Comply, Or Be Gone

What if your research (involving actual facts as opposed to feelings and/or dogma) shows that your employer’s cultural Zeitgeist  is completely wrong?

Silly boy;  if the corporation you work for is full of Marxism and Wokedom, you’re going to get defenestrated.

Which is what happened to this guy:

Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.
But within a few months, this would all collapse. A chain of events—beginning with the death of George Floyd and culminating with a statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims—would turn the 44-year-old data scientist’s life upside-down.

By June 2021, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.

He refused—so they fired him.

I love the “chance to reform his thoughts” line — straight outta 1984, minus the rat cage strapped to his face.  His only mistake was going to HR at all — what did he think was going to happen?  Now go and read the rest of it to see the full extent of the rot.

For the umpteenth time, I am truly grateful that I no longer have to work for Global MegaCorp, Inc.

And final thought:

If the wire services continue to promote myths about race, violence, and policing, they will inflict grave harm on their reputations for fairness; they will also help unleash a new wave of destruction in America’s poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Both have already happened… and I don’t care if it gets worse.

16 comments

  1. I work for a big woke rainbow corp. They gobbled up the company I worked for.

    Good thing is, it’s not in the business of news or any kind of public work.

    I know how the field is striped. What’s the point of piping up on anything if you know what the reaction will be? I did wonder what our colleagues in China, Dubai, or even Germany felt about this so I asked discretely..”Did you catch that webinar?”

    The answer is almost always no, they don’t pay attention to the silliness.

    So neither do I.

    I have six months before I’m at an age that I could retire. It’s really 3-4 before that’s feasible.

    I’m there to make money. I don’t care about anything else other than coming up with an answer for “Goals”, for my HR profile, of which I have none. Especially when it comes to how I’m helping ED&I.

  2. He has an economics degree and a JD. and his job was Director of Data Science. In other words, he’s the Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert. No actual STEM experience or knowledge. His job is to make sure the actual Data Science people are getting the “right” results. His bosses determine the results they want, not him, he should have spent enough time at “The RED School by the River” where he got his JD to understand that.
    He should not have been surprised when he was fired by e-mail.

    …… and he also used up his shot at the ” White Shoe law firm” and High-Tech Start-ups. He’s done.

  3. In his book The Dilbert Principle Scott Adams spends the last chapter describing in some detail how he believes a company SHOULD be run, and companies are getting further and further away from such principles. His guiding principle is that EVERYONE in the company should be doing one of two things, without exception:

    1) Directly supporting the company’s product (whether production of the product, sales, support, accounts payable/receivable, transport, etc) or
    2) Directly supporting those people who do item one (things like payroll).

    Anything else is a one-off, not needed for the business, and therefore is NOT TO BE DONE by ANYONE. As he puts it, if you’re talking TO customers you’re productive. If you’re talking ABOUT customers you’re not.

    We’ve reached a point where many companies have more people working on one-offs than there are people working on the product.

    Mark D

  4. When it comes to the ‘mainstream’ media, keep in mind that this is ALL
    propaganda. It does not matter if what is being said is true or not to
    any degree. It’s purpose is to change ( if necessary ) and unify the
    thoughts / thinking of the largest number of people possible.
    Dr. Goebbels would be so proud.
    Watched any commercials on television lately ? Noticed anything, um,
    unusual in ethnicities of the actors / actresses involved ?
    It’s called, or was called in my yout’, ‘sucking up’. Giving in to illogical,
    almost irrational demands just to ‘keep the peace’. The ‘newspapers’ are
    doing no different than Madison Ave and all of it for the same reasons.

    1. Noticed anything, um, unusual in ethnicities of the actors / actresses involved ?
      Yeah, all bitches and blacks, even the voice actors.
      Any white male is a bumbling bystander or else coupled with a black woman.
      So much for representing mainstream or majority reality.

      1. Mr True Brit mentioned this about a year ago – there are NOT that amount of mixed race families as represented on TV ads in the UK – well, not with fathers present anyway – nor are there that amount of poofters, he says.

        He’s in danger of being right.

  5. My first and only non-self-employed job after retiring from the military was as an SES-appointee for the VA. It was supposed to be a 3 year term appointment, but I only lasted 11 months. I was a retired senior officer, with an MSIS in Information Systems Engineering and MS in Health Data Science, undergrads in Clinical Engineering and Computer Science, VA/DoD CIO, Certified Fraud Examiner (Forensic Data Analysis) and Level III certified acquisition officer. I worked under a retired 2-star Army General. She had no data background, no healthcare background. Her specialty was “executive leadership”, I shit you not.
    She gave us outcomes and wanted data to back them up. I said “that’s not analysis, that’s propaganda.”

    As the great poet George Thorogood said, “and out the door I went.”

    1. Himself is retiring in March, and his biggest fear is that the HR wench will, once again, cock up the paperwork such that payments are late/something else minor goes wrong because she is rubbish at her job.

      After more than 40 years at the coal face, isn’t that a terrible thing to be worried about above anything else???

      I understand that a local ‘Head of HRTraining and Development’. They managed to get themselves a BEM in this years Honours list. For achievements in promoting mental health. Riiiiiight. Of course you did.

  6. Thirty years or so ago, the management buzzword of the day was “MBO – management by walking around.”
    We now have management by HR busybody bitches, which HR is populated by people, mostly bitches, who could not cut it in Mark D’s 1) above – production of the product, sales, support, accounts payable/receivable, transport, etc, so they get parked in HR sinecures at various management levels to fulfill minority and feminazi quotas at those salary levels. They have undue influence with senior management because the senior execs know these HR busybodies will file a civil rights/sexual harassment suit or instigate a mob demonstration outside the headquarters front door in a New York minute if the exec even hints at “You’re bothering me; shut up and go away.” They also have a way of multiplying like wire clothes hangers in an unopened closet.
    They are cancer cells within the organization, and contribute nothing to the bottom line or the organization.
    I watched it birth and grow first hand before I retired and I’m so glad I got out when I did.

  7. He’s lucky to be alive. History has been very unkind to heretics who refused to repent in the face of the Inquisition.

  8. His mistake was in assuming that the goal is get closer to the truth. Wokists, much like their moral relatives in the sub-family Oedipodinae, are not interested in building but only in destroying and then moving on. They are a nearly perfect intersection of pragmatism, post-modernism, and nihilism. In their sick minds there is no truth. There is only Narrative.

  9. If you’re not already self employed with multiple and varied income streams you will soon be unemployed with no income at all.

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