Diversity Is Going To Get Us Killed

In Fact, Excellence Is Our Strength, And Always Was

From the Spirit Aerosystems DEI video

The Seattle Times has news about the door that blew out of the 737 MAX last week in flight:

The entire fuselage of the jet, including this plugged door, is assembled in Wichita, Kan., by Spirit AeroSystems and arrives by train at Boeing’s Renton plant.

In Renton, Boeing mechanics and quality inspectors complete the cabin interior, adding the wiring, insulation and sidewalls that would cover the plug before adding the seats, galley, lavatories and other interior elements.

Investigators will hope to find the piece that fell somewhere south of Portland and will comb the manufacturing assembly and inspection records.

Mann said the lack of any deformation around the hole in the fuselage makes it look like the initial cause may be “a Spirit quality control issue.”

MAX fuselages supplied by Spirit last year featured a stream of various defects, including improperly drilled holes in the aft pressure bulkhead and fittings that attach the vertical fin to the fuselage that didn’t conform to the specification.

These serious lapses forced Boeing to delay MAX deliveries. In early October, Spirit CEO Tom Gentile was fired and replaced with former Boeing executive Pat Shanahan.

Watch the Spirit Aerosystems DEI video here. This is a company that is gung-ho about this stuff. You hear the same blatherskite there that you hear in all these kinds of corporate presentations: that diversity is our strength, that we couldn’t do what we do without diversity, that we cannot be competitive without diversity, and so forth. It’s all harmless until planes start falling out of the air. That video is so full of canting corporate bullshit it actually makes you stupider by the minute.

To be fair, we have no idea for sure if Spirit Aerosystems’ work was at fault here, and if so, why their work broke down. Certainly I’m not saying that non-white or non-Asian engineers are subpar. I’m saying that if you hire for any reason other than excellence, you are weakening your product or service.

It’s logical. I’ve told you before about the argument I got into ages ago with a newspaper executive about all this; the executive denied that hiring for diversity weakened us, and instead said that “diversity is a component of excellence.” In other words, they simply broadened the definition of quality to include the color of skin of the employee, or his sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

If you’re the reader of a newspaper or magazine, and you are not getting the best performance out of the writers and editors, because they were not hired solely on the basis of ability, but also for qualities that had nothing to do with their capacity to do a good job, that might be too bad, but you would survive. If you are a passenger on an airplane, the stakes are higher. As that passenger, would you feel better knowing that the people who built the aircraft were the absolute best available engineers and workmen — or that the aircraft builders were chosen on the basis of ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity?

What about your doctor, or surgeon? This week I have to hire a Hungarian accountant to prepare my taxes for both Hungary and the US. I want the absolute best accountant I can find and afford. Why? Because what if I’m audited? I need to be confident that whoever I hire to do my taxes is diligent and exceptionally competent. I don’t care if he or she is straight, gay, male, female, black, white, Asian, whatever. All I want to know is that they are good at what they do. I’ll probably go to a Hungarian branch of one of the big US firms (KPMG, etc.), because they will have experience with this sort of thing. Fortunately, Hungary is not a country that has gone gaga for diversity. Though American firms doing business in Eastern Europe do tend to press their American fads onto them, Hungary itself does not have a “diverse” workforce, by American standards. The great majority of Hungarian accountants who apply for work there will be Magyar — that is, ethnically white. I don’t care about that. What I care about is that ethnic diversity will have de facto been removed as a hiring criteria. That means I have a better chance of getting an accountant that was hired solely on the basis of professional competence. Good.

I learned something shocking from reading an advance copy of what is sure to become a blockbuster book: Jeremy Carl’s The Unprotected Class, coming out in April (you can pre-order by clicking the link). It’s a book about anti-white racism in America, and its various costs. Did you ever hear about Alan Bakke? He was the plaintiff in a landmark 1978 US Supreme Court ruling that upheld affirmative action (it was finally overturned by SCOTUS last year). In brief, despite far superior test scores, Bakke was denied admission to medical school in California, because he was white.

Carl reports that Patrick Chavis, a black man, was one of the students who took the place that would have gone to Bakke at the UC-Davis Medical School. His test scores — generally in the 20th to 30th percentile nationally — were far lower than Bakke’s, which were in the 97th percentile. Read about Chavis’s life and death (in 2002) here. In short, when Chavis became a doctor, the usual left-wing suspects orgasmically celebrated him as an example of the wonders of affirmative action. But he was a disaster as a physician, being sued for malpractice 27 times. In 1998, his medical license was suspended. He died in 2002, in a carjacking attempt.

Let me ask you: was society better served by Patrick Chavis being admitted to medical school over Alan Bakke? Were the patients of Patrick Chavis better served? Heck, was Patrick Chavis better served by being promoted far above his ability to perform?

Somebody is going to die because of this insanity. The only thing that’s going to stop it is the survivors filing lawsuits against companies who prioritized DEI ideology over competence. When these companies start losing in court because they valued something other than excellence, then they will discover that diversity is not our strength; excellence is, and always was. But that won’t bring back to life those killed, or heal those maimed, so that the ruling class can morally indulge itself in woke ideology.

Look at this chart, from before The Great Floyd Reckoning:

It clearly shows that medical schools were accepting black and Hispanic students who were much less prepared than white and Asian applicants. What does that tell you, the patient? It says that if you want to find the best doctor, you need to be suspicious if your doctor is black or Hispanic. Is that fair to individual black or Hispanic physicians? Of course not! Dr. X and Dr. Y may be very fine and accomplished — but statistically, it cannot be denied that people with their racial background are accepted at US medical schools according to meaningfully lower standards. Does this double standard help them, in the end? Or does it cast a pall over their accomplishments as physicians by causing patients, who understandably want the best possible care, to doubt the competence of their doctor?

The historian Robert Conquest said that everybody is a reactionary about what they know best. I would amend that to say that everybody is a reactionary about their children’s welfare. Would you entrust your child’s care to a doctor you had reason to believe might be second-rate, just because that doctor bears identity characteristics that qualify him or her as “diverse,” and the ruling-class ideology insists that Diversity Is Our Strength? Come on, you know the answer.

To be clear, it’s not only DEI. It’s capitalism:

I hate butt-coverers who want to put these problems all on DEI. Remember the 2008 economic crash, triggered by subprime mortgages? It really was the case that a collapse in lending standards, led in part by Bush administration attempts to increase minority home ownership, played a role. But mostly it was a bunch of greedy bankers who didn’t care how they made their money, and a bunch of government officials, Republicans and Democrats, who didn’t want to ask too many questions, out of fear of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s not either/or, but both/and.

Any criteria for hiring and promotion other than excellence can only result in lesser performance. And it neither adds nor subtracts to the excellence of the aircraft door if the engineer designing it is a disabled Mongolian lesbian. The only thing that should matter is: can she do the job well?

If Boeing and its suppliers are cutting corners on engineering and safety for economic reasons, for moral reasons (diversity), or for whatever reason — that has to stop, and it has to stop now. It’s destroying us.

The building of aircraft is more critical to saving lives than the running of newspapers, but if you are someone like the liberal white reporter friend I used to have — the guy who quit his job as an editor to go back into reporting because he kept having to re-report stories done by unqualified minority hires, and was afraid that eventually he would miss something, and be named in a libel suit — you can’t afford not to care. And besides, every conservative who pays attention can list a number of important real-world stories that nobody in the mainstream media notices, likely because of their ideological uniformity. So, people who depend on the media for information about how the world works are going to end up without accurate or sufficient info, and make flawed decisions.

I keep telling y’all that the Western media is not giving you a full, accurate picture of how life is in Eastern Europe. If I can live here and see how bad the reporting is on an area I know something about (it’s the same about religion, by the way), I can easily imagine how bad it must be elsewhere:

The late Michael Crichton once wrote:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

It is impossible for anyone to know everything. The best we can do is to strive to know as much as possible about a thing, recognizing that there are always going to be data that we don’t know — but once we do know them, we remain flexible enough to adjust our opinions and actions in light of the new data. We have created a society and a culture, though, in which people only want to know what confirms their biases. At some point, that decadent habit is going to result in planes falling out of skies. It’s going to cause a war — and in fact, arguably already has.

When they say “decline is a choice,” this is partly what they mean. When institutional leaders choose to manage their institutions according to standards other than excellence, things will inevitably fall apart. In the state of Oregon, progressive government leaders are dealing with the massive lack of classroom achievement by minority students by doing the academic equivalent of printing money to pay for debts — that is, banning traditional grading for the sake of “equity”. At some point, reality is going to sink in, and these students will be compelled to face the fact that the system has been lying to them all their lives, and that they really are unfit for productive work. Not to worry — there will be plenty of progressives standing around telling these men and women that all their problems are caused by white supremacy.

I keep joking that America is in a late Soviet phase, but you know, this kind of thing really is comparable. The Soviet Union’s leadership class was more interested in trying to impose its ideology on reality than on making things that work properly. Soviet leaders could depend on a captive media to propagandize the population, and tell them that what they’re seeing with their own eyes isn’t really happening. Eventually, reality caught up with them. It’s going to happen to us too. It had better; the alternative is much worse. But it’s going to take a while: a new survey released today showed that most US business leaders remain committed to DEI.