Dr James Allan: Trump’s Lesson in Remedial Education

I have hesitated to respond article-by-article to Roger Partridge’s continuing attacks on the Trump administration beyond my initial response and rebuttal in these pages to his first anti-Trump piece. That was where I argued that Roger’s comparisons of Trump to Hitler, Mussolini and Hugo Chavez were, shall we say, a tad overdone. My general view is that more than a few people on the political Right side of politics (and near on everyone on the Left side) have been infected with a strong dose of TDS, or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. All of us can agree or disagree with this or that policy of a US President, including those of President Trump.

Dr Will Jones: White Men Blocked From Applying for Jobs at Premier League Clubs

White men have been blocked from applying for coaching jobs at Premier League football clubs including Manchester United and Liverpool under a policy that appears to be a direct contravention of equality law. The Telegraph has more.

Penn Raine: Cancelling Shakespeare

I wonder which of our cultural orthodoxies and customs our descendants will need to grovel over and apologise for hundreds of years from now. Will global social media behemoths be coughing up billions on reparations for the crippling wave of diminished self-esteem caused by online bullying? Will Big Pharma CEO’s be required to beg forgiveness for grooming millions of the world’s children in the belief that they were born with the wrong sets of genitalia?

Dave Patterson: Days of DEI in the Pentagon Should Be Numbered

Corporations are ditching the diversity, equity, inclusion scam for a good reason.

Governments, like people, all too often adopt beliefs that are not true. As the opening quotation from the movie The Big Short asserted: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And when those who believe for sure what “just ain’t so” include the Pentagon leadership, then America is in trouble. The promise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) falls squarely in the “just ain’t so” category, as corporations are finding out. Will the Pentagon be the last to get it?

Dr Michael John Schmidt: Ideology and groupthink in our public service - certainly immoral and probably illegal.

The phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” is from one of Aesop's Fables: a wolf disguises itself in a sheep’s skin to blend in with, and ultimately prey on, a flock . The story serves as a moral lesson about deceit and the danger of those who pretend to be something they are not, often to cause harm. Nowhere does the phrase apply more aptly than with “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies in organisations.

Professor John Raine: Ideological Illogic - Facts Not Feels, Please

At a time when universities (notably Massey University [1] and the University of Auckland) are engaged in curriculum transformation projects, we need to look hard at the current rationales for cutting courses. Sure, university courses tend to proliferate over time, and the universities have experienced heavy financial pressures following the Covid lockdowns and the loss of international student business, but we have also witnessed a blow-out in administrative and managerial staff numbers. Currently, a further factor is present, a shifting culture in the sector, that is affecting decisions around what university degree programmes are to look like in the future.

Professor Jerry Coyne: Shorter version of the ideological capture of science funding by DEI

The other day I wrote about the paper below that has now appeared in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (click headline to read; download pdf here).

Ele Ludemann: Will it make the boat go faster?

The Reserve Bank is advertising for a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion advisor.

The Bank has one mandate – to keep inflation between one and three percent.

Dr Michael John Schmidt: Reserve Bank of New Zealand moving beyond its remit into Identity Politics

Critics of "diversity, equity, and inclusion programs" (DEI) highlight that determining the realised value of DEI, of preferring staff according to their immutable characteristics e.g., race, sex, or gender, may be biased, complex, and context dependent. Rarely acknowledged and almost never reported is that DEI initiatives can be costly, problematic, or illegal.

Professor John Raine: It is Time to Resist a New Totalitarianism

On 24th January 2024, the Hoover Institute at Stanford University hosted an interview “The Treason of the Intellectuals” [1] by Peter Robinson of historian Niall Ferguson in the Uncommon Knowledge series. This was a stark reminder that in 1924 in the German Weimar Republic, university academics (with lawyers and doctors) were contributing to the development of extreme antisemitic policy used later by the Nazi regime. The politicisation of German universities such as Heidelberg and Tübingen during this period led eventually to their losing their standing as the world’s very best.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 21/11/23

You can get away with being the first white bloke to win an electorate – but don’t try making a joke about it

No news to pass on from the Beehive website today, sorry. But we have noted how quickly political reporters can swarm – and inflict their sting – after one of them was alerted to something a newly elected MP had said on Election Day.

The result has been a spate of reports which have taken at least some of the media’s focus away from the coalition negotiations and on to happenings in the Upper Harbour Electorate several weeks ago.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 6/11/23

Get rid of those special seats and guess what? Māori would account for 20 per cent of the seats in the new Parliament

While the Caretaker Hipkins Government remains appropriately quiet and the commentariat conjectures on the shape of the new government, Kiwiblog has drawn attention to the issue of Māori over-representation in the new Parliament.

Over-representation, at least, if representation based on ethnicity is a measure of the health of our democracy.

Brian Easton: Are things falling apart?

Coalition government reflects a nation’s diversity. Electoral arrangements show it.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats The Second Coming

Heather du Plessis-Allan: It pains me to say, but Michael Woodhouse has a point

It pains me to say this, it really does, but unfortunately for Michael Woodhouse- diversity does matter in politics, as much as I hate that it does.

I think Michael Woodhouse has been treated poorly. There are other white men who work less hard than him and should’ve been bumped down the National Party list instead.

But he’s been punished because he’s not in right friendship group in National, and he’s a bloke. That’s really what it comes down to.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: You can't force people into diversity

Yesterday, as Matt Heath was leaving this studio after The Huddle, I asked him if he was going to any FIFA Women’s World Cup games.

He turned around and laughed and made an observation along the lines of- you can force people to do a lot of diversity stuff, but you can’t force them to buy tickets to entertainment.

Isn’t that exactly right.

Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto

The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. 

There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

Henry Armstrong: Diversity Is No Substitute for Merit

The new National Party leadership of Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye has been roundly criticised, nay condemned, even attacked, for apparently not having sufficient “diversity” on their revised front bench. 

This follows the replacement of Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett, both, in my view, very able and sincere politicians (yes, some actually are). Both can and do claim significant Maori descent, but at one point were criticised by our pathetic media and other no-hopers, for “not being Maori-enough”!  

Apart from not being sufficiently ethnic, these very able people have been the victims of cruel social media attacks (perhaps initiated by their political opponents) and biased, leftist, journalists who continually slag the Opposition.

And now the irony of all ironies, we have the media complaining that Paula Bennett’s retirement from Parliament symbolizes a deliberate negation of diversity!

Hold on, you cannot have it both ways.

Bob Edlin: Ethnicity data to be collected for “balance” in appointments to State sector boards

Great news for mathematicians.  Their services – or the services of a few of them, appropriately selected – look likely to  be increasingly required to monitor the implementation of the Government’s diversification policies.

Those policies are being pushed into the domain of science by the Royal Society of New Zealand and by Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods.

The society and the Minister are saying – in effect – they can’t wait for the gender and race blends they seek to evolve naturally.  They favour a creative approach, to be effected through social engineering.

This puts merit on the back seat and promotes a numbers game.

Kevin Donnelly: Our 21st century tragedy - how the west was lost

Douglas Murray argues in The Strange Death of Europe that ­“Europe is committing suicide”, as proven by the mass immigration of thousands of young Islamic men and the failure by many ­within academia, the media and politics to acknowledge and ­defend the unique strengths and benefits of Western civilisation on which Europe is based.

Such is the dire nature of events, Murray concludes: “By the end of the lifespans of most of the people currently alive, Europe will no longer be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.”

Kevin Donnelly from Australia: How to teach what it means to be Australian

Celebrating diversity is only feasible when there is a willingness to commit to the values and beliefs that underpin and sustain tolerance. Now that Islamic State terrorism has arrived on our soil it's time to ask the question: what does it mean to be Australian?

There's no denying that during the 1950s and 1960s the prevailing mood was nationalistic and pro-British.  When I was at school, for example, every Monday morning at assembly we neatly lined up in rows, saluted the flag and sang God save the Queen. With our hands on our hearts children would then recite the oath of allegiance and promise to "cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law". The world map on the back of our workbooks was covered in red, proving that the sun never set on the British Commonwealth.