The Rosebud MEGATHREAD

[Canadiandude2]

You can disagree all you want but you need to demonstrate how each step along the slippery slope is a necessary and logical outcome from prior steps. Furthermore, the questions I proposed to you were not merely hypothetical.

I’m glad you understand my though processes. Now defend yours.Answer the questions I asked of you in my prior replies please. Otherwise, there’s no point in arguing further.

Competencies are not attained independent of the systemic advantages and disadvantages present within one’s society, nor are they currently the only qualities that matter in deciding who gets chosen for advantageous positions and other privileges.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Competencies are not attained independent of the systemic advantages and disadvantages present within one’s society

Exactly. Which is why developing a new hierarchy based on arbitrary indicators such as skin color or sexual preference makes little to no sense when, if we’re trying to establish canonical groups of oppressed people we have to ignore fundamental advantages such as cognitive ability, or physical ability, or even attractiveness. You’re arguing under the assumption that we can find enough people within each group with enough competency or ability to adequately fill positions without much of a problem. That’s a faithful assumption with little to no basis in reality.

nor are they currently the only qualities that matter in deciding who gets chosen for advantageous positions and other privileges.

Exactly. However you’re suggesting we can nail down equity by dividing people into, I dunno, four or five obvious differences, when in reality there are thousands of differences both apparent and not readily apparent in population groups that will either have to be ignored to their detriment or we create a fantastically clownish system that can never function well because it’s laboring under its own weight.

eta: I’ll go back through your prior post and input any thoughts I have.

- Doc

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Q: Would you be willing to compromise on competency or availability if the standard within your system is predicated on the physical features and sexual identity as you described above?

A: I don’t see why we’d have to compromise anything.

You’re argument (notice I didn’t say ‘you’) assumes that these bright, competent people don’t already exist in sufficient numbers, or be incentivized, trained, and supported to become sufficiently competent.

And you’re arguing that they do exist, which is just faith-based wish fulfillment. For example, oil field workers are predominantly male. Are we at the point where we arbitrarily fill oil field positions with a ‘diverse’ cast of workers simply based on their identities? The thought is absurd. We fill the positions with willing participants. What about HR positions which have an over representation of white women? Why is that the case with HR positions and not oil field workers? Do we mandate a nationwide diversification of HR positions, but not oil field worker positions? This gets wonky very quickly because there are so many factors that figure into a job’s desirability that parsing the job into arbitrary requirements is an exercise in banality.

Quotas can also be set at manageable targets or ranges that reflect a demographic’s general proportion of a population.

And they can also be set an unmanageable targets and ranges. This is just trying to turn fantasy into policy. At some point you’re going to have to create make-work jobs that begin to weigh down on the organization’s ability to function as designed.

Furthermore, are different standards necessarily unreasonable? For example, in the Canadian Armed Forces men and women must meet slightly different standards of physicality, and there remain many women and men able to surpass these standards all the same.

And I think that’s great. However, the demands of a military environment do in fact affect servicemembers differently, given the nature of the job, and will produce different efficiencies depending on the constraints of the group being represented. Where the physical requirements for the Infantry have little difference among racial groups, it reveals a huge difference for sex. Do we ignore that reality for representation, or do we just slot more people from Group A into Job A so we can ‘balance the numbers’? I’d argue doing that puts wholly unqualified people into positions of responsibility that puts the whole at risk of inefficiency. It’s better to have a job-related set of requirements, and design a more or less blind system that selects the people suited for the position. Is this not the true aim of an egalitarian society?

Are we so certain we don’t already have a complex hierarchy of needs, based on particular privileged group-interests, that’s not already breaking under the weight of its own making?

I dunno. What particular hierarchy are you talking about?

What (and who) defines these needs?

The people with a stake in the organization being successful. Why would you even ask a question like that?

What is the logical and necessary progression here between each degree of your slippery slope?

That’s actually my question for you. You’re arguing in favor of arbitrary representation. The “logical progression” is an increasing amount of absurdity that anchors the organization in mediocrity or worse, failure.

Are complex systems necessarily doomed to failure?

No. They’re “doomed” toward complexity, which is why facile fixes such as putting this or that person in a complex role is disasteous.

Can your argument [ref Harvard admissions] be substantiated with a link to a reliable and valid source for the data provided?

The example given was simply to point out that the unintended consequence of one fix leads to another problem that needs fixing. If Group B is gaining admissions to School B based on, say, skin color alone, that ignores the other problem of over representation by Group B’s ethnicity at the expense of Group B’s other ethnic groups. If you adjust admissions to be more inclusive of ethnicities within Group B it becomes infinitely recursive in its unfairness. You’re not solving a problem with Group B, you’re just creating more under the current screening process. This will eventually have a deleterious effect on the school’s hard earned reputation or effectiveness as talent moves elsewhere. Then you're caught in a ‘chasing the rabbit’ game where you’re now trying to make all academic institutions equitable which results in an overall order of magnitude greater absurdity as you chase equity at the expense of ability. If Harvard, from my aforementioned post, becomes a diploma mill in pursuit of equity its overall brand suffers, in addition to academia itself, which just becomes a mummer’s parade of pseudoacademics.

I’ll have to take a break because I have a few things going on right now. I’ll return to this shortly.

- Doc

[Canadiandude2]

Competencies are not attained independent of the systemic advantages and disadvantages present within one’s society

Exactly. Which is why developing a new hierarchy based on arbitrary indicators such as skin color or sexual preference makes little to no sense when, if we’re trying to establish canonical groups of oppressed people we have to ignore fundamental advantages such as cognitive ability, or physical ability, or even attractiveness. You’re arguing under the assumption that we can find enough people within each group with enough competency or ability to adequately fill positions without much of a problem. That’s a faithful assumption with little to no basis in reality.

nor are they currently the only qualities that matter in deciding who gets chosen for advantageous positions and other privileges.

Exactly. However you’re suggesting we can nail down equity by dividing people into, I dunno, four or five obvious differences, when in reality there are thousands of differences both apparent and not readily apparent in population groups that will either have to be ignored to their detriment or we create a fantastically clownish system that can never function well because it’s laboring under its own weight.

eta: I’ll go back through your prior post and input any thoughts I have.

- Doc

I think you are misunderstanding the implications of your own argument then.

I’m not gonna repeat myself but some of your points remain grounded in assumptions that are not fact, or neglects to understand how competency is achieved, and difficulty in assuring that other things aren’t being the deciding factors involved.

[Craig Paxton]

Interesting debate. I watched the explosive moment regarding me about half way through. RFM calls me “mentally troubled” and Kwaku claims I was “assaulted.”

Men have been using women to make arguments against each other since men first started fighting over women.

The problem is that I’m not “mentally troubled” even if the troubles I’ve faced would have given me every excuse to be. It’s pretty standard, from my perspective, to see men using character assassinations of women they’ve never met in an effort to protect other men they know well from character assassinations (whether the other men are apostles, prophets or podcasters).

I think you’d all have a pretty rough time selling “mentally troubled” to those who know me well. What’s frightening is that abusive men often count on treating women badly enough to make them “mentally troubled” so the abusive men can use the “mentally troubled” character assassination against the women they’ve abused in efforts to protect themselves. It’s standard textbook stuff.

Am I financially troubled? Definitely. And that is the fault of the way men treat women inside and outside the church. But I’m sure I’ll be able to fix the problem eventually.

And I never claimed “assault.” That’s a convenient sound bite for Kwaku and the Midnight Mormons, but it’s a gross oversimplification of the standard reality half of this planet faces on a regular basis.

I get that what needs to happen to resolve this ridiculousness is for me to speak in a bigger way. The problem is that I think both sides of this debate are dominated by limited paradigms that have little to do with the actually reality we’re all swimming in. That makes it hard for me to care about the things either side cares about.

I care about other things. Not this stuff…. although it is weird to know there’s and explosiveness surrounding the way I’ve documented this situation rather than disappearing as John wanted and tried to force.

And Jeez….. study a bit more European and African history, Kwaku, before making claims using the history of secularism v. spirituality to be the root cause of the troubles our nation is facing in 2021. I waited for RFM to address the problems with Kwaku’s arguments, but maybe RFM doesn’t see them. Or maybe he gets addresses them in the second half of the debate…. idk. It’s like the blind debating the blind.

From where I sit, I’m not the one who’s “mentally troubled.” There’s a lot more to understand than the foolishness you’re all spending your time on.

I’d like to think you’d all care about discovering more…… but you have to have the guts to really look. Nobody can force anyone to really search out reality. That’s on you.

And no RFM, I’m not going to read this thread and converse with you. You haven’t earned that level of respect. Be more honest with yourself and others. And make amends when they are due.

There are too many men talking about too much with too little insight into the lived experiences of 50% of the population.

———

My statement regarding “assault”: https://www.mormonrosebud.com/regarding-assault/

I've been a critic. That said, You've NEVER (to the best of my knowledge) ever provided a specific case of the so called wrongs that John Dehlin has done to you. What the “F” did he do to you and why can't you move on and let it go?

Perhaps I could be somewhat more sympathetic towards you were you able to answer that one simple question.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Alright, before I work my way through the rest of this post of yours I just want to note that, from my perspective, as we gain the tools to understand morality, within the scope of the human experience, we don’t need a god or a devil in order to contrast it against a problem or a solution. Couching complex or nuanced legal, technical, or moral problems within a broad brush narrative such as “The Patriarchy” (the devil) only serves to distract us from the problem at hand, and will most likely lead us down a disastrous path because simplistic sloganeering that evokes archetypal imagery is great for Catholic mass, but it’s terrible for, “I need to hire a software engineer to lead my dev team working on such and such client’s business need.”

Ok, back to the topic.

Do you mean Mormon or Latter-Day Saint? Not all of the former are the latter and many of the latter no longer associate themselves as the former.

Yes. I’m, talking about the inevitable not-representation of a group or identity that isn’t fairly represented by the arbitrary hierarchy that is created to right the perceived wrong of under representation.

Is there a special equity interest in representing white Latter-Day Saints at Yale or post-secondary institutions more generally? What about non-white Latter-Day Saints? Are Latter-day Saints marginalized within the United States? Are whites marginalized within the United States? In comparison to what or whom?

Exactly. Who gets to determine if a group or sub-group has been historically disadvantaged? Mormons view themselves as historically disadvantaged and oppressed, while I bet the population writ large doesn’t. We’re now stuck with the institution ignoring the claims of oppression because? What gives them special dispensation to confer protected or unprotected status on a group?

So, let’s say an institution gives special status to Racial Group C. How do we determine fairness within that group? Should we confer special status on Racial Group C -subgroup Women? Now we’re discriminating against Racial Subgroup C’s economically disadvantaged subgroup if we give preference to women based on their genitalia. What about subgroup LGBTQ+ if they’re slotted behind women, but in font of subgroup ‘economic disadvantaged’? What about subgroup LGBTQ+ men, or FTM, if they’re slotted behind subgroup LGTBQ+ women or MTF? What if TERFs complain? It’s an endless recursion of complaints, hard feelings, and a shifting away from the organization’s mission when this endless infighting happens.

At what rate do white Latter-Day Saints achieve post-secondary education in the US? How does this compare with non-white Latter-day Saints in the US.

Clearly it depends on the culture of each subgroup, and what it demands of the student. Utah has some of the lowest investments in their school systems in the nation, but manage to produce high rates of academic achievement. Is the answer to arbitrarily promote students based on external features because representation matters, or do we re-tool how we teach underperforming students without sacrificing their mastery of subject material? How do you overcome the cultural disadvantages they may face at home, church, or in their community? For example, I now live in a rural community. Would it make sense to give a student from my area a full-ride scholarship if they haven’t mastered their topics over an urban kid who is in the top 5% of their class? If we do that, give the rural kid a full-ride scholarship over the urban kid because of representation, what long-term effects does that have on the system? I’d argue you make the whole weaker for promoting the unprepared student over the prepared student.

What about between different ethnic backgrounds, and between race-based categories in the US more generally? Do the same, but with other variables: Income level; representation across high-income jobs; occupational mobility; life-expectancy; etc Is there something about being a white Latter-Day Saint that is disadvantageous in your country as opposed to being a non-white Latter-Day Saint? Caucasian compared to other ethnic backgrounds more generally in the US? Latter-Day Saints compared to other religious identities more generally in your country? What about level and degree of documented hate crimes?

Addressed above.

My goal was never homogeneity. Exactitude. Or even the absence of unfairness.

Well, that’s a problem when trying to right perceived wrongs. Exactitude is necessary unless you’re ok with inequity. Then we’re back to square one.

Policy furthermore is negotiable, adaptable, fluid.

It’s also rigid, inflexible, and permanent until it isn’t.

re: the lack of white Mormon representation at Yale?

I believe you racialized my example. Which. You know. Is a window into your soul, not mine. Whatever th case may be, we on a Mormon Discussions Board. It makes sense to keep things contextual.

Or the premise of challenging patriarchy, and other similar systems of supremacy, with improvement not nec perfection in mind?

Because I wanted to understand why you think patriarchy is bad. I think a patriarchal system is as susceptible to corruption as any other hierarchy. I don’t think you’re making a compelling argument for whatever system you believe will be implemented in the name of fairness.

Curious.

Indeed.

I think a lot of us have lived through some form of systemic discrimination, whether perpetuated by gatekeepers, or by people who belong to Group D ensuring their folks get and keep a choice position or assignment.

- Doc

[huckelberry]

Doc, I hope not to simplify too much but I have some agreement with you here. I am pretty sure you are following the arguments of Jordan Peterson. The example of oil rig workers being male by choice is a good example. He also makes points about Sweden find that trying to even out opportunities resulted in continued difference in career choices reflecting sex. Aiming at equality of outcomes may simply strive against free choice of participants.

I guess in my mind it is pretty simple to say striving for equality of outcomes is absurd. Making some adjustments to counter clear disparities of opportunity makes sense as a limited strategy.

I find Jordan Peterson a bit of a puzzle. I think his passion for presenting some basic values is interesting and valuable. I keep thinking he may be overly paranoid about the neomarxists and such. He certainly has been attacked by some obnoxious narrowminded self congratulating students and academics. He may do some intentional provoking.(and that might not be all bad but serve some purpose)

[Rosebud]

Although they would like me to be so they could more effectively use that argument to discredit me.

However, unfortunately for them, that one won’t work in my case. Anyone who tries to use that argument automatically puts a target on their own back because they out themselves as either an offender or an offender defender.

Apparently there are many posters on this board who fall into that category. What all such posters are missing was the level-headedness, emotional stability and foresight my decision to use “Rosebud” here required. I was able to protect myself and my children financially (at least enough to survive until now) and make an effective record the public deserved while simultaneously dealing with extreme cyber bullying intended to silence me and destroy me financially. It was a rough decade+ for sure.

I wasn’t able to navigate this exceptionally difficult situation so successfully because I was “crazy,” “mentally troubled” or “unwell.” I was able to navigate it because I was smart, independent, free thinking and resourceful. You witnessed my level headedness and resourcefulness and your response to it tells the world about you, not me. It required a lot of emotional stability and fortitude to continue on in my intent to make an important record amongst the abuses I faced here. This board is unhealthy, but my record exists despite your abuses and has changed the dynamics in exMormonism as I predicted from the beginning that it would.

I knew what I was doing. I was speaking the truth and I had no reason to back down from it. No one could derail me because I have a strong mind, a strong sense of ethics, and am emotionally capable. Again, assumptions to the contrary betray the assumers.

My strategy of protecting myself with the pseudonym Rosebud here worked while I needed it to work and I have paved the way for what I hope will be a future that is safer for women and children in exMormonism and the Latter-day Saint church. I was able to do this because I was smart, not unwell.

Hopefully the offenders will be held accountable.

Again, to be -very- clear, nobody who knows me in the real world would listen to the claim that I am “crazy,” or mentally unwell for more than about half a second. It might be a convenient claim amongst a bunch of clueless posters who have never met me, but I am more the kind of person who gets attorneys to represent me for free because I am incredibly emotionally stable, articulate and put together.

Sorry to disappoint, but if I were an easier target I would have gone the way of most of the rest of the victims. I was able to get this far successfully because I was the wrong target for John to select. He has had to deal with the longterm consequences of putting someone too emotionally stable on his list. His bad, but it appears that overall his miscalculation regarding me will be better for Mormon victims in general.

I caught him, and he was a difficult fish to catch.

Let’s see how he deals next. If I find the time and energy, I’m going to get Leah Remini involved. But, more honestly, I have other things to do. Maybe enough women will reach out to her and we’ll have a true exMormon offender “come to Jesus” publicity moment.

Carry on.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

How’s your book coming along?

- Doc

[Rosebud]

I’ve forgotten about those.

Here’s another problem for the offender defenders:

John, as a typical offender, put a lot of work into “driving me crazy” (for lack of better words). For all of his work, he was only able to extract a very small amount of ammunition, a few text messages over two years.

He then took that small amount of ammunition (he worked so hard to receive) and blew it out of proportion to make a false argument.

I have been slandered and maligned and anyone who is continuing to take his bait is guilty and personally legally liable. Like I said, you’d have a hard time getting any well person who knows me in the real world to believe I’m unwell.

John, whether well or not, doesn’t believe it either (unless he’s more recently deceived himself in his efforts to deceive others). His problem all along has been my stability and my comprehension of predator tactics.

If anything, the fact that there is SO LITTLE written material he can produce to try to prove his claim that I am unwell proves that I was far too emotionally stable of a human being for him to be using standard offender “crazy-making” tactics on.

Ask him to produce more than a few texts. He won’t be able to do it because it doesn’t exist.

All that John has proven is that he is an offender. He has proven this by doing what offenders do: call me “crazy” and publicly release a few cherry-picked texts when we exchanged thousands upon thousands of texts. I didn’t save those. He did. Demand the rest of them from him. He should produce everything if he expects you to defend him. Make him prove I was “crazy” before you believe his claims and come to his defense.

Honestly, what kind of human is so desperate to protect a podcaster that they slander a very well put together woman with such claims?It’s ugly stuff offender defenders… and I deserve financial compensation for your harms to my reputation.

And how did Mormonism evolve into such an ugly culture that its dissidents spend time accusing women of being mentally unwell in order to protect offenders? Oh, I already know the answer to that one . This is the culture I was born into.

A reminder - UR8: “Do not make threats or take actions to disrupt the smooth operation of this message board, either through hacking, spamming, frivolous complaints, lawsuits against the board or its moderators, or any other means. Please do not do this via e-mail or private message, either.” -cp-