Jacob Rees Mogg revamping Civil Service training

[achillestoes]

It’s a sad day when you see Jacob Rees Mogg doing anything and you’re happy about it, but here we are. He is calling time on Civil Service training budgets being used for ‘ridiculous’ diversity courses that open the CS up to ‘mockery’ and don’t represent value for money. He’s writing to all government departments to make it clear that staff development should be about providing workers with the training needed to do their jobs.

I don’t like JRM but if anyone thinks the general public aren’t behind him on this, they’re deluded. Most people don’t believe training in your role should amount to moral indoctrination about your privilege, or requiring you to describe yourself within the frameworks of ideologies you don’t accept.

I didn't say that they seized power. I said that they possess power.

I'm just curious about your use of the word "elites". I'm used to seeing it by people who want to establish themselves as a regular guy, as opposed to journalists and academics and policy makers pushing a woke agenda. But you don't strike me as a regular guy type.

@Boxowine

Why am I not a regular guy type?

Yes, they possess power. I differentiate between the power that comes with privilege and the power that is given and can be taken away by the electorate because one is inherited/unearned and the other isn’t. I don’t have any issue with people being fairly elected to positions of power.

But they habe vast amounts of unelected wealth and power -indeed there’s a very good case for saying that’s how they got their parliamentary seats - and how Johnson became prime minister-elected by Tory members, not the people

@antifascist

It’s true that their privilege helped them get elected. I would change that element of our system if I could. But the leader of the biggest party is PM. We don’t elect leaders directly and I’m okay with that.

“It’s true that their privilege helped them get elected”.

Except it took Rees-Mogg over a decade of slogging around being the Tory candidate in a safe Labour seat before he finally got elected. Privileged Old Etonian he may be, but it did not get him parachuted into a safe seat.

Boris Johnson had an easier time ( he was better known), but still had to be a candidate in a safe Labour seat before he got elected.

The real privileged in political terms are the sons and daughters (or brothers) of political figures, who often are parachuted straight in to a safe seat. The Old Etonians don’t scare me half as much as the hereditary political class we seem to be developing.

FannyCann · Yesterday 08:19
And here's a thread about a person who identifies as a bird and uses ey/em/eir pronouns because birds don’t inherently have a gender

I wonder what happens if she works with a cat identifying otherkin🤔

twitter.com/svphillimore/status/1542395917772390400?s=21

I cannot fathom that point of view. Birds don’t have a ‘gender’ obviously but you never see a brown peacock or cockerel. They could not be more particularly male and female in many cases.

It is odd to feel pleased with JRM. What a silver lining.

@achillestoes · Today 18:59
Not only that, I actually think this social hierarchy (where the ostensibly ‘privileged’ are forced to embrace their ‘new’ place at the bottom of the list of those deserving of empathy) is partly what is driving young women to reject their female bodies and adopt new ‘oppressed’ identities. It’s a seductive idea: be delivered of your privilege, be in receipt of the label of ‘most marginalised’, and suddenly you get to insist that everybody hates you, in defiance of the reality, in which you are a member of a powerful elite.

it is interesting you should say this. Have you read this account by a detransitioner, Helena?
lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name?utm_source=url

She describes exactly this as having been an important factor in driving her towards thinking of herself as being trans.

I felt a bit sorry for Tim Farron and the way the media attacked him for his faith when he was leader. They kept asking him whether he considered abortion a sin. Maybe he does, but that doesn't mean that he would have sinners flogged. I'm pretty sure that as a liberal he would let other people make their own decisions, according to their own consciences, so long as he himself doesn't sin (not that as a man an abortion is even a remote possibility).

Is JRM proposing to restrict other people's access to abortion/contraception? Is he campaigning for a repeal of the act?

I don't really agree, I think the method and approach and underlying assumptions about race used in CRT has been wholesale plopped into other disciplines and uses. If you want to say that should be called something else, fine, but I don't think it's at all clear that has to happen. The leaders in woke ideology, if we can call it that (although it's not a great name imo) have been pretty clearly influenced specifically by those ideas.

It's pretty common in places with elections that the people who are the elected leaders are socially and economically elite in some way. My PM is the son of our former PM, not what you'd call a guy who came up from the bottom. Plenty of American presidents come from wealth or political dynasties.

Political leaders who really come from the bottom are quite rare in almost every nation.

@ScrollingLeaves

I read that the other day but this was already my view from other things I’ve picked up on on here. It seems to make sense to me. I pity kids in schools these days. Obviously we can all be aware of the ways in which we genuinely are privileged (I have a house, we have enough to eat, we don’t go without things we need and I know many people do); but this false self-flagellation is unhealthy and it shows.

@DdraigGoch

True. This is a democracy and there should be room for people with religious beliefs that respect the rights of others in society not to believe.

A brief example of how everyone seems to have gone mad... I wanted to report a comment on Twitter. It was gross racism against black people, very clear, and obviously still up. I had to go through (not kidding) 8 pages of Twitter questions asking me whether I was reporting a hate incident based on someone’s ‘identity’. Before I got anywhere near something like ‘this comment is racist’ I had to choose from lists asking me which aspect of someone’s identity was being targeted; disease, misgendering, dead naming, age, sexuality etc. I could go on all day.

Five minutes into the process of reporting it I gave up.

This is where bringing academic understandings of ‘identity’ into ordinary life gets us. People know what is unacceptable. We need to shift away from the culture of endlessly analysing what people say for wrongthink, as there really is plenty of obviously disgusting speech being conflated with tiny (often unintentional) transgressions.

It took you 5 minutes to eventually give up on choosing from 8 multiple choice questions ?

@tommika

Roughly.

I think you miss some of the point. Is it right that Twitter should make it harder to report racism, and elevate much more trivial things (more breaches of good manners than hate speech) so that they are mentioned by name and racism is not?

We’re obviously seeing some of the gap between US culture (particularly online ) where there are no smaller transgressions - everything is elevated - and the UK culture, where we have hovered on the edge of that much more punitive mindset but not yet fully dived in. Only this morning I saw the tail end of a Twitter storm in the States where an artist was mounting a dramatic apology for using a word (just one word, not a slur, not an abusive word) that had been ‘claimed’ by a minority group, and from the responses (mostly white middle class people humble bragging about how tuned in they are to the oppositional zeitgeist) you would think he’d killed someone. It was unhinged.

I don’t want us to go there, tbh.

MangyInseam Today 02:05
Political leaders who really come from the bottom are quite rare in almost every nation

I am not very expert but it seems a bit easier in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Without knowing everyone’s backgrounds, we recently had John Major and Margaret Thatcher who came from ordinary families
though granted not from the very bottom. I think there are other politicians at the moment who did too. It can depend very much on whether they managed to get a good enough education, although John Major didn’t if I remember correctly.

Major left school at 16.

Harder to report racism?
What is your opinion on an easy way to report racism?

What outcome do you want from your report?
Do you want a single ‘report’ button which goes into a giant queue of millions of reports?
A single long list of every possible type of report?
Or do you want a short series of simple contextual multiple choice categories that get fed through a process which can be prioritised and are manageable?

Ive just pulled up some twitter posts and submitted a couple of reports on racial and sexual/gender areas. Both were competed within 5 steps and took under a minute each

@tommika

I’m not in charge of Twitter, but I want a simple system I can use easily, that doesn’t put people off reporting grotesque racism by treating it as equal to or less serious than telling the truth about a person’s sex.

The previous system was much easier to use. One you clicked report, I think it was just targeted harassment based on hatred of a person or group’s race or ethnicity. It’s not hard. They don’t need to bring ‘identity’ into it with three or four steps first.

We can disagree on this.

“We can disagree on this”
👍

Certainly.
As a data person, I’ll take the current system.

You may prefer the earlier route, but breaking out categories allows the data to be analysed much more informatively and for patterns to be found etc as well as focusing resources on prioritised areas rather than having many reports sat in the queue waiting until someone gets to them.

I hope that you can concede that the change is intended to improve efficiency and not a deliberate attempt to dissuade reporting.

Sure, I don’t think it’s deliberately trying to dissuade reporting at all. That doesn’t change the fact that it almost certainly will be a barrier. Think about slow readers, poor readers, people with cognitive impairments, people with visual impairments, people with language barriers. It’s far too complicated.