However, the director of the conference emailed our PI and asked if we could make the committee more diverse. There’s me (white dude), two caucasian females, and a professor from Japan.
So now the group is looking for a more diverse student to join the panel in my place. It sucks majorly. We applied to two conferences. One turned us down. This was my one shot at presenting on this research and I can’t because I’m a white guy.
And the worst part is that I don’t feel justified in being mad. The students that will be at this conference NEED to see diversity. They need to be represented and have someone to identify with. I’m absolutely behind having more diversity. I desperately want to see more diversity in the sciences. I want kids to have role models in academia that they can identify with.
But I’m still upset that I got shoved aside for this. Does that make sense? Am I just being selfish about this?
i support diversity also, but this is absolutely not the fucking place to correct that. the place to correct that is in school and via outreach programs.
and by the way - i did not go into tech because there were "strong empowering female role models." i went into tech because i like tech. i was gifted with excellent computer science programs in school and in my community that got me into it. fuck that noise, and fuck these organizers for being dickheads.
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@pasture @fluffy
Since y'all too coward to say it, I will. Fuck diversity. Diversity is nothing more than a dog whistle for borderline communists. Demanding you put some poc front and center instead of the people who did the work is racist bullshit, it's corruption, it's an attempt to destroy each and every institution that made western civilization work.
You want diversity, how about you put a fundamentalist christian, an atheist, a feminist and a 9/11 truther in the same team. That's the diversity I'd support. But since that's not what we're talking about, fuck diversity.
for that matter, the us govt isn't really run by the people in charge, rather, it's as the french president puts it, POTUS reports to a board run by american corps.
to get 5 you'd have to argue that twitter/fb deliberately not policing cancel culture somehow counts as "govt policing". it's a hard point to make, but not impossible. I think I am not articulate enough to argue it.
@fluffy @pasture
I think a question that needs to be asked is: will the government still be the one doing the governing? At what point do big tech have more influence on the daily lives of people, through their platform policies, than the official government? And if that point is reached and surpassed, is the government the one we should be scared of becoming tyrannical, or are the companies?
As 5 currently stands, if there are entities that are already doing the government's work, is it really necessary for the government to invest resources in their own organizations? If you're the government, why not profit from what's being done already, and only intervene when you think twitter/fb aren't being tyrannical enough? Let tech companies build the framework by themselves, as they are currently doing, and at some point in the future, if you really need to push things farther, you can just take them over.
Now whether it will be the government or corporations that will become the big tyrant in the end, I don't know. But so far they seem to be working towards the same goal, using each other at the very least, maybe even cooperating fully without us knowing.
