Diversity Diner

Posting will probably be pretty light for the next 16 weeks. I'm in a training course for work that includes all-day classes and some pretty intense homework. Sometimes, you just gotta concentrate to get stuff done.

One of the things I had to watch today was a film called Diversity Diner. The preachiness of the film is typical for workplace diversity films, including the stereotypical fat white guy unwilling to value diversity for the goody goodness it is!

I couldn't help but think about the way diversity and diversity education isn't nearly as benign as its promoters like to pretend it is. While watching the film, I thought about how diversity and tolerance, its twin, are used to bludgeon people into accepting all sorts of ideas and to consider all ideas and philosophies to be equally good. This is patently false, of course, but that's the real message one gets from these reeducation films: we're all good, just different. Value our differences. Other people's ideas and beliefs are just as good as yours.

Part of what makes this system so insidious is the feel-good nature of such talk. Can't we all just get along? The problem with it is that not every idea deserves to be treated equally. Some ideas and beliefs are just flat out wrong. Preventing well-qualified people from buying a house they can afford in a neighborhood they like is wrong. Silencing people with views you dislike is wrong. Imprisoning women for showing their ankles is wrong. And telling people that everybody's viewpoints hold equal value is wrong.

Liberals like the mantra of diversity and tolerance because it helps them advance their governmental control agenda while painting anyone who disagrees as a heartless bigot.

Let's take health insurance as an example. Liberals will tell you that single payer health systems are better than ours because they are fairer. How are they fairer? I guess it's that everyone gets the same crappy health care. And taxpayers get the bill for a system which becomes increasingly unworkable (witness the U.K.'s NHS). Many Americans may say they want single payer health care, but what they really want is the same sort of health care available now, but without the bills. It won't happen, of course. We'll all get worse care, particularly as we get older. Oh, and rich people will still be able to get better care because the rich always can afford better whatever, no matter the system.

I've spent a great deal of time complaining about the system we have. It has some enormous problems, but that doesn't mean a single payer system would be better. On its most basic level, such a system takes away the individual choice of health care. Liberals argue that the poor don't have choices, but, in fact, the poor also don't have to go without health care. Virtually every place in the U.S. has some form of charity hospital and the poor also have Medicaid. And as for all the people without health insurance, many opt out of the insurance system. Very few are uninsurable, and those who are uninsurable are usually eligible for some state health insurance. In other words, even people like me, who dislike the system we have, can get insurance of some sort.

The problem is that liberals like to turn such debates into a referendum on emotion. It's not fair. You must be hateful, selfish, whatever. But there are just some ideas that don't deserve equal time with others. That's what they won't teach you in diversity class.