U.S Department of Defense “Equity Action Plan”

SCANALYZER The Happening World
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The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has just issued its “Department of Defense Equity Action Plan” [PDF, 21 pages]. This plan, according to the accompanying summary [PDF, 8 pages], was issued “Pursuant to Executive Order 13985 [PDF, 9 pages] (January 20, 2021) on ‘Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’ ”.

The Executive Order defines “equity” as follows.

The term “equity” means the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.

That’s eighty words to define a term for which Dr Johnson, excepting a specialised legal meaning, required only four.

  1. Justice; right; honesty.
  2. Impartiality.

not perceiving a need to identify those to whom the word applied, as opposed to those to whom it doesn’t. For its part, the DOD “Plan” never defines “equity” at all, although it does provide a full page of definitions of acronyms including:

  • DEPSCoR — Defense Establish Program to Stimulate Competitive Research
  • HUBZone — Historically Underutilized Business Zone
  • MCCYN — Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood
  • NALEMP — Native American Lands Environmental Mitigation Program
  • PFAS — Per and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances
  • TTPTTP — Taking the Pentagon to the People
  • WOSB — Woman-Owned Small Business

As an indication how far the quest for equity has come since the days of yore when the Marine Corps was “looking for a few good men”:

Finally, DoD policy prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity or identification as transgender, provides a means by which individuals who meet applicable standards may access into the military in their self-identified gender, provides a means by which transitioning Service members may obtain gender-affirming medical treatment and recognition of their self-identified gender, and seeks to protect the privacy of all Service members. The Department is taking steps to fully implement this policy.

And lest you think these policies are limited to humans and their myriad and mutable genders, there is:

Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research and Development: Become a leader on equitable AI research and development through programs such as Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams, Grounded AI Language Acquisition Research, and Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception.

Among the items listed in the “Summary of Accomplishments” section is:

Throughout the Department, numerous equity-related achievements or successes have been accomplished which relate to the five actions in this plan. For example, in February 2021, Secretary Austin directed commanding officers and supervisors at all levels to conduct a one-day “stand down” for discussion of the principle that all those who support DoD’s mission deserve an environment free of discrimination, hate, and harassment. This included a focus on how extremist or dissident ideologies violate the fundamental principles of the Department. Shortly thereafter, DoD took steps to ensure transgender individuals who wished to serve in the military and could meet the appropriate standards were able to do so openly and free from discrimination

With the U.S. military having secured the borders, brought peace and prosperity to the many corners of the world in which its forces are stationed, developed and deployed cutting-edge weapon systems on time, under budget, and in quantity, and demonstrating leadership to the world in such areas as ship collisions, submarines running into undersea mountains, and pregnancy among naval crews, I suppose it is to be expected that its focus will turn to other clamant priorities such as “equity” and “climate change”. But I suspect that observing that these matters have precious little to do with deterring, fighting, or winning wars might get one labeled as one of those extremists or dissidents which “violate [its] fundamental principles”.

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“How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!”

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Dangerous times! A military which has been deliberately worn down into something which is all tail and no tooth means that any genuine conflict will inevitably have to escalate to nuclear weapons – with fingers crossed that those super-complicated devices which have not been tested in a generation still work.

Fortunately, the world is at peace and the US/NATO have good relations with every country in the world.

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Sure. But…wait…what? Have you gone alternate universe-hopping?

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Yes.

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This explains why Putin has invaded Ukraine. He has no respect for Austin, Milley and all the NATO military leaders and Heads of State.

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There is too much sarcasm in this thread… Would only like to speculate that in the unfortunate event a military confrontation ensues, our equitable forces would be quick to call out any unfairness on the part of their opponents.

“That’s not who we are”, remember?

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Now the State Department is at it as well: “Equity Action Plan: U.S. Department of State” [PDF].

The State Department will engage high-level diplomatic partners and individuals worldwide from underserved racial and ethnic groups and other underserved communities to better assess and embed equity into U.S. foreign policies. Using a three-part strategic framework, the State Department will track progress and work with local stakeholders to reduce barriers hindering racial equity and support for underserved communities. In foreign assistance, the State Department will establish key reporting requirements and equity analysis tools to align priorities and operations around advancing racial equity and supporting underserved communities through international aid. Using these tools, the State Department will work with agency stakeholders to inform data-driven operations and programming that integrate racial equity and support for underserved communities into U.S. foreign assistance.

The State Department will embed intersectional equity principles into diversifying public diplomacy and communications strategies and expand recruitment for programming and exchange opportunities to focus on underserved communities. The State Department will also increase inclusive, equitable messaging to combat disinformation, which can sow discord among communities and undermine democratic norms. Using equity assessment tools to track progress, the State Department will build global support for the advancement of racial equity and support for underserved communities through partnerships and public diplomacy.

In consular services, the State Department will offer U.S. citizenship products with inclusive gender markers as well as reform and reorganize resources to provide more equitable, accessible consular services to U.S. citizens. Using ongoing strategic plans and product management tools, the State Department will monitor the status of updates to citizenship products and dedicate personnel and resources to operationalizing equity and support for underserved communities in consular services.

In procurement, contracting, and grants processes, the State Department will require new reviews under current federal contracting processes to provide greater, more equitable access to underserved and small business partners. The State Department will grow the industrial supply base by incorporating racial equity and support for underserved communities into agency contracting partnerships and the federal marketplace. The State Department will achieve this goal by using a data-informed methodology in concert with market research, internal business scorecards, and consultations with stakeholders.

I’m beginning to get a sense that “underserved” and “disinformation” may be on the conveyor belt to become the Current Thing. The only “stakeholders” I’d like to see are the ones trying to drive stakes through the undead who crank out this gibberish in their Foggy Bottom lairs.

The State Department provided overseas U.S. missions with messaging guidance, original video content, and official statements from State Department’s leadership on the one-year commemoration of George Floyd’s murder, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and Juneteenth.

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It seems like the orders from above in the Biden administration are to have a so-called “equity action plan” for each department.

  • Transportation plan
  • Energy plan
  • Commerce plan
  • And, Education, of course (plan)

I stopped looking after Agriculture (plan), but it’s very obvious that the neomarxists in Biden’s administration have not been sitting idle. The good news is their execution is piss poor (“poorly integrated” in corpospeak), the bad news is that it’s so bad that it will further crumble and affect our ways of living.

To make more sense about what’s going on, I recommend watching a well known documentary that came out almost 18 years ago.

As an aside, logical people (I wanted to type “normal” but then realized this is a charged word in today’s world) would look at the State “plan” and scratch their heads raw. For instance, one might ask what are “US citizenship products”? I am asking for a friend…

This is word salad that does not mean anything in practice. It reads as if “State Department” was copy/pasted to replace some placeholder text. Replace “State Department” with “XYZ Inc.”, “citizenship” with “hardware” and “consular” with “solution” and it will read equally well (or equally bad). Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse of the trust of the citizens… This is not top shelf civil service, it’s Babylon Bee material written by an intern.

By the way, here is the link to the documentary in question - highly recommended…

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NASA.
FCC.

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The only “citizenship product” that comes to mind is Soylent Green. Does this mean that the underserved will be able to choose whether their supply of Soylent Green is sourced from female, lesbian, transgendered, etc?

It would be interesting to see the related document from China’s equivalent of the State Department. It probably is much shorter and says to the underserved communities of the world – Tell us what you want, and we will build it for you – no out-of-pocket costs for you. All you have to do is sign the attached document, and don’t waste time reading the legal fine print.

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Does anyone here have easy access to Turnitin or similar to check these “plans” for similarity. My hypothesis is diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) komissars in each USG organization half-assed “their” plan starting from a template sent on from the WH. So I would expect minimal thinking/differences across the so-called equity action plans, because the alternative course of action would require, you know, work. And that’s not fair.

(An alternative might be one of the many NLP libraries and python)

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