Posted by italophil 2 days ago
> calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move,
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font,
> saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities
Marco Rubio Orders State Dept to Stop Using Calibri Font in Anti-DEI Push
https://gizmodo.com/marco-rubio-orders-state-dept-to-stop-us...
Who defines decorum and professionalism? Because I’d say this change is anything but.
Then again, this is very partisan and so subjective. Still, I’m not a fan of a government pushing certain esthetics with such a BS justification.
I do wish they’d gone for a classier serif though; Garamond was right there.
Le problème avec les Américains, c'est qu'ils n'ont pas de mot pour «entrepreneur».Bad news: Missed opportunity for Fraktur to make a comeback.
So to reiterate, the department decided to move on from the 1992 default Word font to the 2007 Word default (1 year after it was no longer the default).
Nothing is safe from politics when even a font choice has become "woke".
By that measure, I could create a font with explicit godly origin, because I see myself as a direct descendant of God.
Rubio, however, specifically pointed out the symbolic (and malicious) gesture of his whole switch back to Times New Roman.
The left didn't react pettily. Please stop thinking the left are the right are the same when the facts show they are not. The left's change was for a demonstrative benefit. The right is doing it so fuck over people. You think these are the same.
Uh, yes.
a) We made this change because we think it will help certain people
and
b) We made this change because we fundamentally disagree with attempts to help certain people, whether effective or not
I think b) is a lot worse than a). Or, to put it another way, has the current administration demonstrated a benefit from this change, or are they behaving at least as badly as "the left"?
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
I'm not sure where this conclusion came from. I even acknowledged that the original change was problematic.
> the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional
That's fair, but it doesn't erase the 'DEI' comment in the memo. If that weren't there, we might actually be having a discussion about the merits of one font vs. another.
> It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke"
Again, that might be believable if the memo hadn't explicitly complained about DEI.
I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.
https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2021/109668/109668.pdf
It's not a big difference, but apparently TNR was the worst of the fonts tested for OCR.
But anyway, there was no "signaling" about the change to Calibri. No-one ever tried to make a political issue out of it the way Rubio is now.
If you say that it doesn’t matter whether changing the font had a large practical impact, because it’s a gesture in the right direction or helps build a culture of accessibility, I would classify that as signaling.