Excellent letter Frederick. This nonsense has to removed because it flies in the face of American values and the Constitution. Great letter to send to Costco also.
Thanks Dave. Despite the good news generally, as you know, we need to keep up the resistance agianst the Marxists. They are as mad as hornets and will not give up.
I think a major reason big corporations are continuing to favor DEI is because the WEF/DAVOS and EU require that all business partners who are within a business chain meet specific standards of DEI and Green Initiatives. If they don't they're not approved to bid on government contracts. That was something the UN agreed to a couple of years ago, there's a certificate your business gets if you qualify(this is buried deep in my brain, it happened during COVID so it's jumbled with other horrible junk going on and it's too late at night to claw through my saved articles to find the information).
I have a suspicion this is partly what they're clinging to this dogma for in the belief that global matters are more important financially than what people in the US believe. We had decided tonight we weren't renewing our membership next month, but the idea of actually sending them a letter telling them why is more satisfying. Thank you.
A key point not included here: Jeffrey H. Brotman, cofounder and chairman of Costco Wholesale Corporation, had a son named Justin. Justin Brotman created a website called Bipartisan Report and pumped no small amount of family $$$ into making it a successful shitlib site. I briefly worked for him a decade ago and collected the highest pay-per-post rates of my career. I say "briefly" because my ethics and standards were a poor fit at that website. An example to illustrate: Justin had to pay out a pile of that family $$$ to Melania Trump for amplifying the false rumor that she had been a sex worker. As important as it is to consider who you do business with, you are still basically writing a letter to the Big Box Store equivalent of Ben & Jerry's.
I think DEI should be kept in place, and for the next 60 years should only benefit white males of northern European ancestry as reparations for the past 60 years of "Civil" "Rights" and "Affirmative" "Action" and especially the 50 years of genocidal war drafts that targeted intelligent, fit, brave, healthy, prime-breeding-age white European men for mass slaughter (leaving a massive hole in demographics that white women were supposed to fill by mating with the offspring of 4Fs and new global imports).
By luck, I was pointed to read F.A. Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" a few years ago. It was a complete eye-opener, giving words to the feelings that something was very wrong with socialist precepts - no matter how soothing and just they sound. Hayek was writing about Europe - not the US. Social engineering is a formula coming from the placement of secondary fixed principles to being first principles. Thus, instead of following abstracts such as the golden rule or 'willing the good of the other' which takes an individual approach, social engineering attempts to take Darwin's principles believing they can create Utopian societies using reasoning to construct the perfect society in general, ignoring the individual. I think it was James Lindsay who likened it to Eugenics for societies. But humans are more than just material. It is the confusion that we are just matter and nothing more that is the mistake. As for DEI, it has been used multiple times in the past. Historian Niall Ferguson highlights the replacement of competent Jewish professionals for Nazi party members as an early form of it. Mao used it in the Cultural Revolution creating horror, as did Stalin with his attack on prosperous Ukrainian farmers. Ironically, Silicon Valley types don't truly subscribe to DEI. Sure, they created departments dedicated to it and inflicted it on the rest of us, but their creators are the meritocracy. As one well-meaning tech bro noted, though US schools are producing dismal students entrenched in DEI, the solution would be to brain-drain the rest of the world for their needs. That is a solution for them, but not for us in the US. If Costco and others truly care about advancing those left behind, they should demand that the anchors holding schools in place in squalid waters be unmoored.
Although I have not shopped at Costco for years, not because of DEI but I can't afford to pay $30 and come out with only three items. Besides living alone doesn't require that much to be content. My experience with the DEI policies is the way it effects real qualified people.
My grandson worked for Costco in the meat department. It was a job to get him through college. Now that he has his degree he applied for a job in corporate headquarters in marketing. Unfortunately, he doesn't meet the DEI standards set by the company,.Being a straight, white male is not on the hiring priority list.
He is appreciative of the opportunity to have had employment while in school but the meat department was not the goal.
Fortunately, his stepfather works for an auto dealership and told him of an opening in their marketing department. My grandson didn't want to rely on nepotism to get a job, if he did he'd probably would have gotten the job at Costco. But he chose to rely on his merit, character and his company loyalty when applying, not his relatives.
He did learn a big lesson though, its not what you know these days, its who you know, along with characteristics beyond your control.
You would think after the Budweiser incident and the Target debacle the writing would be on the wall, guess Costco has a hard time deciphering the outcome of those events. Truly short sighted indeed.
> My grandson didn't want to rely on nepotism to get a job,
Your judgment implicitly sides with DEI type thinking:
How is it "nepotism" to act on information gleaned from someone who has your interests in mind and considers you a worthwhile person?
We're SUPPOSED to build information networks and sustain those we care about. "Nepotism" means hiring a relative whether or not they can do the job.
This is one of those white people problems. Too much purity and altruism and fair play, while everyone else is getting whatever they can By Any Means Necessary.
IME that seems to be the Woke message. In fact DEI means nepotism for everybody BUT white men.
I'm flashing to 2017 at Evergreen State when Bret Weinstein was recorded pontificating in a hallway to an enrapt student about how he was ALWAYS anti-white, and ALWAYS taught about how your genes make you racist for preferring your own relatives to strangers. But you can straighten them out by giving them a good talking to. The you in question there was the wide eyed blonde girl student drinking in his wisdom with an awed expression.
Within weeks he was on Ben Shapiro talking about how important it was for him and his people (the small hatted ones) to be able to band together and protect their interests.
When this is how society works, the purity of "oh no, I'd never do ANYTHING nepotistic" looks to me less like virtue and more like masochism.
Indeed - private businesses can do what they want and suffer consequences. It is ironic that there are anti-descrimination laws while DEI discriminates!
Corporations have been "training" (aka. conditioning) their work force for a long time. That's because the corporate culture must prevail.
A successful employer who doesn't condition its employees must make sure the workers represent pretty much the same or, at least, compatible cultures. While that does not always depend on skin color, more often than not, it does. Even men and women tend to think different ways, which explains why one of the two genders dominate certain workplaces...
I stopped shopping at Costco's when they mandated the muzzle.
When a business engages in poor business practices the business suffers because consumers are no longer served and seek other suppliers. Shareholders sell out or vote new managemwnt. The business folds or corrects its ways.
Government imposed poor business practice has no self correcting mechanism except the will of voters who often don't feel the rot until too late.
Very well stated. But, let’s call a spade a spade here. The board has no interest in promoting DEI.
DEI is the perfect cover to deny quality individuals from advancing and succeeding. Why ? Because their positions of power become threatened by those who potentially can overshadow their status by being more knowledgeable thru experience in day to day operations. Therefore, the company actually loses by having unqualified decision makers, probably a bunch holding positions thru DEI initiatives. And, there is also a potential for cost savings in having the less qualified hold lesser positions and not earning raises and promotions.
However isn't Costco's current CEO a guy who started out as a forklift driver, and advanced through the company over something like 30 years?
I had understood that the kerfuffle in question was a SHAREHOLDER vote. Not the executive team or whatever.
My guess would be that somewhere in some swanky billionaire NGO/"philanthropic foundation" board room, it was decided that SHAREHOLDER ACTIVISM is going to be the next strategy for keeping alive the GloboVision of endlessly wrangling dolts for profit. I.e., the Sumerian Swindle (everything becomes real estate; everyone becomes cattle; the lugal's priests calculate the rent).
You’re so correct ! But you have to admit if these buffoons would wake up they’d realize that competence would increase their bottom lines 10 fold. And for them, it’s t that all that matters ???
Well, I speak from the perspective of an infra/logistics household...and my departed darling the railfan/I the ship geek. Even during the career spates we each worked in state service, it was in infra/logistics. Being the people of whom tangible outcomes are required by those who do nothing but "manage," we always have had a kinda hybrid...and curmudgeonly...view of this stuff.
"Competence" is much bandied about these days, including by WEF-front-type magazines and Influencers and such. I pause when I see the word. There’s something so…lathed…about it, to my eye/ear.
But having said that, I guess I can understand why Whoever is pushing that meme is doing it. Just as I’m guessing that the SHAREHOLDER ACTIVISTS either think "competence" is racist, therefore dismissable. But “competence” is hardly the point.
The point is, they have no clue about anything other than their performative dramas. They flick the switch, they expect the electrons to flow. The cyclone smashes the power grid, they check their iPhones every 2 minutes to see when they can expect things to get back to normal (as, meanwhile, thousands of families across the continent are dispatching their men to the affected area to isolate, troubleshoot, and repair, in dangerous conditions, over periods of weeks or months).
Having said that, your earlier point about c-blocking those who can do the job, by those who cannot is extremely on target. People with nothing but drama to offer will generally gravitate toward blocking those who get various jobs done on time and under budget (or anyway with a minimum of change orders). Those who get things done sometimes have to be confrontational, or push hard, or challenge perspectives, or say no to unrealistic expectations. Those who Buffoon for a living just...tap dance and make mouth noises and pretend to get along (while in fact being the most divisive entities in any room).
One main reason my darling left a very comfy state job for the private sector five years before death was that no matter what the salary and perks with the state, not being able to learn, grow, and be effective was intolerable. Also intolerable: the daily experience of having the neck bootstomped by petty functionaries who contributed nothing but Webinars, meetings, Disappearing Task Forces, more meetings, "scrums," and a hundred other management-culture fetishes about which they'd recently read a book or attended a conference.
DEI was just another fashion in an endless stream of fashions for this type, back to the Reagan era. Stopping DEI is good in my view...but the impulse is likely to morph into some other hellish form. And it has roots in things like “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap teaching corporate CxOs how to destroy white men’s jobs, families, and communities for massive speculative profit…but let me not digress there. Thanks, Ken.
Excellent letter Frederick. This nonsense has to removed because it flies in the face of American values and the Constitution. Great letter to send to Costco also.
Thanks Dave. Despite the good news generally, as you know, we need to keep up the resistance agianst the Marxists. They are as mad as hornets and will not give up.
…and the decline of Costco begins.
I think a major reason big corporations are continuing to favor DEI is because the WEF/DAVOS and EU require that all business partners who are within a business chain meet specific standards of DEI and Green Initiatives. If they don't they're not approved to bid on government contracts. That was something the UN agreed to a couple of years ago, there's a certificate your business gets if you qualify(this is buried deep in my brain, it happened during COVID so it's jumbled with other horrible junk going on and it's too late at night to claw through my saved articles to find the information).
I have a suspicion this is partly what they're clinging to this dogma for in the belief that global matters are more important financially than what people in the US believe. We had decided tonight we weren't renewing our membership next month, but the idea of actually sending them a letter telling them why is more satisfying. Thank you.
A key point not included here: Jeffrey H. Brotman, cofounder and chairman of Costco Wholesale Corporation, had a son named Justin. Justin Brotman created a website called Bipartisan Report and pumped no small amount of family $$$ into making it a successful shitlib site. I briefly worked for him a decade ago and collected the highest pay-per-post rates of my career. I say "briefly" because my ethics and standards were a poor fit at that website. An example to illustrate: Justin had to pay out a pile of that family $$$ to Melania Trump for amplifying the false rumor that she had been a sex worker. As important as it is to consider who you do business with, you are still basically writing a letter to the Big Box Store equivalent of Ben & Jerry's.
Now this is some juicy info, Matt!
We'll see when quarterly earnings fall...
That's a lot of words about shopping.
I think DEI should be kept in place, and for the next 60 years should only benefit white males of northern European ancestry as reparations for the past 60 years of "Civil" "Rights" and "Affirmative" "Action" and especially the 50 years of genocidal war drafts that targeted intelligent, fit, brave, healthy, prime-breeding-age white European men for mass slaughter (leaving a massive hole in demographics that white women were supposed to fill by mating with the offspring of 4Fs and new global imports).
By luck, I was pointed to read F.A. Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" a few years ago. It was a complete eye-opener, giving words to the feelings that something was very wrong with socialist precepts - no matter how soothing and just they sound. Hayek was writing about Europe - not the US. Social engineering is a formula coming from the placement of secondary fixed principles to being first principles. Thus, instead of following abstracts such as the golden rule or 'willing the good of the other' which takes an individual approach, social engineering attempts to take Darwin's principles believing they can create Utopian societies using reasoning to construct the perfect society in general, ignoring the individual. I think it was James Lindsay who likened it to Eugenics for societies. But humans are more than just material. It is the confusion that we are just matter and nothing more that is the mistake. As for DEI, it has been used multiple times in the past. Historian Niall Ferguson highlights the replacement of competent Jewish professionals for Nazi party members as an early form of it. Mao used it in the Cultural Revolution creating horror, as did Stalin with his attack on prosperous Ukrainian farmers. Ironically, Silicon Valley types don't truly subscribe to DEI. Sure, they created departments dedicated to it and inflicted it on the rest of us, but their creators are the meritocracy. As one well-meaning tech bro noted, though US schools are producing dismal students entrenched in DEI, the solution would be to brain-drain the rest of the world for their needs. That is a solution for them, but not for us in the US. If Costco and others truly care about advancing those left behind, they should demand that the anchors holding schools in place in squalid waters be unmoored.
I really need to read Road to Surfdom.
Here it is completely free. Now you don't have an excuse!
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/upldbook351pdf.pdf
https://nae.com.pt/wp-content/uploads/The-Road-to-Serfdom-F.-A.-von-Hayek.pdf
Brilliant letter and article. Thank you Mr. Smith, thank you.
Nice!!!!
I included the 71 page edition and the original, for you to view.
And it is pleasure!
> Road to Surfdom.
I have the special Kali Yuga edition by Hang Ten Press.
:^>
Although I have not shopped at Costco for years, not because of DEI but I can't afford to pay $30 and come out with only three items. Besides living alone doesn't require that much to be content. My experience with the DEI policies is the way it effects real qualified people.
My grandson worked for Costco in the meat department. It was a job to get him through college. Now that he has his degree he applied for a job in corporate headquarters in marketing. Unfortunately, he doesn't meet the DEI standards set by the company,.Being a straight, white male is not on the hiring priority list.
He is appreciative of the opportunity to have had employment while in school but the meat department was not the goal.
Fortunately, his stepfather works for an auto dealership and told him of an opening in their marketing department. My grandson didn't want to rely on nepotism to get a job, if he did he'd probably would have gotten the job at Costco. But he chose to rely on his merit, character and his company loyalty when applying, not his relatives.
He did learn a big lesson though, its not what you know these days, its who you know, along with characteristics beyond your control.
You would think after the Budweiser incident and the Target debacle the writing would be on the wall, guess Costco has a hard time deciphering the outcome of those events. Truly short sighted indeed.
> My grandson didn't want to rely on nepotism to get a job,
Your judgment implicitly sides with DEI type thinking:
How is it "nepotism" to act on information gleaned from someone who has your interests in mind and considers you a worthwhile person?
We're SUPPOSED to build information networks and sustain those we care about. "Nepotism" means hiring a relative whether or not they can do the job.
This is one of those white people problems. Too much purity and altruism and fair play, while everyone else is getting whatever they can By Any Means Necessary.
So only “w” people engage in nepotism?
IME that seems to be the Woke message. In fact DEI means nepotism for everybody BUT white men.
I'm flashing to 2017 at Evergreen State when Bret Weinstein was recorded pontificating in a hallway to an enrapt student about how he was ALWAYS anti-white, and ALWAYS taught about how your genes make you racist for preferring your own relatives to strangers. But you can straighten them out by giving them a good talking to. The you in question there was the wide eyed blonde girl student drinking in his wisdom with an awed expression.
Within weeks he was on Ben Shapiro talking about how important it was for him and his people (the small hatted ones) to be able to band together and protect their interests.
When this is how society works, the purity of "oh no, I'd never do ANYTHING nepotistic" looks to me less like virtue and more like masochism.
Excellent feedback!
What happens after Trump's anti DIE proclamation?
Indeed - private businesses can do what they want and suffer consequences. It is ironic that there are anti-descrimination laws while DEI discriminates!
Corporations have been "training" (aka. conditioning) their work force for a long time. That's because the corporate culture must prevail.
A successful employer who doesn't condition its employees must make sure the workers represent pretty much the same or, at least, compatible cultures. While that does not always depend on skin color, more often than not, it does. Even men and women tend to think different ways, which explains why one of the two genders dominate certain workplaces...
I stopped shopping at Costco's when they mandated the muzzle.
When a business engages in poor business practices the business suffers because consumers are no longer served and seek other suppliers. Shareholders sell out or vote new managemwnt. The business folds or corrects its ways.
Government imposed poor business practice has no self correcting mechanism except the will of voters who often don't feel the rot until too late.
Very well stated. But, let’s call a spade a spade here. The board has no interest in promoting DEI.
DEI is the perfect cover to deny quality individuals from advancing and succeeding. Why ? Because their positions of power become threatened by those who potentially can overshadow their status by being more knowledgeable thru experience in day to day operations. Therefore, the company actually loses by having unqualified decision makers, probably a bunch holding positions thru DEI initiatives. And, there is also a potential for cost savings in having the less qualified hold lesser positions and not earning raises and promotions.
I see your point.
However isn't Costco's current CEO a guy who started out as a forklift driver, and advanced through the company over something like 30 years?
I had understood that the kerfuffle in question was a SHAREHOLDER vote. Not the executive team or whatever.
My guess would be that somewhere in some swanky billionaire NGO/"philanthropic foundation" board room, it was decided that SHAREHOLDER ACTIVISM is going to be the next strategy for keeping alive the GloboVision of endlessly wrangling dolts for profit. I.e., the Sumerian Swindle (everything becomes real estate; everyone becomes cattle; the lugal's priests calculate the rent).
You’re so correct ! But you have to admit if these buffoons would wake up they’d realize that competence would increase their bottom lines 10 fold. And for them, it’s t that all that matters ???
Well, I speak from the perspective of an infra/logistics household...and my departed darling the railfan/I the ship geek. Even during the career spates we each worked in state service, it was in infra/logistics. Being the people of whom tangible outcomes are required by those who do nothing but "manage," we always have had a kinda hybrid...and curmudgeonly...view of this stuff.
"Competence" is much bandied about these days, including by WEF-front-type magazines and Influencers and such. I pause when I see the word. There’s something so…lathed…about it, to my eye/ear.
But having said that, I guess I can understand why Whoever is pushing that meme is doing it. Just as I’m guessing that the SHAREHOLDER ACTIVISTS either think "competence" is racist, therefore dismissable. But “competence” is hardly the point.
The point is, they have no clue about anything other than their performative dramas. They flick the switch, they expect the electrons to flow. The cyclone smashes the power grid, they check their iPhones every 2 minutes to see when they can expect things to get back to normal (as, meanwhile, thousands of families across the continent are dispatching their men to the affected area to isolate, troubleshoot, and repair, in dangerous conditions, over periods of weeks or months).
Having said that, your earlier point about c-blocking those who can do the job, by those who cannot is extremely on target. People with nothing but drama to offer will generally gravitate toward blocking those who get various jobs done on time and under budget (or anyway with a minimum of change orders). Those who get things done sometimes have to be confrontational, or push hard, or challenge perspectives, or say no to unrealistic expectations. Those who Buffoon for a living just...tap dance and make mouth noises and pretend to get along (while in fact being the most divisive entities in any room).
One main reason my darling left a very comfy state job for the private sector five years before death was that no matter what the salary and perks with the state, not being able to learn, grow, and be effective was intolerable. Also intolerable: the daily experience of having the neck bootstomped by petty functionaries who contributed nothing but Webinars, meetings, Disappearing Task Forces, more meetings, "scrums," and a hundred other management-culture fetishes about which they'd recently read a book or attended a conference.
DEI was just another fashion in an endless stream of fashions for this type, back to the Reagan era. Stopping DEI is good in my view...but the impulse is likely to morph into some other hellish form. And it has roots in things like “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap teaching corporate CxOs how to destroy white men’s jobs, families, and communities for massive speculative profit…but let me not digress there. Thanks, Ken.