Tag: equity

Is DEI about to DIE?

Is it in its last days? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

With the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, he has passed being in the bullseye, but DEI has not. Suppose you have been living under a rock somewhere. In that case, DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, which means focusing on every single minority group out there to exclude the majority in virtue signaling. It also means ignoring minor details for jobs like, oh, ability, experience, and other little stuff like that. Do you help fulfill the quota for sex, sexual orientation, and race? Welcome aboard!

A lot of it was going on with the Secret Service at the attempt being publicly seen to have huge problems and a lot of it was with what people saw the women doing who were part of the Secret Service. This isn’t just men who have been saying this. Women have been saying it too. One woman couldn’t reholster her pistol and the women were asking what they were doing and where they were going. (See here.)

This is not to say that women can’t do this job. I’m sure some could. There are some women out there who are great shots with guns. However, Donald Trump is a big man and if you are going to shield him, you need to be as big as he is. If you also don’t know what to do in a situation like this, you are more of a liability than you are an asset at that point.

The director of the Secret Service has come under fire for wanting a quota of 30% women by 2030 and for also remarks about the dangers of a sloped roof. We also know the assassin was in sight for thirty minutes before anything happened. Why wasn’t anything done?

It might not be any coincidence that shortly after this, Microsoft decides to axe an entire DEI team. At this, I rejoice. Loyal readers know I am deeply interested in the gaming community and nowadays, many of us are dreading new games coming out. Why? Because of DEI. We’re not getting games. We’re getting a political lecture.

Consider also the case of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The Assassin’s Creed games have been known for historical accuracy in the past. Some people thought it could be used to rebuild Notre Dame after the fire. Now this new game is the first one set in Japan and who is upset about it the most?

The Japanese.

They even have a petition out demanding Ubisoft desist in making the game immediately. A lot of it centers around the character Yasuke. Now he is a real historical figure, but he is being made out to be much more than he was. He was an attendant to Nobunaga, but he was not officially a samurai.

There were plenty of Japanese figures that could be chosen, but Ubisoft decided to ignore all of those. Why? DEI. Oh. This black man who the Jesuits brought over is also supposed to be capable of being LGBTQ+. Yep. That makes sense.

Besides, in the game, the assassin is supposed to be able to blend into the crowd. Kill the target, then hide immediately before people realize what has happened. How will this go in Japan? “So the guy who stabbed the victim? Anything distinguishing about him that sets him apart from everyone else?”

Japan says this is a misunderstanding of Japanese culture and the role of the samurai. They also say it will lead to Asian racism. Besides, how do you make a whole game out of a character that we only have a  few scant documents about?

Gamers have been so sick of this that now we have a website set up to deal with this. DEIdetected.com. If your game has the influence of companies like Sweet Baby Inc. involved, we don’t want them. More and more gamers are going to retro games because they can play games without being lectured on politics that way.

The LGBTQ movement is also getting tiresome for gamers. There are plenty of LGBTQ people who just want to live their lives in peace. When you start putting it in everything, everyone gets tired of it. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has been a massive failure and yet they are introducing a new character, Victoria Frias. Who is she? Mrs. Freeze and surprise, surprise, she’s a lesbian.

I watch the videos people make complaining about this. I don’t see anything that indicates to me that these are staunch evangelical Christians. They’re just people who want to play games without politics.

It’s not just games that are having this. Movies that go DEI are not being popular. The usual claim is that many men don’t want to see movies with strong women. Sorry, but I think the Alien franchise and Kill Bill and others did just fine. For the gaming world, there was no uproar when it was discovered that Samus Aran in Metroid was a woman. No one complained about Tomb Raider. (If anything, most men loved Lara Croft. I wonder why….)

Also, consider a TV series like The Acolyte. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a viewer score of 15% (As of the time of this writing). People who are fans of the series tell me that it is completely out of sync with what George Lucas started and dumps all over the franchise. It is simply pushing a woke agenda.

Contrast this with a major motion picture success last year, The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I rarely see movies due to low income now, but I made sure to see this one. I saw in it a love letter to the fans of the game that focused on facets of the game even going all the way back. Spike from Wrecking Crew is even a semi-prominent character in parts of the movie. I even made a video responding to Grace Randolph on it. (I also have someone on campus who is going to teach me about YouTube editing and producing videos so Gaming Theologian should be back soon.)

What makes great games and movies and TV shows successful? Simple point. They are fun. We enjoy them. We don’t go to these to get told that we need to celebrate diversity or that white men are the spawn of the devil. We go to them because we want to have fun.

If you do it right, you can still get a message across in a fun story. There are several fandoms of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings today and yet both of these series are teaching a Christian way of the world. However, both writers made sure that they were making good stories. Most Christian media today is “Hi. We have to point out to you that this is a Christian movie explicitly so we have to have one scene with a cross where we spell out the gospel entirely because you might miss it otherwise. Also, every Christian will be a charming and lovely character and every non-Christian is completely evil.” It doesn’t work when the Woke do it either where every LGBTQ or minority character is completely awesome and every cis straight white male is evil. Most people at the beginning of The Acolyte said the villain will be the straight white male.

If you are to have characters that are “diverse” in a game or movie or TV show, it needs to be natural and relevant to the story and not forced or artificial. I think of Barrett from Final Fantasy VII. He was a black man who was certainly very gruff, but he also had a great love for his daughter and would do anything to help her out. Many of us liked the character.

Consider comic book characters as well. There is a push to often take established characters who have had a history of having romances with the opposite sex, and all of a sudden make them same-sex attracted. If you want to have a superhero who is same-sex attracted, knock yourself out, but make your own. Don’t throw out a character’s entire history just because you want to shoehorn an agenda into it.

However, if you want to write that story, what the fans want is not diversity for the sake of diversity. What they want is a good story. Yes. Believe it or not if you aren’t a part of these worlds, people who read comic books and play video games care about good stories. We want narratives that hold together. We want heroes we can love because they’re heroes and villains we can seek to take down because they’re villains. We don’t mind some shades of grey where it’s hard to tell who is a hero and who is a villain and we don’t mind it when we have a hard time deciding what the right moral choice to make is. That makes it more authentic for us in many ways.

What will Microsoft do about DEI in the future? I don’t know, but I have high hopes. I have high hopes the time has come for DEI to D-I-E. It has been a kiss of death to series that it has been in. Get back to making great entertainment again.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: The Parasitic Mind

What do I think of Gad Saad’s book published by Regnery publishing? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

(Note that this was book was listened to through Audible so I cannot reference pages)

Gad Saad is a Lebanese Jew who is an evolutionary psychologist and probably more on the agnostic/atheistic side and is a Libertarian. I am a caucasian Christian apologist who has never left America and a solid Republican conservative. We are two very different people then and yet I think we would be able to converse on not only many areas we agree on, but many that we disagree on as well.

Saad is a professor and is seeing a contagion rise up in the university. This is a problem where we are more concerned about feelings than we are about truth. The university was meant to be a place where ideas were discussed and students were opened up to contrary thought and opinions. More and more universities are talking about safe spaces and microaggressions and trying to remove anyone who is a speaker that disagrees.

We all saw that when the 2016 election came to a close and soon numerous crowds were out in the public complaining constantly about the results and asking for safe spaces and therapy animals. We have people that are supposed to be either adults or preparing for adulthood and this is what happened. The same happened when Kavanaugh was being appointed to the Supreme Court.

This is also happening when people are allowed to put fear into everyone else because they feel offended. It happens when someone gets to a place of prominence and then something is found from ten years ago that they flippantly said on Twitter and then the Social Justice Warriors come out. This is a crowd that is hungry for blood and will raise their voices until their demands are met.

What is happening is more and more a world where feelings trump reality. If someone who is a boy says that they feel like a girl, well who are we to disagree? If someone then says they are a dog or a fire-breathing dragon or anything else, who are we to disagree? Feelings trump everything else.

This is also a world where anecdotal experience rules the day over real study. Consider the case of the idea that vaccines cause autism. Anecdotes are given of people who have a certain experience and that is supposed to overrule the studies that are done.

Many times, this is all done in the name of such ideas as diversity, inclusivity, and equality. Generally, these are thought to be good things, but not when they are weaponized. If you dare question someone, the first accusation that can be thrown out is racist or sexist or transphone or homophobe or any such claim.

Saad spends a lot of time talking about the whole idea of Islamophobia. He looks at the terrorists on the FBI most wanted list, the worst nations for women to live in, and other similar statistics and what do you know but there’s something that ties these all together. However, these people are said to not follow true Islam. Who does? Well your friend who claims to be a Muslim and eats pork and is gay. He is what Islam is all about.

Ultimately, Saad sees this as a war on reality and reason. I am inclined to agree. This does hit also in the area of science such as when a paper is given that says that women might not be as good as men at XYZ due to sex differences. This is not allowable because it’s sexist. It’s not asked “Is this true?” It’s instead asked “How does this make us feel?”

I did disagree with Saad some when he spoke so much about the scientific method, but this could be a difference in terminology and if we discussed we might find that we agree more than disagree. I would stress that not all things are scientifically verifiable and there are truths of math and logic and also truths of history that we uncover by studying historical documents.

Saad’s final message is that we stand up and let our voices be heard. Someone might unfriend you on Facebook? Big deal. Real friends don’t separate and pull apart just because they have political differences. There will be risks for all of us involved who want to stand up to what we see going on around us, but they will be worth it.

If you care about ideas and truth, get this book, learn it, and spread what you learn.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)