snorting cocaine in the bathroom in the breaks, which I cannot endorse.

If you're a "prisoner" looking to tunnel out, I'd actually recommend a similar approach. At the very least, you don't want to look hostile in the first ten minutes. (And you shouldn't be hostile then anyway, because even the most painfully right-on diversity trainer deserves a chance to show that they're trying to make this session useful and interesting.) However, it's fine to develop a more quizzical look and increasingly more defensive body language over time. Evolve from an occasional raised eyebrow to stroking/holding your chin (showing disagreement with what the facilitator is saying), to crossed arms, to switching between crossed arms and crossed legs, depending on how obvious you want disagreement to be. This raises an implicit challenge to the facilitator, and whether they take you up on it can indicate their level of confidence in their content.

These events are normally "laptops down, phones down" so that everyone is "present". However taking a notebook and pen won't raise any eyebrows, and these can be useful tools. Whenever the facilitator says something weird or objectionable, you can take a direct note. This can be great material for feedback (see later). At worst, you can draft a love letter to your garage mechanic - no-one's going to ask to see your notes, and if they do then you can indignantly refuse. Make sure it's your own pen and own notebook.

Video sessions come with their own opportunities and challenges. For holidaymakers, feigning attention on video is a whole topic in itself, but you want to watch out for the facilitator calling on you for a response when you have no idea what they just said. Normally they require everyone to have video on and be on mute by default, which buys you a few seconds to "fumble" for un-mute. I recommend using an external, wired mike (e.g. on headphones), and so if you're stuck then gently move the plug out and in while you're talking to fake a dodgy connection. Practice makes perfect! Remember to temporarily stop using that mike and move to just using the laptop mike - it's then fine to "reset" your machine at the next break and report things "working" again.

I also recommend setting up poor lighting conditions in your room; either a strong light source causing glare (sun through a window), or curtains drawn to "remove the glare" but leaving a dark, grainy picture. Touching an unwashed thumb on the camera lens can help too - be sure to clean it after the session! For dark rooms, remember that glasses can reflect the colours of your screen so check before the meeting to see if they give anything away.

Group and pair exercises

Ideally, have a good friend in the same session who has similar views on these mandatory training events, and pair off with them for exercises if you get the chance. However, experienced facilitators will make people rotate round groups, so you've got to plan on group exercises with one or more "committed" learners. In my experience the best way to handle this is to realise that people love to talk about themselves - and the self-righteous adore it. So lead them into talking about their experiences, ask "concerned" and "interested" open questions such as "how did that change how you thought about...", and let them run out the clock for you.

You're going to need to have one or two experiences to talk about, if you don't have an obvious topic then I recommend something like:

• the time you were the only white person / male / non-tranvestite in a place and had an epiphany "this must be what it's like to be black / female / a cross dresser all the time!"; or
• childhood experience being once-off mean to someone black / female / cross-dressing which you only ten years later realising how that affected their relationships in school and oppressed them; or
• if you're got military experience, something on perception of veterans - veteran status is protected in the USA, and companies often have diversity outreach efforts focused on veteran hiring not least because they work hard and are good at execution and leadership but strangely diversity courses seldom talk much about this.

Stirring the pot

If you've got a best friend / partner / family member in a "protected" category, and frowns on "diversity" training, don't be afraid to cite them. "My mate is black and he says it's daft to focus on deaths caused by police as long as we're all shooting each other all the time" - as long as he'll back you up on that, you can probably get away with it. It will derail the hell out of the conversation, so make sure you're comfortable with raised emotions if you're going to try this.

The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) label is itself ripe for manipulation. You could refer to it as Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE); or perhaps Inclusion, Equity and Diversion (IED), making sure to use the appropriate abbreviation. Every firm should have a constructive IED program, after all!

Agreeing with "Black Lives Matter" and raising the game by suggesting "Unborn black lives matter too!" addressing the 35% abortion percentage in the black community is probably only viable if you don't mind a meeting-without-coffee with your boss and HR afterwards. Mind you, if you're a well-established Christian (or Muslim!) you might be able to get away with it.

If they do mention deaths-at-the-hand-of-police, you can refer to my previous analysis of the 2015 black unarmed fatalities in the USA. Short version: if you're not armed, and don't actively try to attack a police officer, you're actually remarkably safe even if you're black.

Raising the well-documented differences between genders is only for the suicidally determined. The facts might be with you, but you can expect prompt personal attacks on you during and after the course.

Constructive feedback

There is almost inevitably a post-course survey. The temptation is to blow this off with the minimum of effort, but If you actually want to effect changes then this is one of the best bang-for-your-buck places to make effort.

In terms of scoring, try not to be too much of an outlier. Score the content and the facilitator honestly and separately if you can. You can have the world's best facilitator, but if they're stuck with bad or dishonest material then there's only so much they can do. Highlight how the course has failed to help you meet the objectives or failed to be convinced about the assertions.

Where possible, make recommendations for "improving" the exercises. Say that there needs to be more time / quicker switching around / better briefing / more guidance on picking the right focus topic / content that you can better relate to. Again, you want to show helpfulness so they don't dismiss your scores and feedback as "grumpy prisoner".

If the facilitator or someone in the class has said something actually offensive, don't hold back from flagging it - I'd suggest without naming the person, at least initially. Make sure you wrote it down verbatim at the time in your notes, with the point in the session marked, so you can point to your notes as evidence.

Next steps

With luck, that will be it for the next year or so. No matter how woke the company, diversity training is expensive in terms of lost productivity, so they're unlike to repeat it unless they feel they have to. Sit back and enjoy 364 days of just treating people like people without fear or favour no matter what their skin colour, gender, age, or religion.

BBC shilling for illegal immigration AGAIN

I don't want to claim that this is a trend but they have recent history in this area.

Today Ms Taylor Kate Brown, DC-based BBC reporter temporarily reporting from Mancos CO, reports on the plight of Rosa Sabido who's sheltering from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the local United Methodist Church who have decided to provide sanctuary to anyone breaking the law as long as it's just related to immigration. Anyone familiar with today's UMC will not be falling off their chairs in surprise.

I searched for the word "legal" in the article, and the only instance relevant to her actions was reported speech from an ICE spokesman:

She entered the country illegally and ignored multiple orders to depart

which, I note, nothing in the article tries to refute apart from a quote from Ms Sabido:

I've been trying all this time to become a citizen... I just tried to do the legal thing and in the end all I get was an order of deportation

The "legal thing" - presumably ignoring the (repeated?) deliberate illegal immigration into the USA which was the root cause of the pending procedures?

At least Ms Brown is honest about the motivation of Ms Sabido:

It is an extreme option and one that extracts a high and potentially lasting price.

Really? What "price" are we talking about? Presumably by Ms Sabido's calculations, it's worthwhile - what benefit might she be anticipating?

Rosa keeps busy but her time in the church is about waiting - waiting for a new Congress, waiting for a potential private bill, waiting for a different president.

Basically, a broad amnesty for people already in the US illegally. How nice to have a substantial fraction of a foreign government working directly for your benefit without any thought of payment - save, perhaps, a future vote in their direction?

However, I find the hints about the church itself of particular interest:

But sheltering Rosa was never the original plan. The church had spoken to a nearby organisation that believed there were a handful of families in the area at risk of deportation, all of whom had lived there for at least 10 years.
"They were our brothers and sisters," he says.
A few people left the church over the decision, but more have joined in support of Rosa, says Paschal.

Aha. I'm sure. So the pastor led the congregation into approving the sanctuary policy in support of a few people that they knew, but it turned out to be available to anyone in the neighborhood. Who knew?

Here's the church. Total congregation: 70. That means fewer than 30 people turning up regularly for services. In a town of 1500 with a total of 5 churches that doesn't look like a particularly successful church, and honestly I don't know how 30 people's contributions are funding a full-time pastor. One assumes that the United Methodist Church - or rather, their national congregational contributions - are covering the deficit. So the pastor doesn't have to have much local buy-in, he gets the $ from the mothership. Nice job, if you can get it.

Anyway, Ms Brown is officially no longer reporting for the BBC:

*clears throat* AHEM.

So, some ~personal news ~ (please forgive me, I haven't gotten to do Personal News Twitter. Ever.):

Today's my last day at @BBCNorthAmerica. I'm heading west for a new adventure, much of it TBD.

— Taylor Kate Brown (@taylorkatebrown) August 3, 2018

so this is presumably her swan-song. If she's moving out west in a career growth move, it's almost certainly to California so presumably this article is a final burnishing of pro-illegal-immigration credentials...

Piers Morgan redefining hypocrisy

Following the awful fatal machete attack on a soldier in Woolwich today there have been the predictable comments coming from the pro-gun contingent that stripping society of firearms did not seem to provide much protection for the poor guy who was run down and then machete'd to death. I'm in two minds about this claim - I can't see how even ubiquitous firearms access would have stopped the soldier being run down by the car, and the initial attack with the machete was so surprising that the guy would have likely been dead before anyone could respond. On the other hand, we would have been spared the two alleged murderers wandering around for 20 minutes, preaching to people and waving their blood-stained hands until the police managed to get a firearms unit together.

Anyway, uber-git Piers Morgan got into a Twitter spat with pro-gun Dana Loesch who asked:

Was the guy with the machete a member of the NRA? Asking for a friend.

It was slightly tasteless, but harked back to Piers Morgan's past few months of suggesting that NRA members were just as guilty for mass shootings as Adam Lanza et al.

Piers, of course, wasn't taking this lying down and blustered:

Can't stomach @dloesch goading Brits with her outrageous tweeting re beheaded soldier story. Unfollowed, and banned from my show.

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 22, 2013

This might have worked better, however, if Dana hadn't remembered why Piers Morgan got fired as the editor of the Daily Mirror:

Maybe instead of mocking the disarmament ideology that creates victims, I should have Photoshopped soldier pics, right @piersmorgan ?

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) May 22, 2013

That's right, Piers: you were fired because the paper of which you were editor ran a story based on faked photos suggesting that British soldiers were abusing an Iraqi man. If that didn't fire up the blood of people like the machete wielders and make them think that British soldiers were their enemies and deserving of death, I'd be quite surprised. Projecting much, Piers?

A lesson in political evolution from South Africa

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has penned a very thoughtful, balanced and personally honest article arguing that South African politics has a number of very real problems:

The ANC was very good at leading us in the struggle to be free from oppression. They were a good freedom-fighting unit. But it doesn't seem to me now that a freedom-fighting unit can ­easily make the transition to becoming a political party.
And, unfortunately, we do have a weakness in our Constitution. It was important for our transition that we had proportional representation, so people were voting not for a particular candidate but for a party. We still have that system. The party that wins decides who will be its representatives, so everybody wants to get on to the party list.
You do not want to jeopardise your chances by being what you ought to be as a Member of Parliament – someone who ensures that the executive is accountable to the legislature.

Note, Lib Dems, that he's rejecting PR in favour of something more like a first-past-the-post system. Definitely go read the whole thing. I have a lot of time for Desmond Tutu, and am encouraged that he's pushing South Africans to consider fixing some of the problems their society has.

I also find it interesting that he addresses directly the Chinese influence in Africa:

China has brought a lot of benefits to Africa, with the investments it has made and the building of infrastructure, but it has come at a cost. In South Africa, a lot of people in the textile industry have been thrown out of work because the country has been flooded with cheap Chinese goods. But what has been even more distressing for me is how our country has seemed to kowtow to Beijing.
A glaring example is what they did with the Dalai Lama, when the South African government dilly-dallied with his visa so that he couldn't come to my birthday.

I remember that occasion - Tutu and the Dalai Lama ended up on a video conference because the Chinese government pressured the South African government not to grant the Dalai Lama a visa. It was amusing to see how terrified the Chinese government must be of the Dalai Lama, and doubly so because a meeting of limited news interest became a major news event. Talk about an own goal...

I have been wondering just what effects the widespread Chinese economic and political investments in Africa are intended to bring. Access to mineral resources is obvious, but they seem to be taking an unhealthy interest in ensuring African governments bend to their whims. It seems unhealthy.

Be careful whom you shoot

Last year, a 15 year old schoolgirl from Swat in Pakistan was shot in the head while returning home from school on the school bus. It seems that certain people objected to the subversive messages she was spreading:

In early 2009, at the age of 11/12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls.

Dear Lord, we can't have girls being educated. Who knows what thoughts might enter their heads? So a gentleman from the local Taliban franchise put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.

This is the story of Malala Yousafzai (the top Google hit for "malala") and if the Taliban spent any time educating their followers on human biology, the bullet would have killed her right there in October 2012. Unfortunately for their cause, the hitman was chosen more for his pseudo-Islamic zeal than actual shooting talent. Malala was hit in the head but survived, thanks (by my reading between the lines) to a combination of Heaven-sent fortune, personal will to survive, and some top-notch emergency care by the local and national medics. Flown to Britain for surgery to repair her skull, she recovered and is now attending school in Birmingham. I rather suspect that the school has surreptitiously taken additional security measures since unfortunately the UK is still home to too many misogynistic and violent gentlemen from South Asia who might take exception to Malala's very public survival.

Now, Malala has signed a $3M book deal to write about her life and her cause. Given the international outcry over the attack, and support for her cause, I fully expect it to hit the top of the autobiography bestseller charts. As a result, millions of people who would only have heard of Malala in a cursory news story about another fatal shooting in Pakistan will be reading about her life and the state of female education in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled areas. We can only expect more international support and money for such education as a result.

I'm somewhat hoping that the Taliban hitman avoided capture and will spend the next few months being slowly tortured to death by his compatriots for failing spectacularly in his assassination attempt.

Post-crisis in Algeria?

The bloody siege at Amenas in Algeria is over, and five alleged kidnappers have been taken alive. I believe that the Algerian authorities have a "robust" approach to prisoner rights, and right now the kidnappers are likely wishing they'd been shot instead. Anyway, the dust is settling on the action with 23+ hostages and around 30 kidnappers dead. What was this all about, and what does it forecast of future terrorist activity in the Maghreb?

The siege was clearly targeted at Western governments; reports seem consistent that the kidnappers left the Algerian staff more or less alone and concentrated on the Western staff as hostages. What gives a little more colour to that view, though, comes from blogger Wretchard writing about Filipino engineer and hostage Ruben Andrada:

With detcord wrapped around his neck and caught in the gunbattle between the Masked Brigade and Algerian forces, he regarded his chances of survival as doubtful. Andrada retreated into that classic Filipino attitude: "bahala na". He thought 'leave it to God' as bullets kicked up the ground around him.

It's odd that a Filipino would be regarded as Western - except, of course, it's not the "country of nationality" that the hostage takers care about. Filipinos are predominantly Christian - 90% of the population, and most of those are Catholic. The kidnappers weren't targeting "Westerners", they were targeting "non-Muslims".

The assault itself was the classic Russian model - go in, slaughter the bad guys, try not to kill hostages if you can help it, but never mind if some of them get hit. Taking prisoners is strictly optional, which is why I was surprised that five kidnappers appear to have survived - I wonder if this group was based away from the gas plant as a support/escape element and was detected and ambushed by the Algerian forces suddenly enough that fighting wasn't really an option. There will be any amount of explicit and implicit blame placed on the Algerian forces in the next few weeks, but really they did exactly as they were supposed to. Algeria doesn't want attacks like this to happen, especially not around its revenue-producing gas plants. It wants to make plain to any attackers that no deals are made, that Algeria won't hesitate to go in shooting, and that holding hostages won't really slow down any attack. From now on, any Western kidnapping in Algeria will likely be by really badly-informed small-scale terrorist / criminal groups (and therefore relatively easy to manage). Jihadi attacks will be aiming to shoot-and-scoot or suicide-bomb, not hold hostages and hang around. Both of these situations are much easier to manage than a hostage siege, and generally less expensive in destruction to industrial facilities.

It will be interesting to see where the next hostage-taking occurs. I'm assuming Mali is now quite a hard target as Westerners are alerted to danger. I wonder if Morocco and Tunisia will be the next target, or perhaps further afield in Nigeria if Boko Haram can be persuaded to up their current game of blowing up churches, providing logistical support for better-trained and more determined jihadi from the Maghreb.

Break open the popcorn!

This should be interesting: a gay French-Algerian man is planning to open the world's first gas mosque in Paris:

Mr Zahed says the mosque, situated in a Buddhist chapel in Paris, will also break another Islamic taboo by refusing to segregate women and men.

You have to admire the guy's minerals, even if you don't personally agree with his life choices. I can imagine that the reaction from Paris's resident Muslim community is going to be, erm, "spirited". Hope the congregation at the new mosque can afford good security, because I think they're going to need it.

So this is going to be an interesting choice for the more conservative-minded French citizens. Do they condemn him as a gay marriage proponent, or do they applaud him for confronting militant Islam and sexual segregation? It should be fascinating to watch. Good luck, Mr. Zahed, and I strongly suggest you ensure you have good home security and a fully paid up life insurance policy (before the insurance company finds out what you're doing)

UK Muslims not as polite as Irish Muslims

After the other week's Muslim protest at Google's HQ in Dublin, today we had 10,000 UK Muslims protesting at Google's HQ in London on the same topic - they were more direct in what they thought of Youtube hosting the video than the Irish group were.

Posters such as "Muslims Campaign For Global Civility" were, I think, quite well put. "Larry Page supports Terrorism" and "Eric Schmidt supports Terrorism", perhaps less so. I didn't spot any "Sergey Brin supports Terrorism", perhaps because it's widely recognised that Sergey Brin is Batman. "Don't they teach manners in Google?" of course begged the response "Maybe, maybe not, but they're certainly very keen on freedom of expression"

One Sheikh speaker commented:

Organisations like Google are key players and have to take responsibility for civility. You can't just say it doesn't matter that it's freedom of speech.

Oh, but you can. You can. You can argue about whether that's necessarily true, or a good idea, but it's quite possible to say that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, for instance.

I do however wonder how useful protesting outside Google HQ on a Sunday might be; I don't expect many Google staff are around then. They're probably all home, or out at church...

It does however seem that certain people's free speech is less important than others':

When asked where where the women attending the protest were, one protester replied: "Right at the back".

Sufis not keen on certain free speech

I missed this event in the news, but YouTube (ironically) has coverage: Mr. Moulana Ghulam Ahmed Rabbani leading a protest outside Google's Dublin office:

"We have a right not to be insulted!"
[...]
"If this is not terrorism, what is the definition of terrorism?"

Er, I'm sorry Mr. Rabbani, but I'm afraid you don't actually have that right not to be insulted. Free speech (look it up) is the right to say more or less what you want. This may involve hurting someone's feelings. If I accuse a crash-for-cash solicitor of being a scum-sucking subhuman weasel then I'm going to hurt his or her feelings; that is, however, not a reason to restrict me from saying those things.

Define terrorism:

Noun: The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. Synonyms: terror

Hope this helps, Mr. Rabbani. For what it's worth, I don't seem much violence or intimidation from those publishing the insulting videos.

Kudos to the Irish Sufi Foundation that they didn't actually hurl rocks, set fire to things or assault people during these protests (oh, how low our expectations have sunk that this is grounds for praise). However, they need to realise that the Western World has standards of free speech that are very different from those in the Middle East, and living in Western societies means accepting these consequences.

Compare and contrast: beliefs

I find it interesting to take Mr. Wadsworth's approach to headline rewriting sometimes: Government lawyers also told the Strasbourg court that wearing a hijab is not a "generally recognised" act of Muslim worship and is not required by the Qu'ran:

Ms Al-Sahab told The Daily Telegraph that she felt "insulted" by the argument that Muslims who are told by their employer that they cannot wear a hijab at work can always find another job.

Yeah, not too believable, is it? I'm almost with the employers on this one - if a piece of religious garb (e.g. a cross, hijab, yarmulke) is not essential to the religion and poses a risk in the workplace such as to infection control, personal safety in an environment of rotating machinery etc. then sure, it's only sensible to require the person to keep it away from work.

Nevertheless, one has a sneaking suspicion that this particular area is a free-for-all in the application of arbitrary HR policies with ex-post-facto justifications. I'm particularly at the decision against former civil registrar Lillian Ladele:

Registrar Lillian Ladele was disciplined after she refused to conduct same-sex civil partnership ceremonies in north London.

This seems to be a clear case of shifting the goalposts of a job during employment. When Ms. Ladele was hired, same-sex civil partnerships were not an issue. Now they are. One feels that no matter what you think about Ms. Ladele's beliefs, retroactively forcing her out of a job when reasonable accommodation could have been made for her as the job changed is not entirely cricket.