DEI is an acronym for Don't Expect Improvement

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

47 minutes ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

Ummm.... where did I say I was offended, or that you were an enemy?

Your posts have not offended, just... confused (to use your phrasing)

I often find myself reading tone and intent into these posts, and have to check those inclinations.  Doing either pushes my own thoughts and biases onto the other person posting.

So, I ask a lot of questions to get at the heart of a matter for understanding.  I do find people often take offense at the mere asking of questions.  This I find puzzling.   And it is why I often say if you look for offense, you will find it.

And on your discourse on civil discourse, I think advice given by another poster is valid:  If you don't like it, you do not have to engage.  I ignore lots of people here in that way 😜

You're right, I expressed myself imprecisely. Negative affect of some kind. I read downvotes as negative, for example. I believe you do too. Laughing at sincerity I also read as some kind of negative affect. But so is reading what I wrote in such a way that you thought I was trying to dismiss OP. I mean, I presume that you think that dismissing people is bad. When that wasn't at all what I was trying to do, clearly something went very wrong in the communication there, which you also acknowledge. I just want to be clear that it's not you asking questions that makes me think negative affect. I don't even feel like you've asked that many TBH.

This is also hard to make heads or tails of. I am not offended, I am frustrated that we're probably putting people off Scouts BSA. Which I have said many times at this point. So ignoring this does absolutely nothing to help protect scouting, or the scouts who are likely to (ironically) find more value in affinity groups. Like I already said in response to the suggestion previously. Do you not care that some scouts are likely to read the OP and wonder if they really belong in the BSA, or some prospective scouts or parents being likely to say "yeah, let's not, we're not really welcome"? yknot has said this, more or less, many times before and nobody seems to respond to that either. We can't all be part of every community, of course, so there's value in saying "hey, this thing is going to be viewed poorly and/or misunderstood by some".

What does this response mean overall? Are you uninterested in civil discourse as defined by these different academic resources, some of which you provided yourself? Was that more important than the actual issue here of the value of affinity groups? I've been in a lot of long conversations with people I disagree with online, and they didn't feature this normal people doing normal things and then bam quality. We played by the same debate rules (civil as per all the stuff that came up when I looked for a reference) and actually responded to what the other person said about the issue. And real mutual understanding arose. So I know it's possible.

On that issue - I joined SWE when I encountered real, clear resistance to my place in my lab in grad school. A labmate started blocking my access to our shared equipment when I didn't want to go on a date with him. My advisor threatened to fire us both if we couldn't "get along". So I joined SWE for emotional support while beating his blocking game and figuring out what else I could do than talk to our advisor. It was very helpful in that SWE is a pool of other engineers who are women to discuss and think through the problem with, people in the same general situation so they understand the context. (Talking to male engineers just turned into a grilling of what I might have done wrong and checking on whether "I had an axe to grind", so I stopped talking about it with them. ) From what I've seen here, some scouts out there are encountering resistance to them being in Scouts BSA, and that's a problem! A problem that affinity groups are there to help. That's why I'm pretty sure that if a scout who's being mistreated by fellow scouts and maybe even scouters (as has actually been reported by scouters here as happening in the case of gender) based on demographics reads what OP and you said about affinity groups, it's going to hit them hard emotionally and not in a good way. I've been there. And these scouts are younger than I was - they're going to have a harder time taking for granted that they do belong. It's just another form of bullying. 

Nobody has managed to produce a shared of evidence that the BSA scout affinity groups came with the potential downside of excluding nonparticipants or that people not in the demographic of the affinity group being actually excluded. You've claimed it does, but that's just argument by assertion. There's no proof for your claim, it's just a lot of claims without backup. And that makes it look even worse to any scouts in a jam reading this. We really need to move forward as an organization. Women are allowed to join, LGBTQIA+ folks are allowed to join, black people are allowed to join, Latinos are allowed to join... but are they welcome? They should be! Ranting about "wokeness" is such a strong culture war flag that it sends the message that they aren't by general cultural association. And it doesn't get better when there's no evidence for that there's even a problem.  Just rewrite what you mean by "wokeness" in specific and neutral language and we can talk about it without putting anyone off Scouts BSA or making bullying worse!

[InquisitiveScouter]

I would say to anyone who is making a decision about Scouting to not pay attention to posts on a website that is not official.  And that ALL Scouting is local.  So check out your local Troop to see if it is a good fit.

I honestly do not believe anyone is so naïve as to think that way.

We can (and do) have any number of people here who are not even involved in Scouting, yet post their ideas in conversations about topics.

Just because you do not like people's opinions, or how they express them, or the way they pose an idea or question doesn't mean you are the hall monitor who has to intervene.

And you have incorrectly conflated way too much stuff here for me to pick it all apart.

Except one bit:

26 minutes ago, AwakeEnergyScouter said:

Nobody has managed to produce a shared of evidence that the BSA scout affinity groups came with the potential downside of excluding nonparticipants or that people not in the demographic of the affinity group being actually excluded.

I would say the OP provided evidence, through his experience, that these groups were detrimental to him, and made him feel excluded.  The very fact that no affinity group marketing made him feel welcome to that group is his experiential evidence, is it not?  And his expression that he knows his creating an affinity group for "...straight white folks..." would only create further division is evidence that these groups, and the way they are marketed has had a negative effect on him.

 

 

[Navybone]

3 hours ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

I would say the OP provided evidence, through his experience, that these groups were detrimental to him, and made him feel excluded.  The very fact that no affinity group marketing made him feel welcome to that group is his experiential evidence, is it not?  And his expression that he knows his creating an affinity group for "...straight white folks..." would only create further division is evidence that these groups, and the way they are marketed has had a negative effect on him.

The OP provided evidence that there were affinity group meetings at NOAC (5 March) He did not specifically state why they were detrimental other than they exist.  He never states exactly why.  He then provided examples at a national level that had no actual connection or identified applicability to BSA.

His apprehension on a white male affinity group is his perception -  or did someone tell him he cannot form one?

[MikeS72]

1 hour ago, Navybone said:

The OP provided evidence that there were affinity group meetings at NOAC (5 March) He did not specifically state why they were detrimental other than they exist.  He never states exactly why.  He then provided examples at a national level that had no actual connection or identified applicability to BSA.

His apprehension on a white male affinity group is his perception -  or did someone tell him he cannot form one?

 

1 hour ago, Navybone said:

The OP provided evidence that there were affinity group meetings at NOAC (5 March) He did not specifically state why they were detrimental other than they exist.  He never states exactly why. 

Go back to late July/early August of 2020 and you will see more explicit examples of why the OP was angry about one specific affinity group at the last NOAC.

While the only affinity group I attended that week was a NESA group I knew exactly what and whom he was angry about, as a very crowded dining hall found me at an empty space at a table with the person he described in detail several times.  In the 20 or so minutes I was there I found the young man personable and polite.  If anyone remembers the conversations right after NOAC there is no doubt what the OP was referring to at that time or what he is referring to in this thread.

 

 

 

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

 

On 3/15/2024 at 8:50 AM, InquisitiveScouter said:

I would say to anyone who is making a decision about Scouting to not pay attention to posts on a website that is not official.  And that ALL Scouting is local.  So check out your local Troop to see if it is a good fit.

I honestly do not believe anyone is so naïve as to think that way.

We can (and do) have any number of people here who are not even involved in Scouting, yet post their ideas in conversations about topics.

Just because you do not like people's opinions, or how they express them, or the way they pose an idea or question doesn't mean you are the hall monitor who has to intervene.

And you have incorrectly conflated way too much stuff here for me to pick it all apart.

Except one bit:

I would say the OP provided evidence, through his experience, that these groups were detrimental to him, and made him feel excluded.  The very fact that no affinity group marketing made him feel welcome to that group is his experiential evidence, is it not?  And his expression that he knows his creating an affinity group for "...straight white folks..." would only create further division is evidence that these groups, and the way they are marketed has had a negative effect on him.

 

 

Yes, all scouting is local. But scouting has a particular value foundation (Scout Law and Oath) that forms the shared ethical and moral framework within which we scout. The types of approaches and styles in scouting that vary from place to place can be substantial, but can't really include whether the pack or troop is doing their best to follow the Scout Law and Oath. Assuming that they are should always be correct.

Why is this relevant? Because being untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, uncourteous, unkind, disobedient, sour, wasteful, cowardly, dirty, and irreverent for any and all reasons is something to correct if you're a scout. Doing it frequently, and even worse, on purpose, is a problem to address and solve. We discuss how to address and correct bad scout attitudes here on the forum sometimes, so I believe that we all agree that's a problem if it occurs. Since the reason for not following the Scout Law and Oath is only important in determining how to address the problem, it then follows that being untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, uncourteous, unkind, sour, or cowardly towards girls, LGBTQIA+ folks, black people, brown people, blue people, pink people, Jews, Muslims, Janis, and members of any other group of people because of them being in that group is a problem that needs addressing and solving. In other words, if we see scouts being untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, uncourteous, unkind, sour, or cowardly towards girls, LGBTQIA+ folks, black people, brown people, blue people, pink people, Jews, Muslims, Jains, and members of any other group of people we need to do something to stop that behavior and correct it. If you disagree, could you please explain why?

We have several reports of female and LGBTQIA+ scouts being met by untrustworthiness, disloyalty, unhelpfulness, unfriendliness, lack of courtesy, unkindness, and/or sourness specifically just for being female and LGBTQIA+, respectively. So how are we going to solve the attitude problems that the scouts not living up to the scout law are having? What are we going to do? It's not an easy question to answer, but because we are committed to following the Scout Law and Oath we are going to help these scouts that are repeatedly running into other scouts that are one or more out of untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, uncourteous, unkind, and sour towards them. Right? If you do not think that we should do something to help, please explain why.

One way to help answer is to survey scouts about their experiences to try to systematically get at the scale of the problem. Not sure what's in the survey national is sending out, but I think we can all agree that surveying both girls and boys is not discriminating against boys. Right? If someone thinks it is, could you please post an explanation of why you think that?

Another method to help find the answer to what to do is affinity groups. Like with the survey, the details matter in whether it is effective and whether there are undesirable side effects. 

Not entirely separate from these two is developing an understanding of whether there are patterns in why the scouts being untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, uncourteous, unkind, and sour. This could lead to additional insights into how this problem can be solved.

It's a problem whether I like people's opinions, or how they express them, or the way they pose an idea or question or not. Focusing on me is not focusing on the issue. This is a problem for which the solution fundamentally comes out of the Scout Law.

Be loyal, show that you care about your fellow scouts (and scouters). Be helpful, volunteer to help others without expecting a reward. Be friendly, be a friend to everyone, even people who are very different from you. Be courteous, be polite to everyone and always use good manners. Be kind, treat others as you want to be treated. Be cheerful, try to help others be happy. This stuff isn't just for children, you know. It's stuck around for so long because there are timeless, universal values in there.

I do not appreciate your analogy implying that I am inappropriately appointing myself "hall monitor". I find it condescending. I also interpret it as implying that breaking the Scout Law is fine and that nobody needs to do anything about that, like nobody should be "hall monitor" and ruin the fun, no matter what happens. Anybody intervening in stopping bad behavior in the hall is sticking their nose where it doesn't belong and should mind their own business. Is that what you meant? I hope not. Anarchy is not a good way of running a society. Societies need rules, and the society has to enforce the rules for them to matter in practice.

Which brings me to the problem with "not pay attention to posts on a website that is not official". Do you honestly think that everyone follows all rules and policies and the spirit thereof at all times? That all you need to do to prevent fraud is to make it illegal? That you can fix racism by making it illegal to discriminate? That all you need to do to create equal opportunities - not even equity, but equal opportunities - for women in the workplace is to outlaw discrimination? If so, I think you are a bit unrealistic about how to solve social problems. Littering is illegal where I live, but it's the dirtiest place in the West I've ever lived in by far, and it's clear just upon quick examination that there's some kind of mindset/culture difference that creates the litter problem. People here as a group don't find littering to be all that bad, evidently, since they do it so much. Why don't they? Probably important to answer if you want to convince them to litter less. They also pop fireworks en masse in densely populated areas full of veterans with PTSD who politely ask people to not do it every 4th of July and New Year, despite the fact that there is an ordinance against it. The veterans with PTSD are ignored, sometimes very rudely. The people being rude clearly don't think there's a problem - understanding why they don't is key to getting them to change their behavior. In the same way, you have to change patterns of thought leading to behavior if you want to actually create a meritocracy in an organization, a society with equal opportunities for all, a society with justice for all, etc. A policy or rule is a start, but never the finish.

I poked around the Internet and contacted the pack we ultimately joined several times to try to gauge the likelihood of it containing people who might put my scout off scouting permanently. My suspicion was that if my scout gets the cold shoulder after joining because of their gender and/or not being Christian, they're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and I may not even be able to convince them to try again. Would it be most unscoutlike for them to be met that way? Of course. But it's happening somewhere, as reported in media and fellow scouters here, and it's no surprise that it is given the fierce and fiery resistance to girls in the BSA. We have folks right here who think girls are preventing the boys they scout with from developing the best character, and that boys can't get a fair shake in the BSA anymore. Official policy matters, but also what the proportion of people you will interact with who actually agree with and follow the policy in letter and spirit are. Searching the Internet is a default thing to do, whatever else people are doing. I mean, would you send your child to a summer camp from which you can find video online showing leaders ranting about how children like yours shouldn't be there because they will ruin everything even though the official policy is that they may attend? Maybe that leader is a freak and won't even be there. But maybe they all feel that way and this guy just said the quiet part out loud. How would you know? It will make you hesitate, and if you're not a priori convinced it's a great camp you might not bother to sort it out. Even as a scout that loved scouting it gave me pause for a year. I sincerely doubt I am the only one.

Prospective parents, especially ones that weren't scouts, are going to be far more sensitive to perception of potential harm than people already involved with scouting. This is also why we talk so much about how safe scouting is now in recruiting, right? We recognize that the CSA scandal put a lot of parents off BSA, no matter how many scouts were not abused and had a great, life-changing experience. Every and any new case of CSA in the BSA is going to be bad for recruiting. Hopefully I don't need to go through why in detail. It's the same for perceived misogyny, homophobia, etc. What you mean may not even have been that but confirmation bias is most definitely a thing. We're not going to fix the recruiting drag by telling parents their doubts are just confirmation bias even if it's true.

I disagree that OP provided evidence of harm. I did not read their post to say that they felt harmed at all, just angry about "wokeness". (Whatever that means to them.) Another example of how it wasn't productive because it was too angry and too vague to start a real conversation about solving problems. We inferred different things from it. But even if you're right and they did mean it as evidence of harm that we should accept at face value and address, then we must also accept feelings of being excluded by online rants about girls in the BSA as harm that we should accept at face value that we should address.

Just feeling aversion or offense isn't sufficient evidence of harm for society as a whole to act upon. Friends can reasonably comfort, but it's not reasonable to never be offended. Now, if the offense is caused by scouts and/or scouters not follow the scout law, then it reduces to the case above. But each individual does also have a responsibility to manage one's own emotions to ensure that one isn't overreacting. (This calibration is, in fact, part of the usefulness of affinity groups. It's a quick way to find useful people to check your reaction with.) Not every negative emotional reaction is warranted. Sometimes it's a misunderstanding. 

Denial of opportunities, more challenges to overcome, a lower reward rate for the same effort, harassment, or other actual obstacles thrown up for some folks but not others is the level of harm you need to show to justify action on a policy level, such as closing affinity groups. In the case of the BSA, if it turns out that scouts are systematically mistreating straight, white men then we would need to figure out how to put a stop to that. But OP definitely did not show that they are systematically mistreated for being straight, white, and male, and didn't relate any incidents of the Scout Law being broken towards them. That's what all the questions digging for more information are about. Maybe we're finding something on that front.

21 hours ago, MikeS72 said:

Go back to late July/early August of 2020 and you will see more explicit examples of why the OP was angry about one specific affinity group at the last NOAC.

While the only affinity group I attended that week was a NESA group I knew exactly what and whom he was angry about, as a very crowded dining hall found me at an empty space at a table with the person he described in detail several times.  In the 20 or so minutes I was there I found the young man personable and polite.  If anyone remembers the conversations right after NOAC there is no doubt what the OP was referring to at that time or what he is referring to in this thread.

Still, more detail is needed here, like what person and what did they do exactly. Not everybody will know this background. What happened in detail?

Edited March 16 by AwakeEnergyScouter
Removed the quote boxes I couldn't remove on my mobile

[fred8033]

Interesting articles in the last few days.  

• Uri Berliner (NPR editor) published editorial about NPR, bias, DEI and other related topics.  Really well thought out.
  • https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust
• Uri Berliner suspended by NPR.
  • https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/16/media/npr-suspends-uri-berliner-liberal-bias/index.html

I'm a four decade long NPR listener from three different parts of the country.  My local channels have absolutely been incredible.  But like the article says, I've had a hard time continuing listening recently because of the repetitive and think-this-way news coverage.  

I highly recommend both articles.  

[RememberSchiff]

On 4/16/2024 at 12:34 PM, fred8033 said:

Interesting articles in the last few days.  

• Uri Berliner (NPR editor) published editorial about NPR, bias, DEI and other related topics.  Really well thought out.
  • https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust
• Uri Berliner suspended by NPR.
  • https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/16/media/npr-suspends-uri-berliner-liberal-bias/index.html

I'm a four decade long NPR listener from three different parts of the country.  My local channels have absolutely been incredible.  But like the article says, I've had a hard time continuing listening recently because of the repetitive and think-this-way news coverage.  

I highly recommend both articles.  

"...the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity."

Thanks. Ironically perhaps, I find myself reading bbc.com more and npr less for balanced US news.

[fred8033]

41 minutes ago, RememberSchiff said:

Thanks. Ironically perhaps, I find myself reading bbc.com more and npr less for balanced US news.

Me too.  

[BetterWithCheddar]

Interestingly, a fair number of large companies seem to be pivoting away from the loaded DEI term:

Under attack, DEI quietly transforms - The Washington Post

Anecdotally, I'll mention that I may have hit a breaking point on the HR-speak at work. We were recently instructed to avoid the term "good fit" when describing a potential new hire. You see, "good fit" might imply that we have preconceived notions about what we value in a candidate, including a preferred race, religion, gender, or personality. Instead, we were asked to describe a strong candidate as a "cultural add." Can you imagine losing your job and having to explain in your first interview that you were let go because you used the dreaded "GF" word?

[Armymutt]

I guess I don't understand the need for "affinity groups" in Scouting.  To me, when one joins Scouting, one sheds all of one's other identities.  Same when I go to work.  In Scouting, I'm whatever position is on my sleeve and an Eagle Scout.  I'm not Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc.  I'm not gay, straight, etc.  I'm a male only for YP and bathroom reasons.  I'm not Dr. Armymutt, I'm Mr. Armymutt or just Armymutt.  When someone holds tightly onto whatever they are outside of Scouting, I question their values and their commitment to Scouting.  If the idea of simply following the Scout Law and Scout Oath are off putting, then perhaps Scouting isn't for that person.  If one needs to see people that look like them before joining an organization, then perhaps the mirror section at the local store is a better solution.