Tag: SJW

One of the Basecamp founders explains why they bought out their SJW employees:

This was the second such discussion in a few months that had to be closed out following an acrimonious devolution that pitted employees against each other, and stressed these complicated power dynamics between managers and reports, all on a company-wide stage that invariably pulled everyone into the spectacle.

Together with other acrimonious debates and inappropriate discussions with roots in societal politics on our internal communication systems, this formed the context that led to the recently announced changes. After going through repeated, worsening incidents like this, we took a hard look at why we kept doing this, and kept getting the same unproductive, unhealthy results.

I’ve read some opinions on all of this that charge that facilitating these kinds of discussions, however acrimonious or uncomfortable or unresolved, is actually good, because a lot of life right now is acrimonious, uncomfortable, and unresolved, so work should reflect that. I can’t get behind those arguments. As I wrote in the segment posted from our internal announcement of the changes, all of that, inasmuch as it does not directly relate to the business, is already so much of everyone’s lives all the time on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. Demanding that it also has to play out in our shared workspaces isn’t going to lead anywhere good, in my opinion.

But more so than just whether I think that’s productive or healthy, a significant contingency of Basecamp employees had been raising private flags about this as well. Finding the discussions to be exactly acrimonious, uncomfortable, unresolved. Yet feeling unable to speak up out of fear that they’d have an accusatory label affixed to their person for refusing to accept the predominant framing of the issues presented by other more vocal employees.

Which gets to the root of the dilemma. If you do indeed strive to have a diverse workforce both ideologically and identity wise, you’re not going to find unison on all these difficult, contentious issues. If you did, you’d both be revealing an intellectual monoculture and we wouldn’t be having these acrimonious debates.

So if that is something you want, I continue to believe that a diverse workforce _should_ be something that you want, you have to consider what guardrails to put on the internal discourse. My belief is that the key to working with other people of different ideological persuasions is to find common cause in the work, in the relations with customers, in the good we can do in the industry. Not to repeatedly seek out all the hard edges where we differ. Those explorations are better left to the smaller groups, to discussions outside of the company-wide stage, and between willing participants.

It’s a good start. But it’s not sufficient. The problem is that a diverse workforce is at the very least inefficient and less productive, no matter what sort of lipstick you attempt to put on the pig. And it will eventually become a disaster if you aren’t prepared to actively screen out the infestants determined to converge your company. 

Of course, it’s much better to maintain professional standards that attempt to keep SJW employees in line, but sooner or later, it will become clear that doing so simply isn’t possible. Especially if you haven’t gotten rid of your HR department.

That’s a fatality! A reader of Corporate Cancer writes to tell of her experience fighting back against, and roundly defeating, a pair of infesting SJWs.

Just a note to thank you both for your book Corporate Cancer and for the constant refrain on your blog to never apologize and to embrace the conflict. With the help of your writing, I’ve had a complete victory over an SJW-infiltration campaign, albeit at a small and very local level.

I’m a board member of an organization that provides a direct, well regarded program to help families in our rural community gain a financial toehold. In the time that I was away from the board on maternity-leave, a Boomer-SJW and a GenX-SJW, so stereotypical they could be caricatures of themselves, took over the board and made great efforts to redirect the program so that it would primarily benefit single white women like themselves, instead of our target group of young families. We were on the verge of having our bank pull out and the entire program dying as a result. A banker friend on the board had been complaining to me about it all year, but didn’t have the tools to lead a counteroffensive.

In my first meeting back on the board, Boomer-SJW and GenX-SJW pressured the board into passing a vote that was a blatantly illegal act of self-dealing, in favor of their SJW-oriented vision. It also became clear that GenX-SJW had A LOT of time on her hands and was making up problems for herself to spend months solving. 

Corporate Cancer and a search of your blog for relevant posts, gave me the framework to explain to Banker what was happening. I was able to pull out a copy of Rules for Radicals and show Banker that GenX-SJW was applying about five of the rules to purposefully derail our organization in favor of her vision, that she likely had training in how to do this, and was doing it on purpose. Banker was astounded. We were able to build an anti-SJW coalition that included our executive director, treasurer, and vice president.

Following the advice in Corporate Cancer to kill them with the rules, I sent out a lengthy email holding up the illegal vote against our bylaws and state laws, and asking the board to rescind the vote and conduct it legally. 

I promptly received an email, copied to the whole board, from Boomer-SJW about how she was too upset to even consider my arguments because my email was so mean that she had been crying since receiving it. I “replied all” to the entire board with a one liner saying “Regardless of your feelings on the matter, the action is still illegal and needs to be rescinded.” 

She followed up, to me alone, with a long wall-of-text email about her feelings and how she had been crying for three days and how mean I was by “sea-gulling” her (apparently this means, swooping in and “crapping” on someone’s head). She insisted that I owed the whole board a public apology for being mean.

At this point you happened to have a week of posts about not surrendering, never apologizing, and embracing conflict that could not have been better timed for encouraging me to stay the course. After consulting with the ED and Banker, and laying out a six-month plan with the Banker to “trigger” the SJWs into quitting, I re-read many of your posts on these topics, and found the courage to pen a response including lines such as “If you think that a homeschooling mother three taking six hours of her Sunday to provide you with over $1500 of free legal advice is “crapping” on you – I can’t help you with that,” “I will not apologize. I have done nothing wrong and am not in the business of issuing insincere apologies,” and “I’m also a sensitive person – in this case sensitive to our board deciding to take illegal action that harms our beneficiaries.” 

She stopped telling me about how much she was crying.

From there, I launched a campaign to take away GenX-SJW’s biggest pet projects by outsourcing them to a specialist attorney, effectively sidelining her. Throughout, I maintained a calm, professional demeanor, and expressed my bafflement that Boomer-SJW and GenX-SJW were so emotional about it all. I reassured the board president and the executive director that I wasn’t upset, wasn’t taking it personally, and was not at all considering quitting. 

And the drama seriously escalated, with GenX-SWJ losing her mind in Zoom meeting – head in hands, pulling at her hair, accusing everyone on the board personally of corruption for not giving her what she wanted, and declaring our employees to be derelict in their duty because in their shoes she would do more [magically impossible things, like having our bank recruit other banks to fund us] “BECAUSE I’M AN ACTIVIST!” In private conversations afterwards, the employees and other board members were actually using the words “mentally unwell,” “unstable,” and “needs help.”  She followed up with an email making mountains out of mole hills, and appointing all of the work of fixing it to herself, or else she would quit. I’m not privy to what actions the board president took, but the next communication was her resignation letter.

Left on her lonesome, Boomer-SJW and her feelings didn’t know what to do with themselves, and she resigned just a month later. All-in-all our six month counteroffensive only took four months to come to completion, and really only three actions: holding them to the rules, not apologizing, and focusing on deliverables and deadlines to be performed by the most competent person available. 

To the best of my knowledge, GenX SJW is devoting her newfound freetime to “Conversations about Decolonization” and Boomer-SJW is “Working on Climate Change.”

Our meetings are back on track, our program is focusing on our intended beneficiaries, we have a competent lawyer helping us, and we’re getting ready for our phase-two roll out. We’ve cut both the meeting times and the number of committee meetings in half and are getting twice as much work done. 

All of which is to say thank you – for providing the framework, vocabulary, and encouragement that helped me excise the cancer from our organization. In terms of real-world impact, your writings and blog posts on this topic have helped keep [families] on the path to homeownership, when the project would otherwise be dead.

 A few smart corporations are finally beginning to grasp that convergence is corporate cancer that will destroy their businesses and are actively attempting to surgically remove the SJWs that infest them. Basecamp has taken a strong anti-social justice stance that might just turn things around there:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore. Update: David has shared some more details and more of the internal announcement on his HEY World blog.

2. No more paternalistic benefits. For years we’ve offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer’s market share, and continuing education allowances. They felt good at the time, but we’ve had a change of heart. It’s none of our business what you do outside of work, and it’s not Basecamp’s place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we’re getting too deep into nudging people’s personal, individual choices. So we’ve ended these benefits, and, as compensation, paid every employee the full cash value of the benefits for this year. In addition, we recently introduced a 10{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} profit sharing plan to provide direct compensation that people can spend on whatever they’d like, privately, without company involvement or judgement.

3. No more committees. For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. No big working groups making big decisions, or putting forward formalized, groupthink recommendations. No bureaucracy. But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We’re turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David. A long-standing group of managers called “Small Council” will disband — when we need advice or counsel we’ll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large. Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work.

4. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions. We’ve become a bit too precious with decision making over the last few years. Either by wallowing in indecisiveness, worrying ourselves into overthinking things, taking on a defensive posture and assuming the worst outcome is the likely outcome, putting too much energy into something that only needed a quick fix, inadvertently derailing projects when casual suggestions are taken as essential imperatives, or rehashing decisions in different forums or mediums. It’s time to get back to making calls, explaining why once, and moving on.

5. No more 360 reviews. Employee performance reviews used to be straightforward. A meeting with your manager or team lead, direct feedback, and recommendations for improvement. Then a few years ago we made it hard. Worse, really. We introduced 360s, which required peers to provide feedback on peers. The problem is, peer feedback is often positive and reassuring, which is fun to read but not very useful. Assigning peer surveys started to feel like assigning busy work. Manager/employee feedback should be flowing pretty freely back and forth throughout the year. No need to add performative paperwork on top of that natural interaction. So we’re done with 360s, too.

6. No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.

Of course, the SJWs are trying to hold their ground, utilizing the popular “you are the problem” defense, complete with a nuclear MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. quote. Damn, they really aren’t pulling any punches, are they? What’s crazy is that this tactic actually works in some corporate circles instead of simply getting the lunatic fired for insubordination.

Jason and David, I believe that your recent company policy changes are both terrible and redeemable. But to be redeemable, you first must recognize that you are a BIG part of the problem. That you too perpetrate the myth that some people deserve to oppress and repress others. Once you hold yourselves publicly self-accountable, then the next step is transparency. Show us all the warts along with the unblemished skin. And from there, we can go about healing Basecamp.

This attack on historical artifacts in the British Library is being portrayed as a mere “relabelling” of history, but it is obvious that this is little more than a precursor to eliminating it entirely.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are to be relabelled in the British Library to explain how it once came to be owned by a slave-trading family.

The relabelling of the collection is part of the institution’s ‘anti-racism action plan’ which was put in place after the Black Lives Matter protests last year, internal documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph reveal.

It will see an overhaul of all 210 items in the library’s public-facing Treasures Collection which includes invaluable literary artefacts such as Shakespeare’s First Folio, some of which have links to the slave trade in their history.

Labels will explain how the item came to be in the country and if it has at any point changed hands via dubious means, i.e. being ‘taken, captured, seized or looted’.

For the case of Geoffrey Chaucer’s manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400 – before the Portuguese started the Atlantic slave trade – it will be explained how the book came to be owned by the Harley family of slave-traders around 300 years later.

The family became wealthy through the exploits of Robert Harley (1661 – 1724) who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, established the South Sea Company in 1711 and was connected to plantations in Barbados, Antigua and Surinam.

The South Sea Company was responsible for the transportation of around 64,000 enslaved Africans between 1715 and 1731 to Spanish plantations in Central and Southern America.  

First they label your history bad. Then they revise it. After that, they eliminate it. Then they eliminate everyone with glasses.

They always seek Zero History.

There is literally no activity or organization that will not be converged, unless it actively and aggressively resists convergence:

Expert Scrabble players have blasted the game’s owner as ‘virtue signalling’ and ‘woke’ after it banned 400 derogatory terms as playable moves. 

Racial slurs including the ‘n-word’, insults against the elderly and homophobic terms were removed from Scrabble’s official online words list following worldwide anti-racism protests in the wake of the death of American George Floyd.

Scrabble’s owner Mattel said it made the change to make it more relevant culturally following global unrest last year.

But Scrabble grandmaster David Webb said the move has been interpreted as ‘virtue signalling’.

Offensive terms including the ‘n-word’ were removed from Scrabble’s official online words list following worldwide anti-racism protests in the wake of the death of American George Floyd. 

The exact list of banned words has not been released.

Of course it hasn’t. The objective is to be able to administer the rules on a subjective basis, thereby granting the converged authority more power and flexibility while allowing them to avoid ever being held accountable to an objective standard.

The Dark Herald explains why converged organizations are incapable of performing their core functions at Arkhaven.

There is an old adage in business; talent goes where the money is.

There will shortly be a new adage; talent avoids where the Woke is.

Google and Amazon became the powerhouses they are today because a generation ago (ouch) they were willing to spend big to get talent. And they got it. It says something about the level of people they were getting that one of the questions on Google’s employment application was, how many books have you written?  This was before internet publishing was a thing.

Unlike the Dickensian workhouse conditions for the Microserfs up north at Redmond, the googlers were treated like princes.  One of the big winners when the company finally went public was the company chef, not food service’s director you understand, but chef as in actual chef.  

Google was also very tolerant of their employee’s eccentricities, believing (not without reason) that a happy employee was a creative employee.  However, this opened the door to a certain kind of eccentricity; political activism.  Since Silicon Valley has its roots in Berkley’s Home Brew Computer Club, Leftism was built into their culture from the start. * Consequently, Google and Amazon were both happy to indulge these little hobbies of their junior employees.  

But then these corporate activists started making hiring decisions.  I remember a story one veteran told, when he applied, the interviewer sneeringly asked him, (citing the company’s Don’t be Evil mantra) how many innocent people had he killed?

The Woke will always find a reason to hire other Wokelings.  Diversity is usually a good excuse but there is always a way to justify hiring someone who is utterly unqualified for her job.  And those that are actually good at their jobs have to take up the slack for the useless dead weight. It used to be a “blonde with a great rack.” Now it’s a “three-hundred-pound, hippo with a purple mental-illness haircut.”  

The thing is the blonde was always cheerful, nice to everyone and pleasant to look at.  She at least made the work environment more enjoyable.  On the other hand, the whale with the purple hair is constantly shrieking and demanding submission to the SJW narrative from everyone that she comes in contact with. During working hours instead of doing her job, she is organizing witch hunts to get people fired. She and her comrades make life miserable at that company.

Here’s my big point:  Every top tier worker in that field will know about this and avoid that company like the plague in the future.  

If the Arkhaven blog isn’t on your list of day trips yet, it should be. 

In case you weren’t already convinced that the big social media companies knowingly serve Satan:

Twitter temporarily suspended Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account on Sunday after she tweeted an Easter message.

Rep. Greene tweeted a message on Easter morning: “He is Risen – Death could not hold him. Rejoice in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Twitter suspended Greene shortly after she tweeted her Easter message.

No specific reason was given for the suspension.

“We have determined that you have violated the Twitter rules, so we’ve temporarily limited some of your account features,” Twitter said.

The name of Jesus Christ and the Good News of his resurrection is literally painful to them because they serve demons. This is why they seek to destroy the Good, the Beautiful, and the True in all things, because the mere reflection of God and His Creation in them causes them pain.

The eternal spiral of racism and anti-racism consumes everyone in time:

The creator and executive producer of the CBS drama All Rise once promised his show would combat racism in the justice system. Now, he’s been fired for ignoring cries of racism in the workplace.

“Warner Bros. Television has relieved ‘All Rise’ executive producer Greg Spottiswood of his duties, effective immediately,” the studio said in a statement to Deadline.

Spottiswood allegedly ignored complaints about racial insensitivity, with most of those complaints reportedly being filed from the show’s writers room.

Writers had become critical of Spotiswood for what they deemed to be stereotypical dialogue and plots centered on lead character Judge Lola Carmichael, played by Simone Missick, and other minority characters.

“We had to do so much behind the scenes to keep these scripts from being racist and offensive,” writer Shernold Edwards told The New York Times.

It’s probably safest to do all-Asian shows these days. For now. This won’t stop until the woketroopers are shooting everyone with glasses for racism and the survivors beg for the ultras to stop them.

The Devil Mouse is now practicing Zero History on its own intellectual property. It’s a bold move, Cotton.

Now Aladdin is racist. So much so that Disney+ added a warning label before the film starts.

“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversations to create a more inclusive future together.”

And here’s where it gets funny.

“Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe. To learn more about how stories have impacted society visit Disney.com/storiesmatter”

When did Disney become educational?

First off, when did Disney suddenly become a Civil Rights movement? We coulda sworn we went to Disneyland and waited in line for two hours to be entertained–not for an “education.”

But maybe that’s the issue that Disney and other major corporations can’t seem to understand. They’re suddenly switching lanes (without putting on their signal, I should add) and trying to educate when they should just be creating a fun environment. Disney+ wants to say they’re focused on inspirational themes while half the children in Disney films have dead parents.

It’s not a question of the converged corpocracy not understanding anything. Converged organizations simply have very different goals than outsiders who don’t understand the concept of corporate cancer grasp. A converged organization always sacrifices its ability to perform its primary objective, so it should come as no surprise that a converged entertainment company like the Devil Mouse is increasingly losing its ability to entertain anyone. 

Apparently the concept of “take pictures of pretty women in swimsuits” is now beyond the ability of the converged Sports Illustrated organization:

Sports Illustrated has revealed the first ever black and Asian transgender model to grace the pages of its annual Swimsuit Issue.

Though the iconic magazine doesn’t launch until July, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Instagram account has been unveiling one model a day throughout the month of March — and this morning, they made waves with the announcement that Chicago-born model, dancer, actor, and activist Leyna Bloom, 27, is joining the likes of Lais Ribeiro and Josephine Skriver in the 2021 edition.

Leyna, who is the second trans model to pose for SI Swim, opened up to Good Morning America about her boundary-breaking accomplishment, gushing: ‘I never imagined that I would be born in a time when something like this would happen for someone with my skin tone and for someone with my background.’

Meanwhile, at even-more-converged Marvel, it’s not enough for Captain America to be black. Now he’s also a twinkie:

Marvel Comics Introduces A Gay Captain America For June 2021

Announced last week, Marvel Comics will celebrate the 80th anniversary of Captain America with a brand-new limited series this June titled The United States Of Captain America. Written by Christopher Cantwell with art by Dale Eaglesham, this series will see Steve Rogers teaming up with Captain Americas of the past—Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, and John Walker—on a road trip across America to find his stolen shield. Throughout the group’s journey, they’ll discover everyday people from all walks of life who’ve taken up the mantle of Captain America to defend their communities, beginning with Marvel’s newest hero, Aaron Fischer.

Aaron Fischer is described as “the Captain America of the Railways – a fearless teen who stepped up to protect fellow runaways and the unhoused” and that “Marvel Comics is proud to honor Pride Month with the rise of this new LGBTQ+ hero.”  

DC, meanwhile, is determined to keep up with the Devil Mouse-owned competition:

DC has announced that they will be launching an initiative this June to celebrate and promote LGBTQ+ Pride, which will consist of variant covers, new releases, and an 80-page anthology tome. Detailed in a recent blog post on the publisher’s website, the “DC Pride” anthology series will include profiles and appearances by some of DC’s most well-known LGBTQ+ characters and the actors who play them in other media.