Followup on Diversity
Last week I wrote that I was confused on this diversity thing:
For years, women at Harvard argued there needed to be more women on the
faculty to support "diversity". I have always thought that diversity
meant that you had a lot of difference - in this case different kinds
of people with different skills. Now, Larry Summers is getting
attacked by the female faculty for implying that women are, uhh,
perhaps different from men. Women are insisting that there is no
justification for even studying the question of whether women are different than men. They maintain that women are the same, no argument allowed. But if they are the same, how is hiring more women contributing to diversity?
Fortunately, hat tip to James Taranto, the diversity term is clarified on the web site of an Oregon lodge. The page begins:
WE WELCOME DIVERSITY
Respecting the interdependence & diversity of all life.
Helpfully, they clarify what they mean by diversity a bit down the page:
No Smokers...No Pets...No Visitors...No Hummers, No RVs, No Bush Voters (due to his environmental destructive policies.)
Oh, and in the spirit of good customer service: no refunds for cancellations.
It can't be long before this same text appears on the Harvard web site.
PS- I would be curious to see a quality, thoughtful listing of GWB's war-crimes on the environment. Not his "lack of commitment", but actual changes in regulation. While I know environmentalists hate his rhetoric, in reality, he has not actually changed much, other than the Clear Skies Initiative, which I discussed here as actually reducing emissions. Heck, he's actually a disappointment for those of us who would like to see a roll-back of some of the sillier environmental rules (e.g. ANWR drilling).
Presumably environmentalists dislike GWB's going along with the Senate's 98-0 rejection of Kyoto, but does this reaction really make sense for minimize-man's-impact-on-nature people like those quoted above? Global warming hasn't been shown to hurt plants or animals or such - I am not sure many would notice. Global warming primarily impacts man, and in particular, technological high-population-density coast-living man. I would think that rising oceans swamping out civilization would be a positive outcome for these folks. (update: more on Clear Skies here at Volokh)
