Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged”

Meta claims it will find other ways to hire employees from different backgrounds.

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[fancysunrise]

pathetic

 

[fancysunrise]

NBC has reported that Facebook now will allow people to post that homosexuality is mental illness, misinformation that is extremely toxic. Check out the language that Meta provided as the explanation if you want to become very sickened.

The gay = crazy myth was dispelled in 1956 by Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who decided to actually investigate the matter for the first time instead of doing what everyone else had done which is use "common sense" (wild bigoted assumption based on historical socialization). One of the experts who reviewed the data she gathered was so convinced of his "common sense" bigotry that he admitted later that he reviewed the data completely two times because he couldn't accept that gay people aren't crazy. At least he had the integrity to not only come out in favor of the facts but admitted his bigotry as a teachable moment. Despite that, it took the APA until the 70s to finally recognize the science. Zealots continue to falsely claim that the decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM was done primarily due to political pressure.

NPR even gave one of those guys' daughters (Spitzer) something like 22–27 minutes (I don't recall the exact number of minutes) during the Bush W administration to try to convince the public of this lie. It took her 15 minutes before she got to the name Hooker (and her pathetic attempt to handwaive the science). According to this particular mythology, poor social scientists like her father Spitzer were so bullied by horrible gay activists that they simply had no choice but to turn their backs on scientific truth. What a crock... thanks NPR. Did NPR follow that piece with a rebuttal or even a sentence or two about the actual facts? Nope. I can only guess that, like Zuckerberg, there was a decision to try to curry favor with the administration.

Facebook will hold "your" account hostage for 30 days if you try to delete it to protest this corporate hate for profit (or for any other reason, such as not wanting to help Zuckerberg build his flaming moat).

I hope that Ars will cover this. It's closely related to the DEI matter, of course — but it's certainly noteworthy enough to be an additional article. The words provided by Meta as explanation/justification are truly breathtaking in their odiousness and viciousness.

Bit of a tangent - To be fair to the APA, the DSM is largely a political/social construct in the first place. That is, it's partly about norms and partly about legal and quasi-medical processes (what to tell a court, how to write a grant application, and, most importantly, how to bill insurance) and not so much about anything valid in the sense other fields approach science. To quote a former head of the National Institute of Mental Health in the US about a decade ago (before superficial reactions in public forums inevitably misunderstand the above and appeal to some "authority" or trope they see on TV like "chemical imbalances" or a general defensiveness) - “The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’—each edition has ensured that clinicians used the same terms the same ways ... The weakness is its lack of validity.”

The point is that the inclusion of most gender related stuff in the DSM, as popularly referenced, was/is political, as was its removal. People will continue to rely on it as something to validate what they want to do - either in treatment or in attempting to communicate about mental health or in justifying unwanted or harmful or ineffective measures and treatment or confinement or ostracism or laws or in writing narratives about individuals or events or in outright targeting perceived "undesirables". On its own, the DSM doesn't really mean anything. Don't tell many practicing clinicians though...