Brain-dead compliance
We talked before about people over-enthusiastically complying with government directives – as if they were government employees who want to make their orders look ridiculous by stretching them to cover every conceivable thing. One currently enjoying being abused is the order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training. How low can you go? Well…
In compliance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to remove apparent DEI content by Wednesday, March 5, U.S. military branches are working overtime to flag and erase any Pentagon media that might seem to promote diversity, regardless of their historical significance.
The Associated Press has compiled an archive of the images flagged for removal, and several of the links already lead to dead pages.
One of the ‘banned’ topics vanishing from service archives? Pics of the “Enola Gay”.
For those who need reminding, the Enola Gay was the B-29 which dropped ‘the bomb’ on Hiroshima. Far from some odd gender-affirming nonsense, she was named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of her pilot, Paul Tibbets. But, since the word “Gay” is visible on her nose…out she goes.
Some of the historic content flagged for removal could have been predicted, fitting into the Trump administration’s increasingly broad definition of DEI. Those included images of the legendary Tuskegee airmen, female Marines and events honoring Asian and Pacific Islander contributions to the military.
Additional “gay” imagery flagged included service members who have the last name Gay, with the name visible on their uniform. People
Me, I can see getting rid of the newer brand of “blame Whitey for everything”, trying to get kids to become sexually confused sorts of nonsense. But the services are taking such broad steps as to call into question the judgement of the folks carrying out the excisions. Are they trying to make the whole effort look ridiculous? Possibly embarrassing a POTUS with whom they disagree? They even deleted a photo of fish biologists classifying fish, apparently because the caption said the workers were recording data on the fish including ‘gender’.
I saw where Trump told managers that when letting people go, they should us ‘a scalpel instead of a hatchet’ Fox News. Hegseth should do the same… we don’t eliminate the history of the Tuskegee Airmen or Buffalo Soldiers because it’s DEI, we celebrate them for doing a double-tough job in spite of the establishment. No need to, as the saying goes, throw out the baby with the bathwater. Use some sense, folks.
On the opposite side, though, this does remind me of a time in the ’70s when the Lawrence, KS police department were forbidden to strike over pay, and were warned not to attempt an adhoc strike by calling in sick (a practice known at the time as “blue flu”.) They had a novel solution: they started enforcing the law. All of them. 2 mph over? Ticket. Parked too close to a curb or more than 18″ away? Ticket. They literally wrote thousands of tickets in a couple of days. I believe they won their pay negotiations, too.
Category: 2024 Election, DEI
The pendulum of Democracy swings to the right for the time being. The trick is to keep it from swinging too far. Look where that got the Dems.
This reeks of sabotage. There are a lot of government bureaucrats who oppose President Trump, the folks he nominates, as well as DOGE. They know full well what Trump/Hegseth are calling for, but are deliberately going overboard so that their ideological allies could could point to Trump’s initiatives in a negative way… And folks wonder why many of us cheer the move to reduce the federal workforce.
Sabotage, indeed. Or, perhaps liberal idiot idealogues (but, I repeat myself) cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
Absolutely correct. And these people need shown the door.
Similar crap is happening in FEMA, with them shutting down the National Fire Academy, cancelling classes midstream, and leaving attendees on the hook for what was supposed to be govt. covered training and travel. This was one area where FEMA was actually doing good work and getting good value for our tax dollars.. so of course they shut it down.
Any of you that are so inclined, PLEASE write your congress critters and encourage them to reverse this stupidity.
What good would it do for me to write to the three stooges of the Vermont delegation? Notice I said of the Vermont delegation as they are not from Vermont. They are all transplants.
Spot on besig…and who didn’t see this coming? We won a battle back in November, but the war ain’t over.
Prepare
Yup. Reeks of “malicious compliance”. It can either be a useful tool to point out idiocracy or a blatant “fuck you”.
I think the key word is “flagged” here. It doesn’t mean it was removed or eliminated. It means literally (used correctly here) that it was identified, by whatever scraping method, as possibly fitting the search criteria (likely conducted by some search engine with a very rudimentary AI). It is up to the humans in the room to then say whether it fits the criteria fully!
Will there be some bias? Yes, there might be someone who is lazy who just hits the delete all key instead of their job. Hopefully the DOGE purge will root them out before they do this though. There may also be some deep rooted racial intensions harbored by some. Hopefully this can be avoided by a review at multiple levels. Then there could also be people those who were victims of DEI in their education, and never learned history so their lack of knowledge causes them to not know the significance of what they are seeing (i.e. the Enola Gay) and deletes something out of ignorance. Hence the need for multiple checks before it is finally deleted.
I would say, for once in the last two decades the Press is actually doing their job!!!
My first thought was malicious compliance but then I remembered something…
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Hom much is is malice and how much is stupidity?
Either should be grounds for dismissal.
Some folk are indeed capable of going the proverbial full retard– common sense ain’t as common as we’d want.
Apparently “common sense” still ain’t common yet.
Curious how many besides myself ever served with a person, last name of Gay? 803rd most common name in the USA in 1964. Just too much B.S.. It’s not just over their boots, they’re neck deep in it.
In the late 80’s had a young Junior Office last name Gay on the USS Lang FF-1060 one of the best JO’s I ever served with.
Served with a SGT Gay in 92-93.
This may not be malicious compliance but an automated process, much like the algorithms used by social media to flag unsuitable posts. Given that the DOGE guys brought in algorithms to trace payments and contracts, I would imagine algorithms were also brought in to scan for DEI text strings or images. The error could be letting the algorithm make the decision and not having a human double-check it.
Which is in itself dtupidity
Nothing says irony like writing a meant-to-be scathing comment on stupidity… and misspelling it
This makes sense from what I saw on my son’s ships Facebook page posted (below) on Friday. I tried reading through the EO, but its 30 pages of ‘lawyer speak’. It looks to me like they went through their previous postings like pride month and other mandatory DEI celebrations and deleted those posts. My mother was upset because she thought they weren’t going to post anymore, and she scrolls through everything trying to find her grandson. He usually only appears when there’s some type of food being given out.