The Washington Free Beacon is reporting that a bill introduced in the Connecticut legislature would allow women to skip the Candidate Physical Ability Test for firefighters and qualify with a test with “revised physical standards.” It seems that the Democrats who have authored the bill are looking for an answer to the question “How do we make fire departments more diverse?”
Perhaps Connecticut should consider the question “How do we make our fire departments more effective?”
David French has a post over at NRO taking note of a weed sprouting in the Progressive monoculture. A Facebook engineer named Brian Amerige has started a group called “FB’ers for Political Diversity,” and around a hundred of his colleagues at the company have joined. Not a huge number for a company that size, but enough for there to be some safety because of the size of the group. Of course, the internal SJW mob at Facebook is complaining, but so far, they’ve been told that the group has not violated any company rules.
Even one dissenting voice in a room can alter the entire dynamic of the conversation and moderate the whole. The lack of any dissenting voices naturally and inevitably causes the group to migrate to the extremes. The resulting extremism further deters dissent and fosters even more extremism — to the point where the received wisdom of the in-group can seem utterly mystifying to outsiders.
With all due apologies to the Harry Potter franchise, if Amerige can become “the engineer who lived” — the man who dissented, gathered a coalition, and made a difference — then his influence won’t be limited to Facebook (and given Facebook’s power, even if he “only” influences Facebook, he’ll have made an impact); it will extend throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.
Reform from the inside is typically more consequential and durable than reform imposed from the outside. And now we have evidence — from the heart of a social-media giant — that the monoculture may see a challenge. The monoculture is facing a threat, and that is good news indeed for America’s embattled culture of free speech.
Read the whole thing.
From my point of view, it’s the SJW monoculture that’s the weeds. Those lone plants look like roses to me.
