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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22780 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I saw someone post this leadership page on the fema website. Do these people look like the best our country has to offer? Just looking at these people I wouldn’t put it past them to be dragging their feet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if they’re incompetent. Either way, I don’t know how anyone can look at this and think the USA is anything other than an embarrassment.

https://www.fema.gov/about/organization/offices-leadership

They all seem pretty qualified. Just looking at the first one;

Ms. Criswell began her career in emergency management in Aurora, Colorado, where she led strategic change in the city's emergency and disaster planning. During her tenure, Ms. Criswell coordinated transitional housing and family reunification efforts in response to receiving evacuees during the response to Hurricane Katrina. She previously served at FEMA as the leader of one of the Agency's National Incident Management Assistance Teams (IMAT) and as a Federal Coordinating Officer. In this role, Ms. Criswell was the primary Federal representative responsible for leading the agency's response to and recovery from emergencies and major disasters, from severe flooding in North Dakota to hurricanes in South Carolina to fires in Colorado. She also spent two years as an executive in the private sector, providing exceptional technical expertise and the experience necessary to help her clients achieve their critical missions.

Ms. Criswell also proudly served 21 years in the Colorado Air National Guard. She is a veteran of two overseas tours to include as a fire officer in Kuwait immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and to Qatar in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2010 where she advised senior leadership on fire protection requirements for new and existing military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ms. Criswell holds a Bachelor of Science from Colorado State University, a Master of Public Administration from the University of Colorado – Denver, and a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Seems like the exact experience you would expect for someone in such a role? She was also Commissioner of the NY Emergency Management Dept.

How exactly are you judging them as "an embarrassment"? Those look like ordinary professional photos and they look Iike normal people. Without knowing anything else about them, should I assume it's just the fact that many of them are black and/or women that's causing the curled upper lip?

They look like bureaucrats. They look like people that have spent their entire professional lives pushing paper around and playing office politics. I can only imagine what skillset it takes to advance to leadership in the federal government, but it seems unlikely that they’ve been selected for competence at responding to emergency situations.

I think it’s worthwhile for people to look at that page and assess for themselves what type of person is responsible for the hurricane response.

People should ask themselves, does this group look like the type of people that would prioritize Ukraine, “migrants”, or rural Americans. There is a well known trope that coastal elites seem to hold rural people in contempt. I’m willing to make the leap that the people on that leadership page are part of that group.

They look like bureaucrats. They look like people that have spent their entire professional lives pushing paper around and playing office politics.

They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.

I can only imagine what skillset it takes to advance to leadership in the federal government, but it seems unlikely that they’ve been selected for competence at responding to emergency situations.

Actually, being an adept bureaucrat is very important for people in charge of managing and funding a disaster response. These are not the people who will actually be wading through floodwaters to bring emergency supplies, which is of course an entirely different skillset.

People should ask themselves, does this group look like the type of people that would prioritize Ukraine, “migrants”, or rural Americans.

I would ask myself that about the politicians who determine policy, not try to divine someone's innermost loyalties based on a picture that reveals only sex and race.

There is a well known trope that coastal elites seem to hold rural people in contempt.

"Well known trope" = "Thing that lots of people are happy to believe because it fits their culture war priors." In fact most civil servants (and these people, while fairly high up in FEMA, are pretty low on the fed food chain) are no more or less diligent about their duties and responsibilities than the average corp wageslave, and I would argue generally moreso. You don't join FEMA because you have a seething hatred of "rural people" and think this is your best avenue to hurt them.

I’m willing to make the leap that the people on that leadership page are part of that group.

Again, I am asking why you think you can be so confident about this based solely on their photographs? If you just assume that anyone in a government agency leadership position is a "coastal elite" who holds rural people in contempt, then it wouldn't really matter what they look like. You could have just said "I'll bet FEMA hates rural people." I think you have a very unsophisticated inductive reasoning chain.

They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.

Tomayto, tomahto. It's not a pure demographics thing: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/prima-facie-leadership

I'm autistic enough to dislike this observation and to not be particularly acute at picking it up myself, but not autistic enough to pretend it isn't real.

I am very skeptical of this kind of phenotyping, which is often little better than phrenology. "You can just tell by looking at the strong-jawed white chad that he's a superior New Soviet Manalpha male." A lot of people claim they can detect "soy face" when it's just a guy making a goofy expression. Really, do you think you could pick Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower out of that West Point photo without being told who they are?

In this instance, it seems pretty clear to me that the judgment is purely based on the fact that the OP saw a lot of women and blacks.

The steelman is that institutional DIE focus causes both uselessness and detectable changes in racial/sex ratios, which creates a correlation between those ratios and uselessness - valid Bayesian evidence - even in the absence of significant causation.

Except you can click on all these people and see that they are all amply qualified and experienced.

People can be socially promoted through their entire education process and career now despite incompetency. Private companies are more likely to terminate these people. Therefore they are more likely to end up working for the government. Without a process to cull the useless, useless people will accumulate within an organization.

Recently, a woman sued Hartford Public Schools because she is unable to read or write. She was an honor roll student at the high school and currently is a part time student at University of Connecticut-Hartford.

https://readlion.com/a-connecticut-college-student-cant-read-or-write-she-blames-her-public-school/

Of course none of this is evidence that these FEMA people are necessarily incompetent. But believing that "qualifications = competency" is mere credentialism.

I think it's clear that this disaster has been mismanaged by FEMA. That, more than college degrees, is strong evidence of competency or lack thereof.

Is it representative of the population? Possibly. Is it representative of their workforce? Possibly. It's hard to tell

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