Posted on 05/16/2022 4:57:33 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.
If you are a devoted reader of Common Sense, by now you have surely noticed a trend: workplaces—in some cases, storied institutions—that turn hostile to independent thinking seemingly overnight.
That’s what Paul Rossi experienced at Grace Church School. It’s what Jennifer Sey went through at Levi’s. It’s what Antonio García Martínez dealt with at Apple. And Roland Fryer at Harvard. And Gordon Klein at UCLA. And Maud Maron at Legal Aid.
Now comes the story of Zac Kriegman, who, until not so long ago, was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters. Kriegman’s crime? Questioning the Black Lives Matter narrative.
Kriegman is a person who loves numbers and statistics. As you’ll read below, he didn’t just voice an opinion to his colleagues. He made an argument after having done extensive research. He thought logic would win out. He was wrong.
This story is most obviously about the assault on difference. The assault on the notion, previously taken for granted, that you shouldn’t punish employees for having heterodox opinions or for voicing disagreement with the political consensus in an organization. But it is also about the assault on reason itself. — BW
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Until recently, I was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. It was my job, among other things, to sift through reams of numbers and figure out what they meant.
About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence. We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.
But when I shared the story with my coworkers, my boss chastised me, telling me expressing this opinion could limit my ability to take on leadership roles within the company. Then I was maligned by my colleagues. And then I was fired.
This is the story Reuters didn’t want to tell.
I had been at Thomson Reuters for over six years—most recently, leading a team of data scientists applying new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to our legal, tax and news data. We advised any number of divisions inside the company, including Westlaw, an online legal research service used by most every law firm in the country, and the newsroom, which reaches an audience of one billion every day around the globe. I briefed the Chief Technology Officer regularly. My total annual compensation package exceeded $350,000.
In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” They’d share articles with titles like “Seeing White,” “Habits of Whiteness” and “How to Be a Better White Person.” There was fervent and vocal support for Black Lives Matter at every level of the company. No one challenged the racial essentialism or the groupthink.
This concerned me. I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.
The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.
The woke workplace has become a hostile environment.
You be wacist!
(He thought logic would win out.)
Not since O’Barry showed up on the national scene.
We now live in something similar to Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. Being politically incorrect won’t get you executed. But it will destroy your career. Here’s a Russian joke from that era:
Foreign reporter: What is your opinion on farm collectivization?
Soviet citizen: I agree with the policy of the party.
Foreign reporter: What is your opinion on the steel production goals?
Soviet citizen: I agree with the policy of the party.
Foreign reporter: What is your opinion on the increase in food prices?
Soviet citizen: I agree with the policy of the party.
Foreign reporter: Don’t you have any opinions of your own?
Soviet citizen: Yes. But I don’t agree with them.
By design.
It is the purpose of wokeness.
You cannot destroy institutions and Western Civilization without hostility.
Okaaaay...
Note to the author: Two words, dude, Heather Mac Donald.
And a compliant public.
Bttt.
5.56mm
Heather Mac has only been reporting to the conservative choir.
Bari Weiss was expelled from the Left as one of the last remaining slightly dissenting voices.
Do you remember back in January when the headlines were that deaths from heart attack and stroke were up something like 40%? And the question then was: were these deaths becauase of covid, the vaxx, or something else?
And we were told that after another quarter, the data would be much more informative.
Well folks, another quarter has come and gone and there's been NOTHING in the news. Surely the actuaries have crunched the numbers for the most recent quarter by now.
There are workplace protections for many things created by the left (sexual orientation, etc).
But there are no protections for political speech.
Exercise your Second Amendment right and have a firearm in your car in the company parking lot...you might get fired.
Bring a prayer rug and kneel toward Mecca....you are protected.
I have no problems with protecting sexual orientation and religion in the workplace, as long as you don’t turn it into a recruiting center or demand acceptance.
I have a problem with expressing political speech and being terminated for it.
These are the same people who love to virtue signal with their lawn signs saying "Hate doesn't live here."
A police officer’s chance of getting killed by a black assailant is 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black person getting killed by a cop.
The chances are much higher now because 2019 was before the defund the police/war on police movement started.
Being woke can be summed up in two words: Intellectual Dishonesty.
You have to lie to yourself, first and foremost.
Jennifer Sey was in my graduating class in high school.
And to think that they all wanted this war in Ukraine...
The silence is deafening, isn’t it?
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ~ George Orwell, 1984
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