86 Comments

Even in cases where there are specific charges, people always seem to face this bind where enough is never enough. You write one white-text-on-black-field Instagram apology, then another, then another. In Vogt’s reply I think he correctly identified the problem: “while I am sure that the experience has changed me, I think trying to prove that is just not going to be good for anybody.” What can you do when critics don’t actually specify what it is that they want? That’s part of what makes them seem so Maoist; they demand an endless series of apologies, an endless process of thought reform. You can let yourself be tormented, or you can say “I’m done. I’ve said my piece. I’m launching a podcast - if you don’t like me, then don’t listen.” We need more of that. Don’t feed the crybullies.

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A mob can only judge, never forgive. Turn a deaf ear to the accusations of bigotry and life gets better.

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Very much like cultural revolution struggle sessions, only here you are not /forced/ to participate. The short advice: never, ever apologize to the mob.

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Might I add, unionism is a presumed good, which is dubious, their opposition was painted as selfish but instead they may have been right, or at least they have the right to differ. They were ousted by group think on unions, heterodox against the shibboleth they got ridden out on a rail, and in the name of compliance with the orthodoxy the tent pole was broken to the dire detriment of the entire enterprise. It reminds me of the BBC firing Jeremy Clarkson host of 5th Gear their most successful property by an order of magnitude, because he slapped a catering employee. This is the myopia at the heart of progressive thinking, it really is adherence to pieties ahead of all other considerations and damn the consequences: silly people.

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I feel like that's one of the best things he can say without coming out and saying "y'all are crazy and I should never have played along." In fact it's a very diplomatic way of saying "y'all are still crazy but I ain't playin no more."

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'The Times piece notes that 24 of the company’s first 27 staffers were white, which — whatever you think about how big a role diversity should play in hiring — suggests a blind spot on the part of the founders'

Come on Jesse, this is nonsense and you know it.

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How so? If I started a company that was 88% white I'd absolutely be worried that 1) we were not recruiting to a wide enough social/professional network, and 2) that it would simply be bad business and bad optics

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Regardless of the pool of applicants and candidates? That your social group might have some founding members that were contributors during that time and not likely to map onto the population?

Proportional representation according to what? When is it OK to place the blame on yourself, vs education rates, vs population rates of interest in the field.

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I'd be willing to bet that 100% of them were under 45, which doesn't map onto the population either. But nobody complains when a tech startup doesn't have enough 68 year olds in the team.

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I feel as though the quest for diversity is like Yoda's cave on Dagobah; what you find there is what you bring with you.

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Comments written as questions? Really annoying?

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Yes, and no.

They are Rhetorical questions. Questions with typically obvious answers meant to make a point quicker than explaining all of the underlying dynamics. IMO quite effective.

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The problem is that the answers are NOT obvious; in fact people strongly disagree on what the answers should be.

Some people believe that diversity should be the SOLE criterion for selecting among all "above the bar" candidates. Others believe that the "best" candidate should be selected without any regard to diversity. And everything in between.

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That is well said but quotas are a bad idea.

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Justin, well argued, quotas are wrong.

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Shouldn't there be some allowance for random variation, especially given the small numbers in play? I think the appeal to optics reveals a culture that has become neurotic on this point.

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Tbf I'm pretty sure Jesse was always neurotic so he comes by that part honestly.

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Similar to the need for a Black woman on the Supreme Court. With such small numbers involved, the recent appointment of one Black woman means they are overrepresented now.

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As are Jews and Catholics on the court.

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Yes, until recently There we’re no Protestants on the court (I think there is one now). Weird for a majority Protestant country

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Never thought of this, especially with the sway Evangelicals have in politics (or at least really did for quite a while). Maybe there is less of a legal tradition? When I think of lawyers and religion, I think of Nortre Dame and Jews, so I'm not really surprised by the representation of those groups being outsized.

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Excessive concern about representation is how we get to woke stupidity.

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So what would be your estimate, a priori, of what percentage of people looking for jobs as media staffers in 2014 were white?

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It's more likely that people just recruited their friends, who were white. Now, if a large company only promotes whites then there may be something nefarious. But that doesn't seem to be the case for RA.

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But they did worry about it, and they did work to improve it, publicly:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/gmhn4x

(Startup episode from 2015)

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And frankly, not you, nor I, nor probably anyone else here knows what the guy actually did to try to start the operation. Here I feel I'm piling on, but the specific statement we're discussing seems so at odds with the rest of your post. What exactly did Vogt do in starting the company that warrants even a raised eyebrow? Nothing that we know of.

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Comments like this make you sound like a racist. I am serious. Better keep Jews and Asians off you hiring searches too, if you just picked on merit you might have too many of them!

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We don't need to speculate: Startup did an episode on employee diversity early on, so we have a record of what management thought about it at the time. And they thought it was important and set about trying to fix what they saw as a problem.

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It's worth noting that Gimlet is not just a media company, but to some degree a tech company -- at least a technology-heavy media company. Within the tech world, there is debate about whether hiring women and people of color for technical jobs happens so little because there is a "pipeline problem" (many stages where discrimination works in a variety of ways, from childhood access to peer influences to school quality to academic offerings to critical masses of interested people around you to college funding to choosing majors to mentorship), or a "hiring process problem" in the company doing the hiring, because they do not care about diversity enough to find the eligible candidates who are out there, or to fairly consider women and people of color candidates.

Asserting that there is a "pipeline problem" is associated with less desire to push in the hiring process to find eligible women and people of color candidates, but I think there's no reason the two have to go together. In fact, as someone who thinks the pipeline problem is real and that diversity is worth working hard for, I think understanding the depth and breadth of the pipeline problem helps to make the case for committing extensive resources to the hiring process; if the pipeline problem isn't real, and diversity is just a matter of not having "blind spots", then why should hiring diverse candidates require more time and money?

Of course, there is some element of both at play in most cases; witness Peter Thiel's ready admission in Zero to One that they struck a candidate on the basis of his saying he liked to "shoot hoops". And there are workplaces where the benefit of the doubt is actively given to women and people of color (e.g., Google's allowing White male interviewees to be struck if only one interviewer disapproves, instead of two), so as to counteract present or historical forms of bias.

All of which is to say that--if the pipeline problem is real--then by itself, the fact that only 11% of a tech company's first 27 staffers were people of color does not necessarily indicate a "blind spot" on the part of the founders, though it does indicate that, at a minimum, they was some level of resources and time in the hiring process that they were not willing to commit to if it was necessary to hire a more diverse staff.

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I read "they was some level of resources and time in the hiring process that they were not willing to commit to if it was necessary to hire a more diverse staff." and I wonder why this phrased as an expectation which they are failing to meet?

"They were not willing to put resources to hiring dog owners", or "They were not willing to put resources into hiring ex-cons" are both likely true statements but clearly there's some explaining to do as to why they should be ones that we pay any attention to.

If the people interested in the job are getting a fair shake in the hiring process why is it their responsibility or even a sensible response to an "underrepresentation" in the pipeline?

And more importantly if we go with "race quotas" to achieve diversity we are clearly just codifying racial discrimination for the sake of "Diversity". Literally saying we're going to DO the thing we don't like to fix the thing we don't like, but in a way that does not fix the underlying issue, ensuring this isn't even a temporary balancing measure.

I would like to hear more about racial diversity for its own sake as a valid, non-discriminatory goal for a hiring organization. I think it is an insidious objective and a poor proxy to the actual benefits of diversity of characteristics which are meaningful in a workplace.

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There's usually some kind of boilerplate language used about "we are stronger with diversity" but it's often left pretty vague about what "diversity" means and how it exactly it translates to increased effectiveness. Sometimes there will be a study or two cited, but if you dig into those it's very hard to find a study that clearly identifies "diversity" as causal rather than correlative (e.g. "The top-10 companies in X industry have more women in leadership positions than the industry average").

Sometimes they also offer anecdotes about how diversity promotes "new ideas" but that seems to imply that a diversity of opinions/ideas/experiences/SES/geography might matter just as much as race/gender, yet it's almost always applied to the latter rather than the former.

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I phrased the conclusion that you quoted to be independent of expectation or value judgment.

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Quotas

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I'll also chime in and say that Reply All has gotten to be pretty good again, and is rediscovering what previously made the show so compelling.

But what's really funny is hearing just how fucking terrified Alex Goldman is of Emmanuel Dzotsi! You can almost hear the muffled crackling of eggshells in the background.

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I remember when the Test Kitchen episodes came out I stopped listening after part of the first one because I really didn't want to listen to yet another podcast that decided to start doing race/gender issues. And then the podcast itself fell apart. I haven't listened since. It was so disappointing because Reply-All was really good. (I really miss yes, yes, no). I never really understood why it fell apart other than progressives eat progressives when they haven't been properly pious.

Crypto Island has been pretty good so far. Not at the level of old Reply-All but not bad.

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Not to mention how ridiculous the test kitchen situation was. Basically an aggrieved employee who happened to be nonwhite saw an opportunity to pounce for her own benefit, so she did. It was a contract dispute that was turned into a racism issue bc the climate was ripe for that sort of grift.

That Sohla woman seems awful. Her failures are always someone else’s fault. She willingly took an entry level job with entry level pay, and then complained about the pay because she was overqualified and “deserved” more. She had previously owned a restaurant in NYC that went belly-up and it was the fault of the customers for balking at her pricing model and offerings. And the way she sneered about her colleagues who chose not to abandon their livelihoods in solidarity with her race-baiting witch hunt was truly awful.

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I miss the 90s when people like this were culturally suppressed.

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Wow. I had no idea about all these details about that Sohla woman. No offense, but what a b----.

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She and her husband were featured in a GQ article after their restaurant caved and basically blamed it all on their dumb white customers not appreciating the magic of their culinary talent enough- a weird blend of egotism and victimhood. I found it appalling and finished the article wondering how the heck anyone could feel bad for those two, but maybe that was just my take.

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“Black and brown people support this thing, so I better do so too.”

If you add [queer/trans/muslim/disabled/etc etc] before 'people' you have pretty much described all of modern online liberalism.

Being a liberal or Leftist in media or academia or culture in 2022 reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode about the creepy evil kid who can destroy anyone by zapping them with his telekinesis. You either obediently follow every aspect of dogma in all ways in all settings, and most especially never ever publicly disagree with anyone from a Protected Victim class (no matter how ridiculous or unfounded their claims)--or else...ZAPPED!

This sounds like a terrible way to live.

No wonder these people are so neurotic!

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I mean, as Jesse himself has already written about on topics like “defund the police” it’s not even “Black and brown people support this thing” it’s “culturally elite sometimes black or brown but often white people who hang out in Very Online media and academic circles support this thing”.

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Omg- what a perfect metaphor that Twilight Zone episode is! That episode was so creepy.

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it really fits too perfectly...don't say or think anything that may offend the all-powerful child! your life depends on it!

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A friend of mine asks why one might question prison abolition when "Black and Brown people are in favor of it". I mean... idk maybe because not questioning someone's ideas because of the color of their skin sounds an awful lot like racism? (Even if it's pro-black racism.)

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I agree it is absurd, but he seems to have decided to live by the woke and was thus obliged to die by the woke. Hoisted by his own petard, if you will. Unless one in such a position is willing to challenge wokery tout court there is no way to defend oneself.

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How much of this has to do with living in New York? He's surrounded by it on all sides. He may not have much access to other versions of reality. That's certainly the sense I got when Reply All did that awful apology episode. It was a dispatch from another planet.

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Perhaps, but I think it is also a matter of being immersed in the high school media dynamics that Freddie DeBoer has described.

In any case, emergent heterodox liberalism is now available to everyone. There is less of an excuse to knuckle under to woke crybullying. I too live in NY, not everyone here is crazy.

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Tristan has a point.

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It looks more and more likely that PJ only “crime” was that he was against the unionization, and maybe it was just against certain points. Kinda like some are accused of “murder” because they are against Medicare for All, even though they favor a more expansive role of government in healthcare.

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One important thing to point out, which I don't think you mentioned explicitly.

If you go back and listen to the original startup podcast about gimlet, it is mentioned that PJ and Alex own part of reply all. Inferring from that, PJ's concern about unionization hurting him financially wasn't some minor misunderstanding. Given the tentpole nature of the company, unionization was absolutely, 100% going to hurt him financially. He had ownership in the only successful show gimlet had, and everyone on every other show was already riding his coattails. Now they want a union on top of that?

So the charge boils down to vaguely being against something that would almost definitely cost you money for a small period of time before ultimately changing your mind. Pretty weird thing to cancel someone over.

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I follow some streamers on twitch, and I've seen a few instances of this. Its basically professional/personal disputes that get broadcast on social media. Things like business ventures that didn't quite pan out coupled with a couple of angry messages that get framed as 'abuse' (a long with weird personal disputes about love interests). No one outside of the actual involve parties has the context to actually evaluate what happens but everyone gets inflamed on twitter and it basically gets decided by who has the more aggressive followers. It's ultimately pretty stupid and meaningless except it can end careers. I don't know exactly how we can create norms of 'don't air your petty professional/romantic disputes in public' without discouraging publicizing actual abuse, but it sure would be nice if we could.

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Simple: create consequences for the cancellors, instead of consequences for the canceled. Gibson's Bakery did that by suing for tortious interference and won. Fire people who try to stir shit and ruin other people's lives. The wokeists won't stop as long as there aren't consequences for trying to end people's careers.

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“End careers”: obviously a problem for them but ultimately they do nothing, they are employed in culture, creating and commenting, so who cares, next man up. In fact half the fun is seeing them be destroyed. Substack is different, solo and dependant on substance, it is honest .

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Will the lack of indenting finally be what takes down Substack?

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"Hens at a pecking party," as Ken Kesey described it in "Cuckoo's Nest."

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Maybe this is playing out under Catholic/Canadian cultural rules where everyone is just supposed to feel vaguely sorry for everything all the time.

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Doesn't unionizing just put the existing employees in a union? it doesn't come with a diversity rainbow attached. Whatever percentage of the workforce is white pre union will remain unchanged post union.

And since only 11% of the workforce is unionized, we're going to have to boycott and cancel a whole lot of people if this is the new standard we're held to.

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IIRC, the union's organizers wanted the union to be fundamentally working towards protecting minority employees, so at very least they were proposing the union would use it's bargaining power to that end, which is really all union does: build a bloc of employees to negotiate as a single unit to force the company to accept workers demands. The workers can demand anything, the union is just a means to an ends. So, for instance, the RA union could ask management to prioritize minority hiring and promotion - no guarantee they would get that, though, but I think that's what they were going for.

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Thanks. I assumed they just wanted raises rather than to be replaced by a person of color. But I am so out of touch nowadays i really have no idea.

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"24 of the company’s first 27 staffers were white, which — whatever you think about how big a role diversity should play in hiring — suggests a blind spot on the part of the founders"

This suggests an endorsement of racial quotas on the part of Jesse.

I don't come here for woke dogma, and I'm disappointed when I get it.

EDIT: I see this was already brought up earlier.

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I have been desperate for someone to follow up on this. I was honestly shocked no one on Substack has written about this until now. At a personal level, this was a huge moment in my becoming very disenchanted.

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So similar to the taint of “pink” that attached to people blacklisted in the 1950s—once the taint is there, almost impossible to erase. Such people were advised to publicly denounce communism, or colleagues, or unions, or anti-blacklisters, or civil rights efforts in an effort to erase the taint. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

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