Like, this is a completely uncontroversial thing to suggest.

Quotas exist. There are tonnes of people who openly advocate them.

I walk into HR (and btw this is a big business media company I'm working for now) and there's a tonne of 'diversity' crap on a whiteboard. My (Pakistani) friend texted me to tell me that he spent a whole day on diversity/identity politics guff in the training week.

There are tonnes of people who advocate having a quota yet not telling people (Jason Manford openly criticised the BBC not for having quotas for women on their comedy-panel shows, but for revealing that they had them!)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/pe...-10097214.html

"I just don't think they should have said it out loud," Manford told the Radio Times. "Why say it? Just do it."

If you want to have quotas and you really do think its the right thing to do, then I'm not going to attack you or shout at you or think you're a bad person (though I do disagree), but I am going to recognise they exist.

And I am going to speculate on whether they've made the difference for certain minorities. Which sucks actually. That's why you shouldn't have them.

I'll be honest with you.

I actually don't think Islam (according to the Qu'ran) is any worse than Christianity (according to the Bible).

When it comes to religion, I agree with Daniel Dennett, who noted that actually, very few people (seem to) believe in God.

If you really did believe in God the same way you believed you were reading a message by Rastamouse on 2+2, you really would be happy to make completely borderline-suicidal decisions. I mean, why look when crossing the road if all this life is is simply a precursor to an eternal afterlife? Why care like, literally at all if there's a miscarriage of justice and a murderer, rapist or paedophile gets away with a crime that victimises even you personally? God will deal with them, its all good.

These aren't kooky behaviours, they're just logical extensions of *actually* believing in God.

Anyway, the issue for me is that a lot more Muslims do display this kind of 'woah-****-this-guy-actually-believes-it' behaviour than Christians (who by an large, compartmentalise their religion and actually don't act as if its claims were true). If it were the other way round, I'd genuinely have more of an issue with Christianity.

So I actually have nothing against Muslims. I'm just...yeah...worried about the effects of having a number of people who (by a pure extension of logic) don't value human life and don't believe that man-made laws of any kind are any authority if they really do believe what they say believe in a country like Britain.

The fact that they have a different skin colour to me is an irrelevance. If you don't believe me on that last point, well...meh.

Emap, Centaur, or another one?

People fall for him, though. Not sure why, but they do.

Neither confirm nor deny etc.

ITT race quotas and racist quotas being filled. White men the big losers.

This is about as convincing as when theists say that if you don't believe in God then there's no lasting consequences and we're all just atoms blah blah and you shouldn't care about anything.

By which I of course mean not convincing at all.

If only they'd foregone the interview process entirely, thrown out the CVs, and just asked you who you thought was most qualified for a place you didn't yet have.

Seems quotas, as an advisory measure, are legal in the UK, but 'positive discrimination' in order to fulfil a quota is illegal under the Equality Act. A quota is an aspiration and you can do outreach or coaching programmes among minorities, but you can't discriminate at interview.

http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/diversit...80.fullarticle

I'm not sure what business imperative or incentive would lead a firm to discriminate at interview, shoot itself in the foot by hiring second-rate staff and open itself to legal action. A mere PR concern to 'put some brown faces up front'? Would they do that, when they didn't have to, and the heck with legal liability? Possibly, because 'management' is often stupid, but possibly Rasta just thinks the white candidates were 'clearly superior.'

(The starship Enterprise once beamed up a couple of aliens, each the sole survivor of his tribe after a bitter war on their planet, and each had a half-white half-black face, and Kirk said something like, 'I don't understand, you look just the same to me,' and they both went berserk and one of them said something like, 'What are you talking about? He's black on the left side! I'm black on the right side! That's clearly superior!')

Why?

Why should you care about a miscarriage of justice if you actually believe that there's a God waiting to take care of everything once we all die?

Its no good to just say "that's not convincing" - that's what climate-change deniers do before then demanding that their opinions are given equal credence.

You need to answer my question.

Well exactly, obviously you can't officially chop up your candidates into black/brown/white etc. but needless to say, companies want to appear as diverse as possible, so of course make sure that their range of staff reflects that.

We've already had the Manford example

We've already had the Channel 4 journalist storming up to the UKIP spokesman demanding why there "was not one black face!" on the front of one of their publications (openly advocating tokenism).

We have the Women's Equality party (delighted about them as they'll sap more votes from Labour) who openly advocate a 50/50 equality-of-result Parliament.

There was that incident of that minuscule estate agency in the UK being pestered by feminists demanding to know why their entire senior management team were male.

But what's the funniest thing is that people who approve of all these things are trying to fight two different arguments simultaneously

1) There are no quotas, quotas do not exist!
2) Even if they do, they're jolly well justified!

Oh well.

Phil, answer me this:

If I find out that there is indeed a race or gender quota for an organisation that claims to be a meritocracy, why should I not be sceptical of whether someone who belongs to a favoured minority is qualified for the job?

Because it's a stupid thing to do.

Also you have no idea whatsoever why these minorities were selected for the job so it's overtly racist to think they were chosen for their skin tone.

Diversity itself is hugely valuable in business, it avoids idea stagnation. This can tip a marginal choice between two hires.

IIRC rasta does something in media so a diverse pool of employees is significantly more valuable than in, say, accounting. Grad schemes aren't about selecting the best today, it's about selecting who will be the best after several years training.

Which loops back into the fact rasta isn't in a position to even judge the hires on their merits, let alone his prejudices probably inhibited his ability to judge the non white candidates.

Not an answer.

If you have a quota system that favours a minority, it isn't a meritocracy. Simple.

Now I can understand the idea that you might feel that say, certain minorities are denigrated and hard-done by in society and so quotas give them a leg-up. Though I completely disagree, that argument does at least make sense.

But how can you possibly claim that a quota system designed to favour minorities over the majority doesn't by definition, work as a handicap to the majority?

Not at all.

They're poor employees who are struggling.

There were better white candidates at the assessment day.

We are aware that there are overt and covert quotas in place that benefit minorities. I can't help but be suspicious.

My face just lit up. Pray what does this mean?

Hahaha!

But you've just done precisely that!

...and about a company that you know literally nothing about

Where 'marginal' means 'all other things being equal,' that would be legal. Rasta was talking about something else, 'clearly inferior' candidates being favoured because of what they looked like, which would not be legal. (Not if it were true -- but Rasta may be experiencing problems in lining up his eyes with the eyeholes in his pointy white hood.)

I've a feeling he works for one of the two 'business-to-business' publishing companies I named. In my day -- not that I ever worked in the field, but I knew a number of people who did -- it was called trade journalism (as opposed to proper journalism: I've worked for the Independent, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, but never for New Civil Engineer or Industrial Purchasing News or Marketing Week or whathaveyou) and it was mostly Morgan Grampian, but that firm was sold off and broken up around 1990.

And then there's that.

Which race am I racist against?

Yes, I'm not qualified to judge the hires of my company, but you guys are of course!

Hey you guys. Rasta isn't making this thread all about him... that's just bad luck... in every... single... thread... every... time...

I mean marginal in a "no clear answer otherwise". All else won't necessarily be equal.

An easier to understand example, say an expert in a field is ranked 100. New hires could start day one as 10 or 20 but the 20 isn't necessarily better than a 10 because you're also judging where they will be in a couple of years. The 20 could get to 30 in a year, the ten could also get to 30. In two years the 10 will be way further developed etc.

Now to add complexity assume we are talking a team, and a team of five experts with a narrow range of experience and backgrounds could be inferior to a team of five worse individuals who have a wider range of experience and backgrounds.

There is no way actually inferior candidates were chosen for their race. Of course not. No one but rasta who somehow got hired as a white man believes this. He seemingly can't even recognise why diversity itself is a valuable business "skill" so of course the simplest answer that he didn't know how the selection process worked is the most likely to be correct. But I can fully understand why some actually superior selections look to be inferior when someone has very limited information.

Its not luck.

We have a political argument where I criticise say...Islam or feminism or whatever.

People then lose logical arguments against me and then go for ad-hominem attacks.

They're the ones who make it about me.

I'd rather discuss things in an objective sense.

So as I say, what race am I racist against?

Your racism is showing.

What 'experiences' does having white, black or brown skin offer? How and why are those experiences different?

And what is 'idea stagnation'?

That is literally what people advocate doing.

Jason Manford, in the one example I can be bothered to link (what with your record on not opening inconvenient links) has openly advocated choosing women for their being women rather than their ability to do the job (be funny).

He's also advocated keeping this secret in order to pretend that they were hired on merit, rather than on their gender.

Right, so you're admitting that you see someone with black or brown skin as having a business 'skill' that people with white skin don't possess.

Besides, you DO advocate hiring inferior candidates for their skin colour.

You just attach an intangible, un-measurable, un-falsifiable value like 'diversity of experiences' onto black or brown skin in order to justify doing precisely that.

Because when you make the "If you believe X then you must do Y" arguments but people who believe X don't actually Y, it's a pretty pointless thing to bring up.

You're telling people how you think they must feel. And they don't feel that way, nor are they obligated to have only the emotions you dictate.

Especially when the religious people he's talking about have a sacred text that attempts to codify how people on earth should behave towards each other and try to alleviate human suffering. Crazy risk taking is often a poor way to achieve this.

He seems to understand very little about humans and their religions.

Erm...people claiming to believe something and then acting in ways that completely discredits their 'claim to belief' is pretty uncontroversial.

If I tell you that I 100% believe that there will be a terrorist attack on the London Underground train that I regularly take to work tomorrow and yet you see me on that very train, does this not disprove (or heavily, heavily discredit) my claim that I did indeed believe, with what I honestly thought was 100% certainty, that there would be a terrorist attack?

Like, I mean examples of this are super common when it comes to religion, are they not? There are tonnes of examples of reasonable and well-adjusted Christians and Muslims claiming to believe that their book is the infallible word of God, yet actually not being homophobic in the slightest (and the books, certainly, are both explicitly homophobic in equal measure).

In such cases, I don't believe that these people actually believe what they say they do as the evidence I have suggests otherwise.

I'll engage one last time.

Idea stagnation is exactly what it sounds like. If you create an insulated homogeneous culture then all the ideas will be inward looking and unimaginative.

That rather sounds to me like an admission that businesses should be hiring people by virtue of their skin colour (although I'm not sure how having black or brown skin gives someone the ability to come up with ideas that someone with white skin wouldn't)

As I say, I completely understand the idea that positive discrimination is *justified* and therefore businesses ought to sacrifice a bit of competence in order to do its bit by helping out minorities, but I cant for the life of me see how you can take your position and then claim that, in a company following your principles, having white skin isnt a disadvantage when applying for a job.

Avoiding the train and not falling into existential despair are pretty different.

I expect people's overall philosophy to religion and God to be a lot more complicated and with a lot more inconsistencies to their approach to dodging a terrorist attack they know about.

I don't assume people are lying if they don't believe exactly what Rastamouse says they must.