The Incompetence Has No Limits

Not a DEI reference

Curmie wrote a while back that he would be writing about the pair of plundering plutocrats only in passing.  Allow him now to clarify.  He’s not, at least for the moment, going to write about the Trusk administration’s policy decisions.  You may take as given, Gentle Reader, that unless you see something specifically to the contrary, Curmie is adamantly opposed to literally anything that pair of mendacious sociopaths do.

He’ll still link to articles on the Facebook and Bluesky pages, and might even offer a bit of terse commentary.  But there’s no need to spend 1000 words or more to say something that other folks have already said, and probably better than Curmie could.  So, what follows here isn’t about whether it’s a good idea to cut support of USAid or medical research, or to eliminate all references to DEI initiatives from government agencies’ websites.  It’s about basic competence.

Indeed, about the best thing American citizens have going for us right now is that Trump, Musk, Hegseth, et al., are so fucking stupid.  Imagine how bad things would be if these bozos weren’t, well, bozos.  Don’t even get Curmie started on the need to shut down major airports in Florida because SpaceX can’t make a rocket that doesn’t blow up.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, Gentle Reader, you probably know most of the following: that the $50 million of condoms allegedly shipped to Gaza for Hamas to “use in making bombs” were in fact about a tenth that much money in contraceptives (not condoms) sent to the Gaza region of Mozambique, that three of the four examples of “wasteful spending” by USAid weren’t even USAid programs and the other one was mislabeled, that the $8 billion in savings accrued by shutting down one ICE program was in fact only $8 million (and actually less than that), that we didn’t spend millions on making mice transgender but on making them transgenic  (altering their genetic structure to better replicate human responses for research into such afflictions as cancer and Alzheimer’s)… and so on.

The most colossal act of stupidity, however, was the attempt to purge DEI references, which you undoubtedly know by now, Gentle Reader, resulted in the pending removal of photos of the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: the Enola Gay.  Also flagged were references to anyone whose surname happens to be “Gay” (or “Black,” presumably) as well as… you know… anything about the first black person to do this or the first woman to do that.  

Presumably, any accounts of vehicles needing a new transmission (trans mission?) would be even more problematic.  (I know, I know, Gentle Reader, I shouldn’t give them any ideas.  My apologies.)  It is not clear at this point whether these items have been permanently deleted (how Orwellian would that be?) or placed in some sort of archive inaccessible to us mere mortals.

Here’s the thing: mistakes happen, and if you rely on AI or lazy, hubristic techbros, a lot of mistakes will happen.  Musk chucklefucks the problem by cheerfully admitting that sometimes he’ll say something that isn’t true—this after ruining careers and shutting off aid to starving children, of course.  After all, “nobody’s going to bat 1.000.”  Well, if you’re going to take people’s livelihoods away, you pompous accretion of nitrogenous waste, you’d better be pretty damned close to 1.000.  And your batting average isn’t good enough to keep you around as a utility infielder.

The problem isn’t that someone (or, more likely, something) screwed up; it’s that no one stopped the publication of this bullshit without checking it first.  (Insert Allstate commercial here.) 

Back when Curmie was teaching fulltime, one of his departmental responsibilities was to compile the “ineligible list.”  In order to be eligible to participate in theatre productions, a student had to meet certain criteria that were intended to ensure satisfactory progress towards graduation.  Among other requirements, theatre majors needed to meet at least one of these criteria: to have passed all courses taken in the previous semester, or 12 semester hours of credit in that semester, or 24 hours in the previous 12 months.

The problem was that there was no easy way to get the information I needed.  The department’s administrative assistant could run a program that could tell me which majors had passed 11 or fewer hours and how many hours those students attempted.  That narrowed the field of potentially ineligible students down to 20-30% of the total.  From there, I could eliminate students who passed 6 out of 6 hours, or whatever.  And those whose GPA was below 2.0 were on the list irrespective of other criteria.  

But there wasn’t a way to get the total hours of courses passed in the previous 12 months except by looking up each student individually.  And because of a quirk in the system, students taking remedial courses (and a fair number of theatre majors take remedial math) get shortchanged unless you actually look at the transcript.  Remedial courses show up on the printout as attempted hours, but not as successfully completed hours, regardless of the grade, because they don’t count towards graduation.

So I checked a few dozen transcripts every semester, looking for whether the student had passed enough courses earlier in the last year to overcome a one-semester bobble, or had taken courses at another school, or had passed remedial courses, or had a WH (“withheld,” same as an “incomplete” at some places) but had already clinched a passing grade, just not a specific passing grade.  And yes, I’d email the prof to find out.

What I sure as hell didn’t do was to publish, even to my colleagues, the list of names generated by that computer search.  Do the work first, then create an accurate list.  All of this took some time when I would have liked to have really been on vacation, but getting it right was worth the effort.  Having students know where they stood so they could plan their appeal or adjust their schedule because they wouldn’t be doing shows, or whatever: yes, that was important.  But not having the names of students who should have been eligible appear on any sort of even semi-official ineligibility list: that was even more important. 

The foregoing is not to complain about the work I had to do instead of just letting the machines do all the work.  Rather, it was simply a matter of doing what needed to be done to get results that actually comported with departmental policy.  A similar approach would solve a lot of problems in the current DEI purge.  Sure, run your Control-F search… and then check to see if the thousands of hits generated are actually relevant. 

Even—no, make that especially—if you think purging the historical record of all references to DEI is a good idea, you probably don’t want to be a laughing-stock.  This level of incompetence does no one any good… unless, of course, it’s not really incompetence at all, but a strategy to distract our collective attention away from something more sinister in the works.  That’s a possibility, of course, but Curmie doesn’t think that’s the explanation.

Yet, at least.