The Faith of Our Betters
29th August 2024
ZMan keeps pointing out how the world is going to shit.
Western elites are in a competition with one another to see who can be the most creative in violating the old rules of the liberal order. Every week seems to bring a new outrage from a Western government. The reason it seems like they are looking to outrage rather than work from an understood ideological foundation is that they do not fully understand their new ideological foundation. It is an evolving paradigm, as they used to say, to which they are forced to adapt.
A good example is this rather weird story out of the UK. A company was taken to court because they paid warehouse workers more than their retail workers. The warehouse staff was predominantly male while the retail staff was predominantly female, thus creating a situation in which men are earning more than women. The company pointed out that this is normal and there was no evidence that women were discriminated against in hiring or evaluations. They lost the case anyway.
Something called an employment tribunal agreed that “the difference in pay rates between the jobs was not down to direct discrimination, including the conscious or subconscious influence of gender on pay decisions, but was caused by efforts to reduce cost and enhance profit. Even so, it ruled that the “business need was not sufficiently great as to overcome the discriminatory effect of lower basic pay.” In other words, it just looked bad so it must be bad.
‘Disparate impact’ forever!