I'd just say that I find it very frustrating that the argument for "one side" is how insane "the other side" is, because then that pretends that reasonable solutions (and not what I would call "compromises") don't exist, because you're only looking at the extremes.

Yes, I think it's nuts to replace "DEI hires" with DUI hires and pretend that is "merit based", and I think the US has become a pretty full-blown kakistocracy (my new favorite word) right now.

But while I agree with the purported goals of DEI, I often saw it go "off the rails" in practice, and lead to a cottage industry of pseudoscience-based "DEI consultants". I'll show my hand: when it comes to DEI, I absolutely get behind the "I" part of it - everyone should feel welcome and included at work. When it comes to the "D" part, while I support outreach to cast as wide a net as possible when it comes to things like hiring, too often I saw this devolve into soft quotas and semi-performative hand wringing when some job distribution didn't exactly match the wider population distribution. The "E" part I think was frankly insane and just "equality of outcome" over "equality of opportunity" with window dressing - and yes, I've heard how backers framed the equity part, but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.

> but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.

I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equally!", it's slightly harder to actually mean it, and it's even harder to do something about it.

We're certainly not legislators debating a bill before us, we're on social media arguing, but it'd be nice if people complaining made some effort to think of a solution.