When will Scale be sued for discrimination? Hopefully soon enough.
Is this clickbait? I think so.
Let me clarify; I do not bear Alexander Wang or Scale any ill will whatsoever.
As far as I know, he’s a perfectly reasonable person and Scale is an excellent company employing serious people working on important (if sometimes less than glamorously tackled) problems. And yet I can’t help but hope that some misshapen goblin of the modern Americas with a powerful ‘deconstructor phenotype’—or better yet, a whole activist group of them, preferably financed by George Soros—tries to sue them for employment discrimination relatively soon.
I say ‘relatively’ because I hope before such a lawsuit, that many other tech companies commit the sin that Alexander is committing; the sin of taking the US Civil Rights regime at its word. I hope the suit fails, too. Did I mention that?
Techies are interesting people. They’re generally quite smart, but, and please forgive me for going a too-online-trope-a-minute, often kind of mid-witted.
For a long time up until recently, technologists were—much like members of the medical profession still *are*, which is why they’re not interesting—diligent, competent, totally uninformed or superficially informed people. So, good incomes, high social status, and *clueless* about how the world works outside their own domain. But this changed dramatically, recently. Two things did it.
One was the election of Trump and a deep (dys)reflection of journalists about social media which brought a lot of attention on certain online rightist communities who had presaged Brexit, Trump, and Europe’s populist turn.
And the second was venture capital (pre-rate hikes/ZIRP era) as a whole through the influence of Peter Thiel (and Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, and, etc. etc. all of the greats of course - but *especially* Thiel, being a big René Girard booster), that there was a bit of alpha in these weirdos. Memes and mimesis.
This has played out most spectacularly on X/Twitter where the confluence of ‘crypto’ and ‘not wanting to be fired from a cushy job by some diversity hire retard’ brought together people who understand the elliptic curve signature algorithm (or at least ‘get’ deep in their bones that the dollar is a mess and BTC is great) and people who understand what the population distribution of variable upstream tandem repeat monoamine oxidase-A means for urban crime (or at least ‘get’ deep in their bones that they really need to get to the nice suburbs).
You know all of this. You’re a smart person. I can’t believe anyone would find this tiny substack among all that exist without just knowing this. Right? Right.
Okay, back to Alexander Wang and his post I hope (without malice) brings suit:
So, MEI. That’s a funny (in a Boomermaxxing, unc coded way) retort to DEI. And on the surface, Wang’s post is really nice. A breathe of fresh air! And legal, too!
In fact, not so long ago, Mark Cuban (who has been getting BTFO’d into derangement left and right by centrist Libs whom he imagines are Nazis in the worst kind of stolen valor and crime by association that exists on the internet) had to be told by the EEOC Commissioner herself that he was saying illegal stuff:
This was, and is, quite amusing. But why was Cuban saying that? Why didn’t he realize saying it so explicitly would actually be illegal? What prompted it?
What prompted it is that he was completely justified in thinking that this *is* what the US government ultimately expects him to do in running a company.
Unless you’re the proverbial fish who doesn’t know he’s swimming in water, you know it too. And by the way, so do the EEOC and Justice Department, deep down:
Prove Xi Jinping and the CCP wrong about American attention spans and read that *portion* of a website, a little excerpt. Have a sweet treat if you need, after.
The important parts, with some emphasis added and minor changes made:
1. Under the laws enforced by EEOC, it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person’s [WAY OF BEING ANNOYING]
and
2. The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practice sthat have a disproportionately negative effect on other applicants or employers of a particular [WAY OF BEING ANNOYING]
Just think for a second here. Imagine the Jeopardy! theme song. What’s the issue? Put on your thinking cap. The security hole is staring you in the face.
Perhaps it would help to look back at what Alexander Wang is saying? Or to scroll through the careers page? Maybe go back to Cuban’s post and then read the EEOC statement immediately after? Maybe try watching this TikTok video?
The United States Government requires you to never discriminate in hiring, unless… it looks like you’re not hiring ‘enough’ blacks, Latinos, women, gays, foreigners, disabled people, etc. Then it requires you to super-discriminate to ‘even things out’ and steals your money.
I’m sure some of you are actual lawyers (like Jay-Z, I also didn’t pass the bar, or take it) and I’m sure some of you are even fair-minded Liberal people who think this is an exaggeration. But it is not. (And by the way, this is also how the Voting Rights Act works when it comes to drawing the boundaries of voting districts.)
Don’t want to hire people with what you think are significant arrest records?
That’s illegal, and the highest paid corporate lawyers in the world can’t help you.
”Ahh, but that’s just one careless employer!” you say. Ahh, but no it is not:
You are NOT allowed to do something resulting in—as asserted by sleazy ‘civil rights organizations’ doing the liberal CRT/DEI/Diversity huckster version of ambulance-chasing—any number of ‘protected class’ persons not getting jobs.
And then the Federal lawyers, the shakedown organization, and even some of the would-be employees get your money. Corporate lawyers now recognize this, so they encourage the environment that induced Mark Cuban to think what he was saying was not just OKAY but REQUIRED. He thought it was a best practice:
Right? He’s just trying to promote equal employment opportunity and address one or more barriers that adversely affect equal employment opportunity.
Except, when you say in front of everyone, and not in an HR seminar, or an EEOC workshop, or a Supreme Court oral argument, the contradiction is totally evident.
And not just the obvious contradiction, but the obvious injustice of it all. As Jeremy Carl’s excellent book: “The Unprotected Class” thoroughly demonstrates, it’s not like anyone is mourning the discrimination that whites (and particularly young white Christian men) routinely face within institutional life in America.
Did you know, for instance, that a routine obligation of HR at large companies is to look at people who didn’t fill out race information in their job application or employee onboarding, and then figure out what race they are with a best guess?
Scale would certainly be included among companies with more than 100 employees, or as a Federal contractor with more than 50 employees. It goes on Form EEO-1. Here is what that form looks like. Please note the highlighted part:
It’s bullshit.
They know it’s bullshit.
But it’s the law.
The United States Government requires you to never discriminate in hiring, unless… it looks like you’re not hiring ‘enough’ blacks, Latinos, women, gays, foreigners, disabled people, etc. Then it requires you to super-discriminate to ‘even things out’ and steals your money.
I hope like the “mission focused company” letters from Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) and Jesse Powell (Kraken), Alexander Wang’s note takes off. I hope lots of companies adopt this same stance. I hope some talentless ass-clowns who don’t get hired connect with talented but dramatically more evil and shitty losers working for a Soros-op NGO activist lawyer roster, to try to sue Scale in a race-huckster shakedown. And I hope they lose because The Civil Rights Act—everything from disparate impact to the elimination of freedom of association—is pants-on-head retarded, and it becomes clear to some future cohort of US lawmakers that it’s time to throw all the bathwater out. There’s no baby.