Legal definition of woman is based on biological sex, UK supreme court rules

[Loren Pechtel]

Over and over we are told that Harris was a DEI hire because Biden himself declared that he would only select a black woman.

This claim might have validity only IF the following fact were true, which it is not: that in the past, black women have been seriously considered for vice president, along with everyone else.

Since they have not been, the complaint is entirely without merit.

So discrimination in favor of X is proper since X was discriminated against the past?

No, this is a big problem with the left. You can't fix past wrongs, the attempt simply perpetuates the wrong rather than fixing it.

This is silly. It is simply a way to rig the game yet again favor of cis straight white men. Someone can lie and say, “I’m going to consider everyone” but then keep on hiring only cis straight white men. OTOH if someone is sincere and then really does hire a qualified black woman, the pick will still be castigated as discrimination against cis straight white men. In fact there is not and never has been discrimination against cis straight white men. Removing unearned privileges is not discrimination.

If someone is actually discriminating go after them. However, if it's properly blinded how do they discriminate??

And it's the current situation that causes people to question the credentials of anyone who could be thought to be DEI.

And how can you say there has never been discrimination against cis het white men?? When you try to balance the racial mix of your employees you are inherently discriminating against them! The current crop of new hires is not responsible for any past discrimination but you are stacking the deck against them.

 

[pood]

Over and over we are told that Harris was a DEI hire because Biden himself declared that he would only select a black woman.

This claim might have validity only IF the following fact were true, which it is not: that in the past, black women have been seriously considered for vice president, along with everyone else.

Since they have not been, the complaint is entirely without merit.

So discrimination in favor of X is proper since X was discriminated against the past?

No, this is a big problem with the left. You can't fix past wrongs, the attempt simply perpetuates the wrong rather than fixing it.

This is silly. It is simply a way to rig the game yet again favor of cis straight white men. Someone can lie and say, “I’m going to consider everyone” but then keep on hiring only cis straight white men. OTOH if someone is sincere and then really does hire a qualified black woman, the pick will still be castigated as discrimination against cis straight white men. In fact there is not and never has been discrimination against cis straight white men. Removing unearned privileges is not discrimination.

If someone is actually discriminating go after them. However, if it's properly blinded how do they discriminate??

And it's the current situation that causes people to question the credentials of anyone who could be thought to be DEI.

And how can you say there has never been discrimination against cis het white men?? When you try to balance the racial mix of your employees you are inherently discriminating against them! The current crop of new hires is not responsible for any past discrimination but you are stacking the deck against them.

What you are saying is that hiring is a zero-sum game. Anyone not hired has been discriminated against.

 

[Bomb#20]

(Of course, Vice Presidents are normally chosen by selection methods not based on measuring skills. Usually it's appeal to some demographic the Presidential candidate thinks will help win the election -- so there's little reason to think DEI hires will be any worse on average than other VPs. For that matter, I can only think of one VP in living memory who was chosen for his skill set, and we saw how badly that worked out.)

No, I was talking about Derec’s characterization of people in certain positions previously ( and currently) which exclusively went to white males who do not belong to the category white male. He has repeatedly called Kamala Harris a DEI hire. Never mind that white male has been the preferred DEI hiring category for centuries. Which has been effective because laws and tradition have assigned the position of ‘leader’ to a single category: white male and some people still cling to the belief that is the best category because it is traditional and customary and does not represent change or a challenge to the status quo.

I’m very well aware of how candidates for high office are chosen.

All VP candidates are DEI.

Cheney wasn't. The point of using DEI for VPs is so that some voter demographic will feel more represented. Who the heck felt represented by Cheney? He was picked to make up for the well-deserved perception that W. was a light-weight. But just because somebody is highly skilled doesn't mean he's good for America.

It's just DEI doesn't always mean something other than cis-het-white-male.

It just almost always means something other than cis white male.

Right; just not in the case of VPs. John Edwards was a classic DEI pick, so southerners wouldn't feel ignored by the Dems choosing a New England Yankee for the top job.

 

[Bomb#20]

(Which, as noted upthread, is a dubious inference to draw, because if Biden hadn't applied DEI he'd have probably applied some other non-qualification method instead, so a hypothetical alternate pick wouldn't have been the winner of a qualifications contest either. But that isn't the point -- I'm not saying Derec's reasoning is sound;

I think that my reasoning is sound and not at all dubious. The presidential candidate tries to find a suitable running mate. It will of course not only include qualifications, but also things like balancing the ticket (in many different possible ways) and how well the two will work together also play a role.
So I was not denying the importance of criteria that are not just strictly qualification. It is the fit "for a particular opening on a team" point that Toni made. However, I think that if you consider 100% of possible candidates, rather than a priori restricting yourself to 7% that are black women, that you are more likely to find the best candidate, considering both qualifications and "team fit".

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If the Biden team was correct in calculating that black women were a critical demographic and having them stay home on election day was likely to cost Biden the election, then none of those other features they might have gotten by considering 100% of possible candidates would have mattered.

Now, I happen to think that KH did a decent job as running mate in the 2020 campaign. Was she the best Biden could have picked? Probably not. But she was good enough.
Problems with KH began when Biden started declining. She was never a very popular vice president. And without a nomination contest, she was handed the nomination on a silver platter. The same identity politics that led Biden to restrict himself to only black women also made it challenging to not give her the nomination.

True; but planning ahead for that contingency was never something the Biden team was going to take into account in making the VP choice. If they hadn't DEIed Harris they would have just DEIed someone else.

I think that this is why it took Biden so long to decide not to run. He (and his team) wanted to foreclose the possibility of even a truncated speed-run primary that may have given the nomination to somebody other than Kamala Harris.

I think it took him so long because of ego. He was in denial about his dementia. After Harris lost, he seriously imagined he would have won if he's stayed in.

I'm saying ZH's and your criticism of him was based on a misunderstanding. I think Derec has criticized DEI so often he lost track of which criticisms apply to the candidate and which to the employer -- it would have been perfectly fair to criticize Biden for applying DEI without criticizing Harris for benefitting from it.

She certainly benefited from it.

She certainly did, but that isn't the point. Benefiting from it isn't a reason to criticize her, because it isn't an indication of anything wrong with her; it just means she played the hand she was dealt. Back in the days when the only job black people were considered for was sharecropping, would you have turned down a bank-teller job offer on account of it being affirmative action for white people, and only accepted a sharecropper job, out of solidarity? It's not Harris's fault she has the traits people are currently discriminating for. Of course that's not the only reason to criticize someone for being a DEI hire -- typically it's also circumstantial evidence for probably being less qualified than an alternative, for reasons that have been thrashed out upthread. My point is that in the specific case of VPs, that reason doesn't apply, since any plausible alternative would also have been a DEI hire. So I'm not seeing a good reason to regard Harris's DEIness as grounds for criticizing her. For criticizing Biden, sure, but not Harris.

 

[Derec]

Over and over we are told that Harris was a DEI hire because Biden himself declared that he would only select a black woman.

Which he did, artificially restricting the candidate pool severely. That is textbook DEI hire.

This claim might have validity only IF the following fact were true, which it is not: that in the past, black women have been seriously considered for vice president, along with everyone else.

No. The fact that Biden made a DEI hire does not hinge on that.

 

[Derec]

Or Asian, Hispanic, etc. We seem to not care or even think about selecting them for some reason...

An Asian-American has never been a Senator from California. Asians are also a much bigger share of California demographics than black women. And yet, Gov. Goodhair has not even considered appointing somebody Asian.

 

[Derec]

Woke is not a movement. It’s just a different way of saying an old thing, that we ought to respect and not oppress people different from ourselves. Duh.

Woke can be many things. Sometimes it's just a word for being aware and is not political, as in the 2016 song Redbone.

But stay woke
Niggas creepin'
They gon' find you
Gon' catch you sleepin'
Ooh, now stay woke
Niggas creepin'
Now don't you close your eyes

But when it comes to politics, "woke" entered the mainstream lexicon during the 2014 Michael Brown riots.
Type specimen comes from the radfem rag Jezebel.
In the Aftermath of Ferguson, Stay Angry and Stay Woke
Because of that, the word became associated with far left SJW movements, and especially with #BLM. That's why the changes in racial politics are referred to as The Great Awokening, as in this VOX article from 2019, where I think the term was coined.
The Great Awokening

In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.
[...]
Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, observes that on key measures of racial attitudes, white liberals’ opinion has moved to the left of where black and Latino opinions are. White liberals are now less likely than African Americans to say that black people should be able to get ahead without any special help.
White liberals also have warmer feelings about immigrants than Hispanics do.
And, critically, white liberals are much more enthusiastic about the idea that diversity makes the United States a better place to live than are blacks or Latinos. Non-liberal whites are least enthusiastic of all, which is not enormously surprising, but Latino views of this are closer to those of non-liberal whites than to white liberals.

Of course, the 2020 riots and resultant overreaction by politics, media and corporate America merely made The Great Awokening even bigger. I also think that the inevitable backlash to this led directly to Trump 2.0. It was probably only his mishandling of the COVID Pandemic that enabled Biden to win in 2020 in the first place.

In other words, it's not just that we "ought to respect and not oppress people different from ourselves". Duh, indeed!

 

[Derec]

Also vegans could be described as "woke". I wouldn't believe every vegan is a PETA supporting extremist though. Also not every climate change activist/person who believes in climate change action, is an Extinction Rebellion, or Just Stop Oil supporter. Etc etc. Very basic logic stuff, but feeble minds cannot comprehend it.

I would not describe every vegan as "woke", but I would PETA activist.
Same with climate change. The "you can't drink oil, keep in in the soil" idiots are definitely woke. But acknowledging the reality of climate change and working to mitigate it is not necessarily woke. Aware yes, not woke. "Woke" represents the radical fringe, the people who (to go back to when the term entered the mainstream political lexicon) people justified rioting and "burning this bitch down" because an 18 year old robber was shot by a police officer after he attacked him.

Another very simple thing that's hard to grasp for certain people... if you are against wokeness, you are in the group of people who are against wokeness. That is an ingroup. That's just how groups work. I support basic decency, and am against cruel and unusual punishments, so I am in the woke ingroup. Plus I simply just don't worship Trump, which also puts me in the woke ingroup.

Nope. People can oppose Trump without being woke. Being against cruel and unusual punishment is not necessarily woke. People who think that police and prisons should be abolished definitely are woke. If you oppose such an extremist idea, you are not necessarily in the same ingroup as everyone else who does, since it's such a broad and heterogeneous group of people (in fact, vast majority of us) who disagree with it.
Same with opposition to Trump's immigration enforcement. That is on the opposite end of the spectrum as "woke", but it illustrates the point that being an outgroup to an extremist ingroup is not necessarily an ingroup in itself. I am opposed to it, but so are people who are for de-facto open borders and who say things like "no human is illegal" or "asylum for all". I am not in the same ingroup with those wokesters, even if we both oppose Trumpist immigration enforcement.

 

[Derec]

Those people are very different from each other and are in each other's ingroups.

You might want to edit a "not" into that last sentence.

You are right. My bad.

 

[Derec]

By the way, notice how they criticized my stereotyping, but not Derec's stereotyping of every woke person as an extremist?

I am not "stereotyping [...] every woke person as an extremist", but am saying that woke is an extreme ideology.
Just like not every conservative is MAGA, not every progressive is woke.

 

[Derec]

Or if there were no highly qualified black women to comprise a good pool of candidates.

But they are not the only ones who are "highly qualified". So why restrict SCOTUS and running mate nominations to that relatively small demographic?
And of course, what made Biden's decision even worse is that he made both these race and gender restrictions at about the same time, about two high-profile nominations.

 

[Derec]

And…up to that point, the only people considered ( for a major party) were white men with the exception of Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin, both white.

Those are the two VP nominees who were picked. You have no evidence that they were the only ones who have ever been considered for running mate. And note that Ferraro was Mondale's running mate more than 40 years ago. That's a long time, especially in politics.

Certainly Palin was chosen because she had a female and it beggars belief that anyone who was not white would have been considered.

Palin was chosen to shore up evangelicals since McCain was not seen as very popular among them.
And we know that people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had been under consideration before.

 

[Toni]

Or if there were no highly qualified black women to comprise a good pool of candidates.

But they are not the only ones who are "highly qualified". So why restrict SCOTUS and running mate nominations to that relatively small demographic?
And of course, what made Biden's decision even worse is that he made both these race and gender restrictions at about the same time, about two high-profile nominations.

Perhaps to make a point that those in a group or groups who have been entirely or nearly entirely excluded from consideration would now get first consideration.

I know I am repeating myself but only an idiot would think that Biden did not already have a list of candidates for VP who met all of his criteria before he made that statement.

 

[Derec]

Of course you wouldn’t recognize them. Wot a surprise.

How many random photos of people from the 19th century would you recognize if I were to post some? Even if I restricted myself to elected officials on the national level?

But enlighten us: who are these women, and why do you think they would have made good vice presidential nominees?

Four straight content-free posts reveals a lot.

You are mistaken, as usual.

 

[Toni]

And…up to that point, the only people considered ( for a major party) were white men with the exception of Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin, both white.

Those are the two VP nominees who were picked. You have no evidence that they were the only ones who have ever been considered for running mate. And note that Ferraro was Mondale's running mate more than 40 years ago. That's a long time, especially in politics.

Certainly Palin was chosen because she had a female and it beggars belief that anyone who was not white would have been considered.

Palin was chosen to shore up evangelicals since McCain was not seen as very popular among them.
And we know that people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had been under consideration before.

Under consideration but never nominated. Perhaps they never wanted the jobs, but we don’t honestly know.

Biden broke a barrier that needed to be broken. He did not choose someone who was inept or unqualified as so many presidential candidate dates have done. Frankly, McCain really shot himself in the foot by choosing Palin.

 

[Derec]

The problem is not that this one time, a presidential candidate announced he was only considering qualified black women to be vice president.

As well as SCOTUS justice. Even though Dems have not put a man in SCOTUS since 1994.

The problem is that all the other times, qualified black women (and many others who were not white, male, hetero and cisgendered) were specifically excluded from consideration.

[citation needed] that for all the other times, black women were specifically excluded from consideration.

You whine about “DEI,” but never acknowledge that DEI did not arise in some vacuum. It arose because always in the past, what we have had is MIE — Monotony, Inequity and Exclusion, always specifically designed and implemented to keep white man in the saddle, both in government and in positions of authority in private industry.

Two wrongs do not make a right. Justifying discriminating against some people today under guise of DEI just because different people who vaguely looked similar were beneficiaries of discrimination in the past is the hallmark of an ideology that does not see people as individuals but merely as ciphers for demographic groups. Whites benefited in the past, so it's ok to exclude them today. That is racism by definition.

But let’s be honest. Had Biden never announced he was only considering qualified black women, but then went ahead and picked one anyway, you’d still be whining that it was “DEI” pick.

If he hadn't announced it, but still picked KH, I might have suspected DEI, but Biden did in fact make it explicit.
In any case, it would have been a baffling choice, given her mishandling of her 2020 presidential campaign (which fell apart before the year started) and especially given her vicious attacks on Biden over race-based forcible bussing in the 1970s.

Because the fact is that for people like you, any success by non-whites and non-males can never have been earned.

That is not true. Obama earned his success for example. He prevailed in the primaries despite the party machine favoring Hillary. A black woman can succeed on her own merits. I do not think Kamala Harris did, and that made her a worse candidate in 2024.

From your perspective they had to have been given something they didn’t deserve.

Wrong. It's not that they HAD to have been given something that they didn't deserve. It's that if you exclude everyone else, and only consider black women, that they did get something they did not deserve.
Are you even capable of understanding the difference?

 

[Derec]

So? Does it bother you when only Democrats are considered or Republicans or loaylists or men ?

It is hardly surprising that a governor would pick somebody from his own party, unless there is something in state law that prevents him doing that.
But that is very different from excluding 97% of the state population because they do not have vaginas and have too little melanin.

It is an indication when the only time one brings it up is with a woman and it is based on an assumption.

n=1, so it's impossible to draw conclusions about "only time".
Can you point out the case that is similar where no hay was made of the likely quid pro quo?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If someone is actually discriminating go after them. However, if it's properly blinded how do they discriminate??

And it's the current situation that causes people to question the credentials of anyone who could be thought to be DEI.

And how can you say there has never been discrimination against cis het white men?? When you try to balance the racial mix of your employees you are inherently discriminating against them! The current crop of new hires is not responsible for any past discrimination but you are stacking the deck against them.

What you are saying is that hiring is a zero-sum game. Anyone not hired has been discriminated against.

It's zero sum. When you advantage one person you inherently disadvantage another. That does not mean they have been discriminated against--it's only discrimination when they are not hired because they belong to the wrong group.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

All VP candidates are DEI.

Cheney wasn't. The point of using DEI for VPs is so that some voter demographic will feel more represented. Who the heck felt represented by Cheney? He was picked to make up for the well-deserved perception that W. was a light-weight. But just because somebody is highly skilled doesn't mean he's good for America.

And that's not DEI? Diversity isn't just skin color.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Or if there were no highly qualified black women to comprise a good pool of candidates.

But they are not the only ones who are "highly qualified". So why restrict SCOTUS and running mate nominations to that relatively small demographic?
And of course, what made Biden's decision even worse is that he made both these race and gender restrictions at about the same time, about two high-profile nominations.

Perhaps to make a point that those in a group or groups who have been entirely or nearly entirely excluded from consideration would now get first consideration.

I know I am repeating myself but only an idiot would think that Biden did not already have a list of candidates for VP who met all of his criteria before he made that statement.

"Would now get first consideration" -- discrimination. Period. You can't fix old wrongs, you inherently end up discriminating against those who have done nothing wrong. Only by introducing the artificial notion of harm to groups can you disguise the evil you're seeking.