With no economic components I'm genuinely curious what you consider the "American sense" of the left, in the sense of actual policy. Pro-choice, I guess?
> But by American standards, her platform was well left of the average politician.
Again, only if you entirely discount her economic positions, which are the core positions of any "left" figure.
You're free to paint with however wide a brush you wish, and your other comments in this thread leave little doubt that you'll retain your opinion regardless of how this exchange turns out. But simply because the Democratic party is the "more PC" corporate capitalist party, and the Republican party is the "less PC", does not mean that either of them represents anything remotely resembling economic left interests.
I think you have a skewed idea of the American political spectrum, but everyone is free to define left/right however they wish, so we'll have to agree that we disagree about their meanings.
I'm on the person you asked, but to me the "American left" would include things like drug legalization/decriminalization, abortion as a civil right, gun control, progressive taxation, and tax-funded social welfare programs.
There are plenty of social policies (religion, civil rights, education, right to die, abortion, war and diplomacy, federalism, policing, vaccinations, research priorities, ) with left right vectors.
It's not the economics. It's all the other stuff. It's intersectional feminism, Black Lives Matter, gay marriage, abortion, diversity initiatives, and so on. There is one acceptable position on each of those issues.
When somebody says, "Everybody at my company is a leftist!" they're not talking about people who read Marx and support trade unions. They're talking about culture.
From what I understand leftist politics in the US would be considered right in the EU. Casual observers of our political discourse from other countries have a hard time discerning the difference between our political parties. I assume this is because in terms of foreign policy, they largely agree.
“What does it do to somebody when they feel like they literally can’t express themselves?” said Mr. Andreessen, a Facebook board member who backed Mrs. Clinton last year.
Remember 20 years ago when we were all focused on studying computer science, building cool products and starting successful businesses around them? What happened?
Valley Values are completely destroying the tech industry. We have Google, one of the most successful companies to ever exist, being brought to it's breaking point over identity politics and diversity initiatives.
With the recent events, lawsuits and hoopla, I'm starting to view women as a liability in the workplace. As a business owner / Investor it seems like a liability to hire women.
I find my self asking, if I hire this woman, how long before she starts to demand equality of outcome regardless of skill level? How long before she starts to threaten to destroy my company, my brand, my livelihood if I don't succumb to their requests?
> But for the right, it became a potent symbol of the tech industry’s intolerance of ideological diversity.
To me, totally missing the point. Not just "for the right". To many who would consider themselves mostly aligned with left wing politics, myself included, this is just the latest in a long line of media (social and news) driven forced punishment for people guilty of expressing a viewpoint or just generally doing something a bit poor taste in public. It doesn't really matter if they've done wrong. It's not a considered or proportional type of response.
Sure, there are far bigger injustices in the world than someone losing their job, but this sort of thing is wrong because it's for the wrong reason. It's headlines driven HR.
I'm sorry, if you spend your time at work writing manifestos that ignite culture wars instead of working - you should be fired. Wanna write a manifesto? Create a blog post. I would be fired if I wrote a manifesto like this at my job - without any publicity
Not that I agree with the statement, but it could easily be the case he wrote it on his own time and shared it at work on their internal Google+. Unless you have a source for your accusation, in which case I stand corrected.
Serious: do you see that your response is exactly what the memo was about? He's claiming that the pre-judgment that the topic is toxic is harmful. To argue against him by re-asserting that which he questions will not be persuasive.
Are you saying my argument - that sharing a 10 page personal essay, or whatever to all your coworkers is toxic - is invalid, because in it, he asks not to be prejudged?
That's ludicrous. You don't do things that make potentially thousands of your coworkers uncomfortable internally just because you want to make a point. Human Resources is a thing for a reason.
I think you may have raised a good point - was this the appropriate forum/channel/whatever to offer his observations, questions, and criticisms?
He suggests that Google has a culture of sharing pretty openly and of offering criticism and even commentary on important issues. It would be good to have additional evidence of this to evaluate whether his statement was indeed matched to the appropriate environment.
(I am not and have not been a Google employee, so IDK for sure. I know that at my company, there are indeed particular fora in which this sort of thing could be raised. I can imagine at some companies this would not be possible, so you raise a great question. Thanks!)
It was a memo about a matter that's internal to Google, so I don't think publicly publishing it would have been appropriate. And doing so would have surely created an even larger furore.
Sundar Pichai tweeted in support of allowing transgenders in the military, on work time. Would you say that, too, is "toxic"? it's politics on work time, right?
Sundar Pichai is the CEO. He decides how to run the company. If you are a 28 year old software engineer, you should focus on software engineering. By all means, grow to be a C level executive and change the culture. But google is a private company and those who own it and run it are perfectly entitled to want to not have junior software engineers stir up culture wars inside the company
If investors who own google don't like the culture Sundar is supporting inside their company - they can fire him and if they do, it's their business.
So you were fine with Brendan Eich being against gay marriage because he was CEO? Because he's CEO do you think everyone at mozilla should have been prevented from supporting gay marriage?
Jeez. No. But when Brendan Eich was CEO, it would have been totally fine for him to fire people who distribute internal memos arguing for gay marriage. See the difference ? You can be for or against whatever you want, work is for work though
I'm not commenting on this specific case, but if you've spent any amount of time in NameABigCorp lately, you've surely realized that various points of left-wing politics are pursued as official points of dogma. So it's not as if politics are being kept out of work in the first place.
I'm all for keeping politics out of the workplace, except for verbal conversations between colleagues. But that's just not the case right now.
NsmeABigCorp is owned by investors, yes? Those investors hired management to run it a certain way, yes? Don't like it? Start your own and run it the way you want
When the corporation in question controls a major part of the spaces that have replaced the institution of the public square, so central to the functioning of a republic, their political actions deserve scrutiny. If they claim to be open to diverse opinions, yet behave in a manner that suggests otherwise, then citizens need to start paying attention.
I agree, I'm merely pointing out that suftware engineers who aren't focused enough on their immediate duties and instead stir up culture wars by writing manifestos would be fired by most companies not just google
Do you think an employee at a tech company would be fired for sending out a 10-page memo about why trans people should be allowed in the military? How about a 10-page memo about why they shouldn't?
Both are obviously incredibly unprofessional, but only one would probably face life-changing punishment in reality. Ideally you set the tone that both are unacceptable, that the only political discussion acceptable beyond interpersonal conversation is the politics of the company's self-interest. Both starting an internal political battle, as as well tweeting externally about an already-started one, should get you fired. But that's only fair if you set that tone and expectation.
My guess is if you start spending your time writing 10 page political memos and distributing them inside companies, your career won't advance very far, regardless of content. But, in this case, literally most women at google were upset and that's incredibly disruptive and stupid - hence he was fired and should have been
Maybe you are unfamiliar with Google's culture. Employees are encouraged to engage in conversations about the culture and values of the company, using mediums like this. Google is not rigid about "work time", preferring that you are productive.
1) He never insinuated that anyone was biologically inferior just that there is marginal statistical proof that -on average- women prefer to work less hours, and more flexible hours; his "idea" was to promote a culture that adopted this, rather than using hiring quotas, in order to achieve the diversity goal which he also claims to wish for.
That you claim he was calling people "inferior" only shows your own bias.
2) It's not a "Manifesto" that's what gizmodo called it but it was, at best, a memo, at worst, the first post on an internal forum thread hoping to discuss this matter.
I think the point is that "manifesto" is a term that is a bit loaded, as it conjures up images of things like the uni-bomber or serial killers, or some kinds of ideological militants, for a lot of people.
Priming your audience with terms like "Anti-diversity screed" and "manifesto" all but guarantee a sizable portion of people will read the document with major prejudice and bias. And that's the kind of thing those of us who value diversity ought to loathe.
>He was fired because he can't reliably review his peers if he thinks they are genetically inferior to him.
He literally said the exact opposite of this.
Why are you purposefully misrepresenting his views? And if not purposefully, why are you then commenting on a story whose main source (the document) you haven't read?
He wrote the memo poorly but he tried to make it clear that he wasn't talking about individuals.
He was offering a different explanation, based on group averages, of why the industry is unable to reach a 50/50 ratio of male/female engineers. And most of his arguments were based on interests, not abilities.
That's very different from the way it's been mischaracterized as an argument that women are inferior.
Suppose I think my female colleagues can't be trusted to review and respond to my work, because their explanation for demographic imbalances among engineers is that white heterosexual men are racist, sexist, and homophobic. How can I trust someone who suspects me of being every kind of bigot will treat me fairly?
> Netflix’s Mr. Hastings warned Mr. Thiel last August, a few weeks after Mr. Trump had accepted the Republican nomination for president, that he would face consequences for backing Mr. Trump.
> In contrast, Mr. Hastings, a supporter of Hillary Clinton ...
From my PoV, the fact that Hastings has received no backlash for supporting Clinton after Trump won, is a sign that right-wingers/conservatives/Trump supporters are more tolerant of the opinions of left-wingers/liberals/progressives/Clinton supporters than the other way around.
The far left is dunking on the center / Clinton establishment pretty hard all across the internet, which has been immensely satisfying.
That being said, Clinton was pretty tepid and corrupt, not openly offensive and terrifying the way Trump is. Unless you're REALLY desperate you can't honestly say supporting one or the other is the same.
A big part of her campaign strategy was to generalize from a few actual white supremacists and paint everyone who opposed her as a deplorable sexist Nazi white-supremacist who couldn't stand the idea of a woman President.
That kind of McCarthyism is always a threat, but it was doubly dangerous in the current environment, with leftist groups declaring that violence was justified against anyone they thought fit that description.
The "basket of deplorables" remark was accurate as hell and hilarious, but you're wildly exaggerating anything she actually claimed. Sounds like you're still stuck in an echo chamber where people blew her beliefs out of proportion, probably most of it being attributed to her most extreme followers.
Trump, meanwhile, actually hired open white nationalists and people with Nazi ties. Cool! The existential threat from Clinton was definitely the same because she.. opposed exactly that.
> “I suppose it’s fair to say: don’t you someday want to see a woman president?”
Hillary repeatedly pressed the "I'm a woman" button, and the "Trump supporters are white supremacists" button. Then she generalized to insult all Trump supporters with remarks like the one you mentioned.
Oh dear, she claimed white supremacists liked Donald Trump. That's some serious egg on her face, seeing as he hasn't filled his cabinet and White House with white supremacists and people with Nazi since being elected, which I literally mentioned in the comment you replied to. Serious bungle on her part.
>Trump, meanwhile, actually hired open white nationalists and people with Nazi ties.
That's just not true, unless you use a twisted definition of "white nationalist" that means "anyone who has ever said anything acknowledging that white people are a group with interests".
Instead of claiming that your opinion is a "literal undeniable truth" and telling people to "do your research" perhaps you could make an actual argument with evidence.
In a conversation that actually makes Trump sound reasonable, he tells Bannon that he’s concerned about foreign Ivy League students, highly skilled and otherwise capable of working for or starting their own tech companies, graduating and then returning to their home countries. “When someone is going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Stanford, all the greats” and then graduate, “we throw them out of the country, and they can’t get back in,” he said. “We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country.” To which Bannon replied: “Um.” Trump tried to get Bannon to agree with him, but to no avail. Instead, Bannon suggested there were already too many Asian tech C.E.O.s. in Silicon Valley. “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, trailing off. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
In what situations would people be punished for supporting Clinton? In the case of Hastings and Thiel and the Facebook board of directors, correct me if I'm wrong, but Trump winning the presidency didn't change the membership of Facebook's directors or their political leanings.
Sorry, are you unaware of any people who've been attacked by Trump supporters? Really? Besides the obvious politicians (Senator Ben Sasse, for example), there are viral incidents like these: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/11/2...
But back to the matter at hand. You seem to be arguing that Thiel faced particular abuse for being a Trump supporter, given the example of Reed Hastings calling him out after Trump secured the Republican nomination (the GP comment [0]). I think it's worth pointing out the pre-conditions in this situation: Thiel, a known conservative, is allowed to serve on the board of directors for one of the biggest institutions (Facebook) in one of America's most famously liberal enclaves [1]. When it's revealed that he's a Trump backer, the liberals, who far outnumber those of Thiel's mindset in his peer group, threaten to kick him out. And let's be fair, Thiel is by far not the only example, as similar liberal outrages have been inflicted upon conservatives in other liberal enclaves, such as Hollywood.
But that's exactly what happened to the Clinton-supporting members on the board of directors for Hobby Lobby and the NRA. Oh wait, no such Clinton-supporting members exist. At least that we know of. If those conservative institutions could even tolerate a Clinton-suppporting board member in the first place, I imagine those Clinton-supporting members would face the same kind of backlash from their colleagues that Thiel faced from his for supporting Trump.
Know of any what, exactly? Why don't you go and list the times Trump supporters have been punished, since the previous examples I've mention don't seem to be that big of a deal to you.
Search for "fired for supporting Trump" or "Trump supporters assaulted" if you'd really like a list.
Here, I'll just mention what I consider the most egregious example:
In San Jose, a leftist mob attacked people leaving a Trump campaign event, while police stood aside and watched. "The only people arrested the day of the rally, Dhillon added, were those who attacked police officers."
> There have been worse events, including kidnapping, torture, murder and attempted murders, but in that case the police seem to have been accomplices.
OK. Yeah, I guess if police are covering things up, then there are all manner of awful events that we don't really know about.
Your story was about a mob, which can behave just as erratically and uncontrollably as any individual. And individuals don't always get their ideas from inner reflection. You think the guy who decided to attack a pizza parlor with an assault rifle was also the creator of the PizzaGate controversy and its ensuing discussion?
Are you without access to the Internet or to Google? Your original question was:
> Do you have any examples of people punished for supporting Clinton? I'd be interested to hear about them; I'm not aware of any.
I'm not particularly interested in getting into a link-fest fight that will ultimately stall at a No-True-Scotsman appeal. I took issue at your apparent complete obliviousness of violent attacks originating from the right-wing. Are any of the incidents I've mentioned sufficient for you and all those awful incidents you have in your head but can't be bothered to find the links to?
Oh what the hell. Here's another one for you: "Couple charged with assault in shooting, melee during UW speech by Milo Yiannopoulos"
Oh, I guess that doesn't count as a "mob", because apparently when members of one group of protestors shoots another protester in the stomach, police swoop in and shut everything down. Do you imagine that if the police weren't there, that the right-wing protesters (including the ones carrying and firing guns) would have amicably resolved things?
I don't expect to find scores of examples of angry right-wing mob action. The winning side tends to have less reason to protest or lash out. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are aware of angry anti-Obama protests and retaliation that happened back in 2009. But let me know if you are equally oblivious of such incidents and I can search the news archives for you.
As a registered Republican, I can only imagine what my reaction as a Democrat would be upon hearing of attacks on Obama supporters. I would hope that my reaction would not be to assume that such attacks were coordinated by Senator McCain/Governor Palin, or use such incidents as a sweeping indictment against the Republican party. It's been several hours since you claimed that there were "so many" anti-Trump attacks and yet you've still only been able to come up with that one link from the Mercury News. Save yourself the effort, I can think of several incidents in which Trump supporters were harmed, but I'm not the one who was ignorant of such incidents nor do I deny that such incidents, whether they involved angry words or actual violence, were considerably harmful to the victims.
But -- looking at the most recent election cycle -- it's hard to ignore that the most direct examples of a party's leader sanctioning violence comes straight from Trump himself, which is why a lawsuit accusing him of inciting violence has been allowed to go forward:
The police chief/city officials ignoring mob attacks based on politics is indeed a huge problem. If I'm reading the example you posted correctly, and the most recent update [0], a judge has so far dismissed claims against the defendants who would have the power -- e.g. the mayor and police chief -- to tell police to not protect Trump supporters. Did police officers intentionally decide to harm Trump supporters? I suppose the court case will examine that, though it's worth noting that Trump was endorsed by the nation's largest police union [1], so the thought of police being part of a conspiracy to hurt Trump would be pretty surprising.
In case you were unaware of Democrat-supporters who were either fired, or were threatened to be fired, for their support of Democrats, here you go:
Right-leaning professionals who live in major urban areas are completely surrounded by left-leaning people: almost all of their colleagues, friends, bosses, etc. I know many conservatives in these environments who would never admit it outside of a very trusted circle. They would never think of making their job a platform for their views, like left-leaning people routinely do (often at the encouragement of management and HR). They fear precisely what happened to this Google engineer: a smear campaign, weaponized outrage, and a ruined career.
I'm sure there's challenges to being a left-leaning person in rural Georgia. But moving to rural Georgia isn't necessary, or really even an option, for people seeking economic mobility.
Weaponized outrage online has become a real problem, no matter your leanings. Or I prefer to call it the "Outrage of the Day" or even the daily "Two Minutes Hate" since people only seem to be outraged at that issue for about a day before finding some new shiny thing to be outraged about.
But it can really screw up people's lives in that short period of time, and scares everyone into not sharing any potentially controversial views in public nowadays, which I find disconcerting living in a country that's supposed to hold Freedom of Speech as one of its highest values (yes, I know freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, but the consequences have gotten extremely severe, career ending in a lot of cases, for statements that are sometimes taken out of context).
I'd rather people see these statements they dislike as an opportunity to engage in discourse and try to change these people's minds, instead of swift retribution, often without examination of how guilty the people in question actually are, just being told they're guilty by some random person they like on the internet is often enough to get them to jump on board.
It's especially concerning considering a lot of these people turning their shame button up to 11 consider themselves to be religious people, and most religions tend to espouse not letting yourself get swept up in hatred and casting stones at others. I'm not particularly religious, but I still don't think it's a healthy mentality to have, and I've had to ignore and heavily filter my social media in order to not see this presented to me every day, and even then I still get a lot of it shoved in my face (I can only imagine what all a person who actively looks for these things must see).
The Two Minutes Hate seems more and more appropriate the more I reflect on it. Here's a quote about it from 1984:
"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."
Outrage is addictive and social media only makes this easier: commenting is quick and there's always the urgency to jump on a bandwagon before it disappears.
"Outrage of the Day" is appropriate because what else can fill the mundanity of your life? The trouble is they accumulate and you inevitable form judgements, courtesy to the echo chambers (I'd like to see a new word echosystem!) This also makes it harder to introduce new ideas because the 'right' opinions and argument trees are already set.
I don't see social media as good/bad, but my observation of it is making me wonder if I'm turning into a reluctant Luddite.
That's because the election was over, and they got to taste victory, at least for a little while. Most people don't feel the need to lash out at other people when everything just went their way.
From my point of view, the religion-proxy-based travel ban, the abandonment of the Paris agreement, the attempt to dismantle the ACA, the (so-far attempted) banning of transgender soldiers, the refusal of the Census office to collect LGBT+ statistics, and the stepping-up of civil forfeiture, are all signs that right-wingers/conservatives are not tolerant of the existence of many people, let alone the opinions of left.
I desperately hope this is not, in fact, the prevailing sentiment of half the country. But to be convinced, I could really use examples of right-wing politicians affirming that LGBT+ people, the non-Christian religious , and people who can't afford their own living expenses are welcome in society.
Are these the tolerant right-wingers still chanting "lock her up" and wearing "kill all the liberals" t-shirts[0] at those space-time-confusing election rallies Trump does?
I don't like Donald Trump any more than the next person (and I would never vote for him), but watching people line up actively encouraging punishing (or firing) people based on who they voted for is crazy, especially because about half the country voted for the guy.
I come from a small town where Trump dominated Clinton, and most people I know voted for Trump holding their noses. They considered him to be a less-bad option, and Thiel even said as much in interviews. Yet folks are being smeared for being "complicit" and dragged as if they are Trump, or agree with everything he stands for.
I don't think that's ever happened before, at least publicly. Every candidate I've ever seen has major flaws, and people that lack those flaws and even despise those flaws voted for them anyway. I get that Trump is particularly incompetent, but if voting for a candidate that wins the election is a punishable offense maybe we should rethink our political activism.
Except that the google engineer this article refers to was not punished or fired for supporting Trump; he was fired for circulating a memo which claimed there were immutable biological reasons why approximately 50% of the workforce was unfit to work in his industry.
He claimed that women are more neurotic and emotional, that it negatively correlates with engineering performance, and that it is the reason why they aren't succeeding.
He claims that, therefore, we should make software engineering more emotional and people-focused.
Please quote from his manifesto where he actually said anything like that. You're both misinterpreting and sensationalizing, which does not help the conversation.
Well you obviously missed the sarcasm. I was making fun of the stupidity of the "ACKSHUALLY only 25% of the country voted for him" argument, which is needless pedantry and ignores that we can infer how the rest of the country _likely_ would have voted since we have such a large sample size.
> I don't think that's ever happened before, at least publicly.
The left got pretty hysterical about Bush too (did you know he was a Nazi, just like Trump?). I would not be surprised if being outed as a Bush voter would have been considered career-limiting in SV at the time. What has changed in the time since is a dramatic increase in our ability to discover and record people engaged in wrongthink and let our outrage go viral through social media.
I'm pretty sure the media has a large part to blame. By getting the view out that Trump was so bad, people started really believing it. You can see it in articles or tweets where parents say their young children are frightened. Kids don't analyze politics, they just believe what you tell them. So what have these kids been told or seen that actually made them scared?
After the election I saw people, smart people that work in the physical sciences, crying. Yelling that people will be killed now. That they should give up on their careers as it no longer matters.
These people obviously have bought into something along the lines of "literally Hitler". And if you really believe that, then his supporters are "basically Nazis". And given how Nazis are portrayed (and not just them, anyone involved in Germany's WWII effort is labeled a Nazi regardless if they were), anyone remotely like them forfeits all rights.
So it's not about disagreeing on any particular issues. It's that in their mind, the US just elected a monster and there's no excusing it.
This makes sense if you believe he's literally an evil monster. Just saying "politics!" doesn't give people a free pass to think or do anything at all.
> After the election I saw people, smart people that work in the physical sciences, crying. Yelling that people will be killed now. That they should give up on their careers as it no longer matters.
The reactions captured on video seem to indicate some serious psychological issues with these people.
Trump is unlike any president we’ve had before and crying is hardly an overreaction. Many government organizations are losing funding and leadership. We might lose our access to healthcare. A number of Trump's new hires were chosen to dismantle or loot their respective branches. There's a non-zero chance we'll get into a nuclear exchange with North Korea. The White House routinely issues statements supporting police overreach and denying domestic terrorism. Climate change is outright mocked. Our traditional alliances are in shambles, even among our neighbors. The only thing tempering Trump's authoritarian impulses is seemingly the fact that the Republican Party is in total disarray. And to top it all off, the man spews abhorrent, childish garbage almost daily on Twitter. Our fucking president!
All this was easily predictable before the election. How is this flaming pile of garbage not worth crying about? Are you seriously suggesting that any of this is normal?
I think crying and screaming, saying "women will be killed now" and "I might as well give up [on my PhD] because this is the end" is an overreaction, yes. I don't think many people cried and were ever-so-distraught because of climate change being mocked, or Trump's twitter. No, they bought into the whole "literal Hitler" nonsense, and truthfully thought we'd have violence all over, like Right Wing Death Squads.
Most of my friends who voted for Trump did so for one reason.
They were sick of Republicans getting battered by the media and their opponents. Every time the Republicans put up a "nice guy" the media skewered them along with their Democratic opponent. Think Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney. All decent guys, completely dismantled by their opponents and the media and turned into evil men during their campaigns.
My friends voted for Trump because he was a straight up brawler. The guy didn't back down, he didn't apologize, and was a flame thrower.
Clinton tried and tried to go after him and everything fell flat. He went after her, labeled her "crooked Hilary" which his base ate up. He talked about her husband being a rapist and how she allowed it and they went nuts about that. Nothing was off the table and it kept her completely off balance, she had no comebacks for most of his attacks.
The media went after him and what happened? He punched back - repeatedly and they were unprepared for him. Called him a joke, derided him, tried to bring him down. He just kept coming back and countered with something they weren't reporting on, or the polls being way off, or any other number of issues. The media were so unprepared to deal with him, even more so now that he's been elected. In one election, he completely dismantled the MSM and convinced half the country they couldn't be trusted. How many times a day do you hear the term "fake news" now? Trump started that. Now the media can't get away from it and now it's a part of our political lexicon. CNN is no longer a reputable news organization because Trump called them out repeatedly, their reputation is in tatters because of him.
The Republican base ate him up and loved the fact they finally had a candidate who played in the mud and never tried to be the "nice guy" and fought the media and Democrats with everything he had. It's not that they knew what they were getting, it was more about pushing back the Liberal ideology, and feeling like they had someone who would fight for them.
Those I know who voted from Trump did so because they objected to Clinton politically. They did not in the least like Trump.
I don't remember anyone speaking of Dole, McCain, or Romney as evil. Frankly, Donald Trump has said crappier things about McCain than anyone on the Democratic side ever did. Romney did get slammed on his statement that some percentage of the population was freeloading.
CNN is as reputable a news organization as it ever was. It may well be in worse odor with the Republican base because of Trump's statements, but I don't think it was ever that popular with them. And let's face it, Fox News has a 25-year investment in depicting Hillary Clinton as bad. If we're going to talk about CNN saying bad stuff about Dole, we should probably go back and think of all the folks who pushed the notion that Hillary Clinton arranged the death of Vincent Foster.
>> Those I know who voted from Trump did so because they objected to Clinton politically. They did not in the least like Trump.
this statement makes virtually no sense to me. They didn't like Clinton's politics, but instead of voting for Bernie or a third party candidate, they voted for someone they didn't like? That kind of logic completely escapes me.
>> CNN is as reputable a news organization as it ever was.
I'm not sure how they can be. It's one thing to have a political slant to your reporting. It's quite another to tow Democratic party lines, publish fake or purposefully misleading stories to hurt Trump, and 90% of the stories you run about him are negative. That's not journalistic integrity, it's a running tirade about him and his administration.
How much does CNN hate Trump? 93% of coverage is negative
You can say Fox News reporting has a conservative slant and I won't argue that fact. Even their reporting on Trump during and now after the election has had an air of pessimism about it. They ran very few, if any positive stories about him during the campaign, and many of their more moderate commentators still hedge their support of him and his policies.
>> Hillary Clinton arranged the death of Vincent Foster.
I've followed the Clinton's since the 90's and have heard various conspiracy theories about them, but this is the first time I've heard someone talk about Hilary arranging Vince Foster's death.
Actually they should just report the facts and let the people have their own opinions.
The media used to be the check on the government, now they're firmly on its payroll. When that happens, you lose all credibility. When you can't trust the news being reported to you to be unbiased, and not filtered through a political lens or some ideological slant, then it's no longer news, it's an agenda - which is exactly what I saw and experienced all through the election cycle and even now several months afterwards, with no signs of abating.
Ciricling back to this, cause it's kinda nuts. If you think "the media" and especially CNN has its reputation "destroyed" by Trump you are deep in a bubble. it's the same shitty network with pundits paid to yell at each other that has been since at least jon stewart went on crossfire and pointed out how stupid it all was. Cable news is junk outside of their sunday shows; but trump wasn't the one to point that out
>> If you think "the media" and especially CNN has its reputation "destroyed" by Trump you are deep in a bubble.
I'm not in a bubble. I've been an independent voter since I was 18. I read both conservative and liberal news sources and then have to sort them out to try and determine where the truth lies. It's exhausting, but it keeps me honest.
I didn't say Trump ruined CNN, they did that all by themselves when they cast their lot with Clinton and after she lost, they've since doubled down trying to oust Trump, outing them even further as partisan hacks.
I wouldn't fire anyone to punish them for their decision in the voting booth.
I would, however, consider firing someone who voted for Trump because of their lack in critical thinking skills–if such skills are relevant to their job.
The difference is in the employer's motivation. Say you've hired someone with a medical condition as a truck driver. As it turns out, they tend to randomly fall asleep at the wheel every few weeks. If you can't find a job where it's safe for them to do so, you will probably have to let them go. That doesn't mean that you harbour ill will towards them, or that you seek to punish them for this behaviour (that they have no control over). It only means that it's a bad fit.
But, to be honest, there are certainly people who wish others to be fired based on their vote. But that isn't actually a new phenomenon: it's the basic reason behind the principle of the secret ballot. If people voluntarily let others know how they voted, all the usual mechanisms of social feedback will kick in: Because people feel that a vote for Trump has and/or will harm themselves or others, they will treat the people who did it with the same sort of retribution they would inflict on someone they saw littering, or hitting their dog, or any number of actions they consider harmful.
Would also considering firing somebody for their lack in critical thinking skills if said persons believes in, let's say, an all powerful being, and who guides part of his life based on sacred texts which are not subject to criticism?
It's unfortunate how both political extremes are just the same:
The right uses the state to censure.
The left uses people and popularity to censure.
To fight the dictators I can simply join a militia and fight a civil war.
But how to I fight people? I'm not popular, I'm not cool, I'm not socially connected. I am no one. How do I maintain my rights when those depriving me of them are everyone else?
If I'm targeted by the populist mass, where is my recourse?
I'm lucky that I live in a country where I could just study and pass a test to be a public servant, where I'm guaranteed a job and won't be fired based on public outrage. But what about others?
The state doesn't censor speech. Hate speech laws (in the US, anyway) aren't very strong, for example the Supreme Court in the USA didn't rule against the Westboro Baptist Church or even people burning crosses on black family's property.
(All these people whining about "facts" being censored and none of them are using facts of their own..)
In the US, the right is closely aligned with white evangelical Christians. A large portion of their platform is dedicated to ensuring all Americans must hold the same moral code as that small group. They also actively suppress minority opinion through gerrymandering, voter roll purges, and voter idenfitication requirements. Conservative media isn't operated by the state but it's so tightly interwoven with conservative leadership that it might as well be. Fox News, Breitbart, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group all push decidedly right-wing messaging under the guise of journalism. Trump's EPA is censuring scientists. Trump's FCC is ignoring citizen outreach. Recordings of the White House press briefings are no longer allowed and Trump has called the media "the enemy of the people".
Republicans control the US government through what most on the left consider illegitimate means. The way they hold power is decidedly anti-democratic. They've gotten to a point where they control the day to day narrative and don't even have to listen to opposing viewpoints as they govern.
Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick just said this:
> "People are happy with their governments at their state level, they're not with the city," said Patrick, a Republican, in an interview with Fox Business Network. He was responding to a question about gubernatorial races.
> "Our cities are still controlled by Democrats," he added. "And where do we have all our problems in America? Not at the state level run by Republicans, but in our cities that are mostly controlled by Democrat mayors and Democrat city council men and women. That's where you see liberal policies. That's where you see high taxes. That's where you see street crime."
Ignoring that crime scales with population everywhere, people live in cities, cities are centers of production for most states, cities are generally healthier than suburban/exurban/rural areas, and cities are absolutely not happy with republican state governments, this comes on the heels of a series of anti-city legislation at the state level. The Texas legislature has been actively undoing liberal policies in Austin for no reason other than ideological disagreements. We apparently can be overruled at any time by rural legislators from hundreds of miles away.
Suppression is censorship in aggregate. It's not exactly "your opinion is harmful so stop talking" but it sure feels like it, and has the same results. The aggregate form happens to be easier to hide because it is more abstract.
Classic quote by Republican strategist Lee Atwater:
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
P.S. The dichotomy of state vs private censorship among parties is a false one. I've seen multiple references to a contemporary "red scare" in this forum today. It concerns me that if I were to bring up Russian collusion and election interference I might be shut down as a fear-monger when the concerns are completely valid. I also understand the Republican viewpoint of states suppressing opinion when it comes to things like affirmative action, political correctness, etc. There's too much noise right now for anyone to take anyone else seriously. Hard to imagine that ending anytime soon.
Are you saying that the far right and the far left have the same policies? If they have different policies, how are they the same? Are they essentially the same? Does that mean the content of one's political beliefs is not essential to their political identity? I don't get it so please clarify.
The far left and far right have similar policies but for different reasons.
The far right will censor to ensure that nobody questions the regime. But the far left will censor to ensure nobody questions the idea of the day. Which is functionally equivalent to a social regime.
There's a criticism section specifically answering the point you're trying to make, mate. Am I supposed to accept Horseshoe Theory because it has a wikipedia page? All that means is that people hold the view that extreme ideologies are the same. I already acknowledged that people hold that view.
> The far right will censor to ensure that nobody questions the regime. But the far left will censor to ensure nobody questions the idea of the day. Which is functionally equivalent to a social regime.
Ok, I see. Your politics boil down to what you can say or cannot say in public without being publicly criticized.
Not OP, and US centric, but far left and far right are both united in seeing the status quo as their enemy, and both believe they're better able to harness any chaos that will ensue from overthrowing it.
That's why you had Snowden and Jill Stein throwing soft support to Trump, telling their followers that the previous election was a choice between Goldman Sachs (who apprarently clinton represented) and freedom from banker rule (which apparently trump represented), and why you have Bernie supporters now attacking minority centrist candidates, who would be a challenge to him in democratic primaries.
It's pretty standard for any revolution, to be able to come together to kill the status quo without necessarily needing to agree on what would come next.
"Once we throw out everything that makes them different, they're the same." Going 500 miles north of here is the same as going 500 miles south of here because they are both going away from here.
Or maybe people that have the same short term goals, actually have the same short term goals and should be treated as though they have the same short term goals.
Other than the fact they have the same short term goals, they're totally different.
> Does that mean the content of one's political beliefs is not essential to their political identity
If your political ideology allows you to think that 'people who disagree with me about policy but agree with me in principle are still bad people and deserve as much righteous indignation as I can muster from others' then no, the virtue of your particular policy positions do not distinguish you in any meaningful way. That attitude is how the Republican party manages to churn out bulllshit platforms year after year
How about we talk about Trump's actual policies. Let's take healthcare specifically.
If Trump and the republican congress's healthcare policy were put into effect, millions of people would lose their health insurance. I know how shitty it can be to go about health insurance with a chronic illness. I expect thousands of people to die if this policy were put into place.
What the fuck does it mean to disagree with me about policy but agree with me in principle, in this case? Am I supposed to ignore the fact that political decisions impact the material lives of actual human beings? Am I supposed to play polite with politics that will harm people I care about because it's more important to agree in principle than to agree on actual concrete policy?
People who complain about how close-minded it is to be vehemently against Trump and by corollary people who put Trump into power never mention actual policies and how those policy differences actually impact people. It is always vague statements about politics in the abstract.
Politics in the abstract is never the reason for anything.
If you listen to these types of arguments you would think that the Democrats have figured out how to synthesize healthcare out of thin air and the Republicans are putting a stop to it
Democrats have produced several viable options based on existing models across the world. The ACA was the most conservative option and Republicans still fought to stop it.
I think there's a 20% chance that the Democrats abandon their center-right neoliberal platform next presidential election and actually push for single payer healthcare. I'm not holding my breath though.
Healthcare has already been successfully synthesized in dozens of countries around the world. There is nothing unique about America that precludes universal healthcare.
Just to be clear, I think the president is a fraud and a grifter who is attempting to use the fundamentally broken ideology of the far right for his own advantage. We can discuss the absurd details of his agenda all we want, but he is ultimately a symptom and not a cause of really shitty political discourse, or 'politics in the abstract'. There is no reason that progressives cannot fall into the same trap as conservatives have.
I think that's only because of how our country's electorate has evolved. The left would be happy to use the state to censure, and the right would be happy to use people and popularity to censure. You could find examples of both sides using populism or legalism to advance their agendas.
>To fight the dictators I can simply join a militia and fight a civil war.
You say that pretty casually! To me that sounds almost as daunting as being targeted by a populist mass.
You're right. The Right doesn't control massive swaths of the economy and fire and blacklist anyone who disagrees with them on any point of their platform. The Left does.
Right = capitalism. The right definitely controls the vast majority of capitol. You're delusional if you think otherwise.
Most educated people (who aren't massively insecure) see gender equality as a progressive goal and moral good. Most educated people are socially progressive, even if they are capitalists and have very libertarian economic leanings. Silicon Valley is the biggest example of this dynamic, that I know of.
Posting creepy memos about how one gender is biologically unsuited to write boring software is dumb and the guy was basically asking to be fired. It's good and hilarious that he is now dead.
It is a little absurd to say that this is censorship by the left. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences, and the manifesto has been widely distributed.
What rights were deprived from the author exactly? Did I miss a story where he got arrested?
That misses an important point IMO. The idea of Freedom of Speech is what's important, and that idea is not "the literal first amendment and absolutely nothing else". Arranging for harm to come to someone for expressing points of views you don't like is antithetical to the idea of Freedom of Speech. What we're supposed to be protecting is everyone expressing any views they hold, and for bad or wrong views to be dealt with in the marketplace of ideas, not by silencing the owners of those views.
You can perhaps say there are exceptions to views to be tolerated, but we're letting those exceptions become bigger and bigger. It's a dangerous trend, and if it continues, the idea of Freedom of Speech could be gone, even if the Government doesn't explicitly suppress it.
His job required him to participate in a team setting. His speech made that untenable according to his employer.
He hasn't been silenced though, if anything his voice carried far further than intended.
I'm not sure Google did the right thing here. The argument that this is the precise sacred cow he was talking about is strong.
But it isn't censorship. His speech wasn't abridged. He isn't in jail. There is no freedom from reaction, nor is there a freedom from outrage. If he had sent out a racist tirade, dropping racial epithets, would you still say his right to free speech was infringed when he got fired?
It is a little absurd to say that this is censorship by the left. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences, and the manifesto has been widely distributed.
What rights were deprived from the author exactly? Did I miss a story where he got arrested?
I believe it's illegal in the US to fire someone for their political leanings, but not if you say something outrageous like women aren't built for tech jobs (or whatever he said).
That being said, it's never a good idea to get on a soapbox about politics at work (or anywhere really). It doesn't make a difference in your listeners opinions and only gets people with opposing views aggravated. Best to just think about the issues and vote come election.
> I believe it's illegal in the US to fire someone for their political leanings, but not if you say something outrageous like women aren't built for tech jobs (or whatever he said).
It's easy to circumvent the legal issue, just have a vague code of conduct and claim the employee broke said code of conduct.
"You really need to read it again. He never brings of the topic of suitability. His section about biological differences only discusses why genders tend to choose certain professions."
he complained to the labor board about this issue before he wrote the memo, and apparently it is illegal in California to fire someone for complaining about their work conditions.
certainly not a slam dunk case, but he may have some reasonable basis for a case.
"That being said, it's never a good idea to get on a soapbox about politics at work (or anywhere really)."
The difference, presumably, is that people inside Google are already talking about all kinds of other political issues on internal message boards. They want to believe they're different, that they're in a new kind of enlightened environment where politics can be discussed by reasonable people without danger.
But this is ridiculous. It's easy to talk about things for which there's wide agreement. You don't even notice those things as politics. It's only politics when you disagree.
I don't suppose the human beings at Google are any better at talking about this stuff than any other human beings. If they want their workplace policies to reflect that, then fine! But there are a whole bunch of implicitly accepted leftist positions that they shouldn't be talking about, either. That's the hard part, because, again, they don't even notice those positions as politics.
Here are some Google executives saying exactly this:
Just as Uber and AirBnb are slowly revealing why we had hotel and taxi regulations in the first place, this Google case shows why our grandparents established those old-fashioned ideas about politics in the workplace.
You are 100% correct. Politics is shouted to the rafters in every forum inside Google, but with a voice that starts out from the extreme left and migrates further leftward from there. I can completely understand why conservatives - or even moderates - feel unwelcome there. It's really bad.
> I believe it's illegal in the US to fire someone for their political leanings
In most circumstances it's perfectly legal to do so. Exceptions include states with specific laws that protect political affiliation (which includes California) and federal government employees.
Someone asked in another HN thread. Federal employees are protected, and some states protect political affiliation including California: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953325
>Really? Leave it up to the media to decide what he was fired for afterwards?
I honestly don't care. Anyone who sends a company wide memo is asking for trouble. The news throws so much stuff that you are expected to get "outraged" over. It's not healthy to absorb it all.
Looks like we might go nuclear with North Korea real soon, if that happens, none of this will matter.
>Mr. Hastings, the chairman of a committee that evaluates Facebook’s board members, told Mr. Thiel in an email dated Aug. 14 that the advocacy would reflect badly on Mr. Thiel during a review of Facebook directors scheduled for the next day… "I’m so mystified by your endorsement of Trump for our President, that for me it moves from ‘different judgment’ to ‘bad judgment.’ Some diversity in views is healthy, but catastrophically bad judgment (in my view) is not what anyone wants in a fellow board member.”
Is it legal in the US for someone to judge a person’s political beliefs or a declared support for a candidate in a performance review? I can imagine that even if the answer is ‘no’ that things might be different on a public board where it is less ‘performance review’ and more ‘public face of the company’, but the idea of judging someone professionally on the basis of their personal politics at the ballot box seems a little disturbing to me.
The article claims, and as a (former) lawyer this seems plausible, that in California this would be illegal as it pertains to employees.
But you're right that executives are often treated differently, and board members even more so (since they're not just management - they're not employees at all). But I believe that under federal law political views are not currently a protected status, so it would not necessarily be illegal to fire someone for their political beliefs. Though this might seem odd, it is perhaps a behavior that is sufficiently deterred by the fact that it would be very bad for business in many cases. Remaining employees could be upset by it, customers and potential customers could be alienated, and legal challenges could be mounted under various theories.
Another reason that this could be less common that might expect, given that it's legal under federal law, is that some states are not at-will employment states (like California is), so it's generally harder to fire employees in general.
At this point everybody's made up their minds, assigned heros and villains and victims, and now flood every comment board on the internet to repeat their own existing beliefs.
Has anybody's mind been changed at all through this whole ordeal? Or are we just going to sail through another historic moment of cultural reckoning with our comfortable beliefs firmly intact and affirmed the whole way through?
I read all 3000 words. Of course it was an appropriate work place share--he was complaining about the working conditions of his company. He said that he had previously complained to the labor board as well. How are you supposed to complain about your company and discriminating work conditions if you never tell your company?
Yes and absolutely not. He should have stuck with the problems of ideological rigidity and shame-silencing and said absolutely nothing about differences between any groups of people.
This is a very good point. Nobody is going to educate themselves on this matter, we're divided and sitting in our echo chamber listening to what we want to hear until one of these threads pops up and we open the floodgates and start attacking each other.
it's unhealthy, but I suspect we're going to keep doing it.
There isn't a conversation. There isn't going to be a conversation just because you keep insisting there is. Insisting that there is in an indirect way, such as moralizing over how we go about this non-existent conversation, aside from being useless and weird is also not a clever way to make a conversation magically happen.
Yeah, and everyone who knows better is ignoring you. The entire point of all the impotent rage in these threads is about how no one is "willing to engage", therefore no there's isn't a "conversation" for you to insist is being "hurt".
If I followed people around insisting about talking about human sacrifice they would dismiss me, and if I kept following them saying things like "you're just hurting the conversation" it'd be pretty obvious I was either delusional or being manipulative.
I can't speak for the other party, but there are people who promote their ideology on the premise that any disagreement simply must, necessarily, be predicated on an immoral worldview. They explicitly state that indulging such people in an exchange of words is not "a conversation." It seems to have something to do with establishing themselves as gatekeepers of valid and invalid exchanges of words.
there are people who promote their ideology on the premise that any disagreement simply must, necessarily, be predicated on an immoral worldview.
I think you are right and it is a general human thing.
I believe it is a side effect of the feeling of being in majority.
I think old Catholics behaved this way back when they were mainstream all over Europe and persecuted all kinds of wrongthink including other Christians.
I belive other religions does the same.
Communists did the same.
I might even have been guilty of the same myself half a life ago and -looking back - I think I can see a pattern:
When we belong to the majority view then we feel strong and infallible. In this position (infallible and with strong support) it feels like doing anything that acknowledge the other sides point is just counterproductive.
I also think it is interesting - maybe even a bit deserved given what I think I said as a young man - that this is happening now and I'm on the receiving end of it as atheists and sjw are going mainstream and are starting to act like any other cult: punishing and supressing wrongthink.
"Supporters of women in tech praised Google." .. total lockdown of discourse is helpful to women? Outright firing anybody who dares to ask for open discussion is creating a more woman friendly working environment? This is pretty sexist. They are openly saying that in order for women to succeed we need authoritarian thought policing, and that if you are a woman you automatically agree with their agenda. Something strange is going on here.
One of the ironic things about this is the right has fought for years to empower corporations, and disempower workers, then goes apoplectic when Google Inc sees him as a liability and disposes of him like a used tissue. Damore sees the left as the problem, then files an NLRB complaint to try to protect himself. The biologically IQ-superior Damore might be surprised to find that the worker protections of the NLRB have been systematically hollowed out over the preceding decades by his conservative pals.
Conservatives and Republicans fought decades to enshrine the power of corporations and the 1%, and to undermine any worker autonomy. I have to roll my eyes at all this. I guess Damore found out the hard way that he's not part of the biologically IQ superior clique he thought he was part of.
I did ctrl-f for "iq" at diversitymemo.com and only came up with a reference to a comparison Damore made about types of scientific evidence the left or right tend to ignore.
The comment in question was not referring to IQ of males or females in any way.
So I am not sure where your accusations regarding IQ come from.
It's just terribly convenient to believe that everything that's good for large corporations is also good for "the little guy".
Considering the balancing of these interests (which most people consider to at least sometimes conflict) is the core issue of politics, such a belief would actually render politics useless. You could just appoint the top 10 CEOs and wait for the trickle-down wealth to wash over the masses.
The problem with "whataboutism" is that its an infinite loop.
If this were Hobby Lobby or Chick Filet, and an employee wrote an "pro birth-control screed" on their company discussion board, and was promptly fired, many of the people on the right standing up for the Google engineer would currently be defending the rights of big business to fire who they want, and attacking the fired employee for lacking awareness and common sense to know his audience, and to keep his politics out of his work environment, etc.
But that's a bit of a cold comfort, since so many of the left are doing that exact same thing now. And do the exact opposite in cases where the situation is the inverse.
Pro tip: unless it's part of your job, don't talk about politics at work. It's your place of work, it isn't /r/politics. If there is a specific policy that you'd like addressed, bring it up without a bunch of political baggage.
On a side note: The article mentions alt right people complaining that a lot of SV companies' cultures are left leaning, which I think bizarre. There are plenty of industries that lean far right, in fact, unless the company is a non-profit or is in the public sector, in my experience the typical company culture is more right leaning than left. In most companies outside of SV, diversity programs are almost non-existent or just something that is briefly mentioned on the careers page.
The fact that Google or other SV companies have robust diversity programs and have cultures that lean left is an anomaly and freaking out that you aren't included in these companies' diversity programs or that you feel on the outside of the company culture screams of entitlement and ignorance of the actual reality that minorities and women face in the rest of the job market.
Silicon Valley is like USSR in 70s-80s: you can say anything, but for saying things not in the party's line you would be expelled from a higher social class.
Totally, except for the economic stagnation, widespread malnutrition, common alcoholism, kleptocratic gerontocracy, almost every way, and the actual arrests of dissidents.
Oh, and losing a war in Afghanistan also doesn't seem to be in Twitter's immediate future.
You dont' get the comparison at all. And btw, Bay Area is full of drugsters, not to say that the country is losing the war in Afghanistan, as well as couple of other wars.
Welcome to 2017 where we're currently in the throes of an ideological civil war.
Politics used to be a gentleman's game. Sure, you argue and huff and puff over bills, and the opposing parties viewpoints, but at the end of the day - you found compromise. The last decade or so? No such thing. Politics is now a bloodsport. Total victory is the only option.
- Different viewpoints? Not allowed.
- Compromise? Not allowed.
- Rational discourse? Not allowed.
- Don't believe what I believe? Your're a racist, bigot, homophobe, xenophobe, misogynist.
The Liberal ideology that has dominated politics for the last decade is now eroding, the Republicans own Washington DC right now and its rather off putting to the people who used to be in power. The whole Google issue just highlights that this isn't going to end anytime soon - but it sure didn't start with Trump, and it sure didn't just "land on Silicon valley's doorstep" this past week.
I think the larger question is when is rational discourse going to return? Google had an incredible opportunity to create a forum to discuss the issues the author brought up. Instead, they had a knee jerk reaction, based on the current environment, and fired the guy. They would rather deal with a lawsuit, a ton of backlash and a social media furor I haven't seen in a while, instead of having an open dialogue on what happened and why this guy believes what he believes. Can him, put him the box and label him an evil person and let's move on.
Nobody wins, and nothing is gained.
Another wasted opportunity.
Sad and depressing this is where we are as a country.
I'd hesitate to say liberal politics dominated DC. In the last decade there were only two years where Democrats were able to pass liberal legislation at the federal level: 2008-2010. Even then it was a slog. Republican powers keep pushing the Overton window further and further right and liberals are supposed to just accept it? No, they're going to draw a line and learn to fight back. Only "The Party of No" bears the burden of compromise at this point.
The topic at hand is probably the worse you could start with if you want "rational discourse". Because to a large degree it's about values much more than facts. Yes, this so-called manifesto names some facts, but the opposition isn't to those facts, but to the way they're used.
And let's not pretend like the split between left and right in the US is somehow the shared responsibility of both sides. It's no coincidence that both the "reality-based community" as well as "alternative facts" are terms coined by the right.
There are literally dozens of lists on the web of actual, proven, indisputable lies of the current President. From crowd sizes to "even the liberal media calls it the greatest speech ever held on foreign soil". To insist that both sides are the same, and that therefore the best course of action is somehow in the middle, is ridiculous.
Non-white and grew up with a very religious background - even lived in a religious commune-like environment for a few years. The current environment in the bay reminds me of those days in many ways - the incredible pressure to visibly signal virtue through study, fasting, public displays of humility, etc. It's easy to trick yourself in thinking you actually believe and this is the only way, but it quickly fades once you're out of the environment
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadThis is not in any modern sense "left" (please don't bother pedantically bringing up "classical liberalism").
Just a dash? Just a smidge? LOL. That's not the Silicon Valley I moved to in 1999.
No disintermediation and bitcoin here. No way.
In many other ways SV is clearly skewed left.
Europeans might disagree and say that all Americans are on the right.
With no economic components I'm genuinely curious what you consider the "American sense" of the left, in the sense of actual policy. Pro-choice, I guess?
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/
The economic components were maybe 1/3 of her platform, and not all of her economic positions were incompatible with free markets.
But by American standards, her platform was well left of the average politician.
(Though I suspect, had she been elected, she would have ignored the platform and governed as a corporatist.)
Again, only if you entirely discount her economic positions, which are the core positions of any "left" figure.
You're free to paint with however wide a brush you wish, and your other comments in this thread leave little doubt that you'll retain your opinion regardless of how this exchange turns out. But simply because the Democratic party is the "more PC" corporate capitalist party, and the Republican party is the "less PC", does not mean that either of them represents anything remotely resembling economic left interests.
The Swedish left is regarded by everyone else as utter madness. See how the media covered their refugee policy a few years ago.
When somebody says, "Everybody at my company is a leftist!" they're not talking about people who read Marx and support trade unions. They're talking about culture.
Nailed it.
Valley Values are completely destroying the tech industry. We have Google, one of the most successful companies to ever exist, being brought to it's breaking point over identity politics and diversity initiatives.
With the recent events, lawsuits and hoopla, I'm starting to view women as a liability in the workplace. As a business owner / Investor it seems like a liability to hire women.
I find my self asking, if I hire this woman, how long before she starts to demand equality of outcome regardless of skill level? How long before she starts to threaten to destroy my company, my brand, my livelihood if I don't succumb to their requests?
To me, totally missing the point. Not just "for the right". To many who would consider themselves mostly aligned with left wing politics, myself included, this is just the latest in a long line of media (social and news) driven forced punishment for people guilty of expressing a viewpoint or just generally doing something a bit poor taste in public. It doesn't really matter if they've done wrong. It's not a considered or proportional type of response.
Sure, there are far bigger injustices in the world than someone losing their job, but this sort of thing is wrong because it's for the wrong reason. It's headlines driven HR.
That's ludicrous. You don't do things that make potentially thousands of your coworkers uncomfortable internally just because you want to make a point. Human Resources is a thing for a reason.
Put it on medium and be done with it.
He suggests that Google has a culture of sharing pretty openly and of offering criticism and even commentary on important issues. It would be good to have additional evidence of this to evaluate whether his statement was indeed matched to the appropriate environment.
(I am not and have not been a Google employee, so IDK for sure. I know that at my company, there are indeed particular fora in which this sort of thing could be raised. I can imagine at some companies this would not be possible, so you raise a great question. Thanks!)
I'm all for keeping politics out of the workplace, except for verbal conversations between colleagues. But that's just not the case right now.
Both are obviously incredibly unprofessional, but only one would probably face life-changing punishment in reality. Ideally you set the tone that both are unacceptable, that the only political discussion acceptable beyond interpersonal conversation is the politics of the company's self-interest. Both starting an internal political battle, as as well tweeting externally about an already-started one, should get you fired. But that's only fair if you set that tone and expectation.
Maybe you are unfamiliar with Google's culture. Employees are encouraged to engage in conversations about the culture and values of the company, using mediums like this. Google is not rigid about "work time", preferring that you are productive.
Also, 10 page manifestos to your company are never good ideas.
has everyone forgotten Jerry McGuire?
1) He never insinuated that anyone was biologically inferior just that there is marginal statistical proof that -on average- women prefer to work less hours, and more flexible hours; his "idea" was to promote a culture that adopted this, rather than using hiring quotas, in order to achieve the diversity goal which he also claims to wish for.
That you claim he was calling people "inferior" only shows your own bias.
2) It's not a "Manifesto" that's what gizmodo called it but it was, at best, a memo, at worst, the first post on an internal forum thread hoping to discuss this matter.
Priming your audience with terms like "Anti-diversity screed" and "manifesto" all but guarantee a sizable portion of people will read the document with major prejudice and bias. And that's the kind of thing those of us who value diversity ought to loathe.
We certainly need a whole lot more charity in our conversations on sensitive issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
[[Citation Needed]]
He literally said the exact opposite of this.
Why are you purposefully misrepresenting his views? And if not purposefully, why are you then commenting on a story whose main source (the document) you haven't read?
He was offering a different explanation, based on group averages, of why the industry is unable to reach a 50/50 ratio of male/female engineers. And most of his arguments were based on interests, not abilities.
That's very different from the way it's been mischaracterized as an argument that women are inferior.
Because they're outraged by what they've heard about it and demand that someone (almost without question) facilitate that outrage, correct or not.
Writes a manifesto 1. Google is intolerant of opposing views 2. Hitler did nothing wrong.
Gets fired.
THIS PROVES MY POINT ABOUT GOOGLE BEING INTOLERANT.
"Hitler did nothign wrong, let's kill the Jews" should be judged differently from "Maybe Hitler was right on some points, here's why:".
leave the emoting/bitching for your next flat-earther/climate-denier meeting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> In contrast, Mr. Hastings, a supporter of Hillary Clinton ...
From my PoV, the fact that Hastings has received no backlash for supporting Clinton after Trump won, is a sign that right-wingers/conservatives/Trump supporters are more tolerant of the opinions of left-wingers/liberals/progressives/Clinton supporters than the other way around.
That being said, Clinton was pretty tepid and corrupt, not openly offensive and terrifying the way Trump is. Unless you're REALLY desperate you can't honestly say supporting one or the other is the same.
Basket of deplorables...
A big part of her campaign strategy was to generalize from a few actual white supremacists and paint everyone who opposed her as a deplorable sexist Nazi white-supremacist who couldn't stand the idea of a woman President.
That kind of McCarthyism is always a threat, but it was doubly dangerous in the current environment, with leftist groups declaring that violence was justified against anyone they thought fit that description.
Trump, meanwhile, actually hired open white nationalists and people with Nazi ties. Cool! The existential threat from Clinton was definitely the same because she.. opposed exactly that.
> “I suppose it’s fair to say: don’t you someday want to see a woman president?”
Hillary repeatedly pressed the "I'm a woman" button, and the "Trump supporters are white supremacists" button. Then she generalized to insult all Trump supporters with remarks like the one you mentioned.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/donald-trump-pepe-the-fr...
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/theres-a-reason-why-whit...
My opinions here aren't based on "an echo chamber" but on her own words and her own site.
For example?
That's just not true, unless you use a twisted definition of "white nationalist" that means "anyone who has ever said anything acknowledging that white people are a group with interests".
These are literal undeniable truths. Please do your research and don't try to be coy.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/steve-bannon-racist-...
> racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic
> ... irredeemable
Sorry, are you unaware of any people who've been attacked by Trump supporters? Really? Besides the obvious politicians (Senator Ben Sasse, for example), there are viral incidents like these: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/11/2...
Putting aside the question of why she felt she was being discriminated against, that's a story about a woman who said some nasty things.
Is that the worst of it?
Hardly comparable to what's been done to Trump supporters.
But back to the matter at hand. You seem to be arguing that Thiel faced particular abuse for being a Trump supporter, given the example of Reed Hastings calling him out after Trump secured the Republican nomination (the GP comment [0]). I think it's worth pointing out the pre-conditions in this situation: Thiel, a known conservative, is allowed to serve on the board of directors for one of the biggest institutions (Facebook) in one of America's most famously liberal enclaves [1]. When it's revealed that he's a Trump backer, the liberals, who far outnumber those of Thiel's mindset in his peer group, threaten to kick him out. And let's be fair, Thiel is by far not the only example, as similar liberal outrages have been inflicted upon conservatives in other liberal enclaves, such as Hollywood.
But that's exactly what happened to the Clinton-supporting members on the board of directors for Hobby Lobby and the NRA. Oh wait, no such Clinton-supporting members exist. At least that we know of. If those conservative institutions could even tolerate a Clinton-suppporting board member in the first place, I imagine those Clinton-supporting members would face the same kind of backlash from their colleagues that Thiel faced from his for supporting Trump.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968956
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nearly-all-of-silicon-v...
May I assume that you also don't know of any?
Search for "fired for supporting Trump" or "Trump supporters assaulted" if you'd really like a list.
Here, I'll just mention what I consider the most egregious example:
In San Jose, a leftist mob attacked people leaving a Trump campaign event, while police stood aside and watched. "The only people arrested the day of the rally, Dhillon added, were those who attacked police officers."
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/15/san-jose-new-allegatio...
There have been worse events, including kidnapping, torture, murder and attempted murders, but in that case the police seem to have been accomplices.
OK, just try to list ones that you think are important examples.
> In San Jose, a leftist mob attacked people leaving a Trump campaign event, while police stood aside and watched
OK, here you go:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/man-accused-of-assaulting-...
http://www.lex18.com/story/35275736/transylvania-university-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sente...
> There have been worse events, including kidnapping, torture, murder and attempted murders, but in that case the police seem to have been accomplices.
OK. Yeah, I guess if police are covering things up, then there are all manner of awful events that we don't really know about.
I consider the organized attacks by companies, protestors, and other groups, some with the tacit approval of the government, to be worse.
> Do you have any examples of people punished for supporting Clinton? I'd be interested to hear about them; I'm not aware of any.
I'm not particularly interested in getting into a link-fest fight that will ultimately stall at a No-True-Scotsman appeal. I took issue at your apparent complete obliviousness of violent attacks originating from the right-wing. Are any of the incidents I've mentioned sufficient for you and all those awful incidents you have in your head but can't be bothered to find the links to?
Oh what the hell. Here's another one for you: "Couple charged with assault in shooting, melee during UW speech by Milo Yiannopoulos"
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/couple-charge...
Oh, I guess that doesn't count as a "mob", because apparently when members of one group of protestors shoots another protester in the stomach, police swoop in and shut everything down. Do you imagine that if the police weren't there, that the right-wing protesters (including the ones carrying and firing guns) would have amicably resolved things?
I don't expect to find scores of examples of angry right-wing mob action. The winning side tends to have less reason to protest or lash out. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are aware of angry anti-Obama protests and retaliation that happened back in 2009. But let me know if you are equally oblivious of such incidents and I can search the news archives for you.
As a registered Republican, I can only imagine what my reaction as a Democrat would be upon hearing of attacks on Obama supporters. I would hope that my reaction would not be to assume that such attacks were coordinated by Senator McCain/Governor Palin, or use such incidents as a sweeping indictment against the Republican party. It's been several hours since you claimed that there were "so many" anti-Trump attacks and yet you've still only been able to come up with that one link from the Mercury News. Save yourself the effort, I can think of several incidents in which Trump supporters were harmed, but I'm not the one who was ignorant of such incidents nor do I deny that such incidents, whether they involved angry words or actual violence, were considerably harmful to the victims.
But -- looking at the most recent election cycle -- it's hard to ignore that the most direct examples of a party's leader sanctioning violence comes straight from Trump himself, which is why a lawsuit accusing him of inciting violence has been allowed to go forward:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/3/trump-campaig...
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/both-sides-blame-tru...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/04/03/th...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/get-him-out-racial-t...
Again, not a mob action since ca...
Of course there were actions by crazy individuals on both sides. That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about people punished by organized groups and the powerful. I'm talking about Google firing people and the police ignoring mob attacks.
And you still haven't mentioned any such things.
I agree Trump's rhetoric was dangerous but he hasn't acted on it, as far as I know.
The police chief/city officials ignoring mob attacks based on politics is indeed a huge problem. If I'm reading the example you posted correctly, and the most recent update [0], a judge has so far dismissed claims against the defendants who would have the power -- e.g. the mayor and police chief -- to tell police to not protect Trump supporters. Did police officers intentionally decide to harm Trump supporters? I suppose the court case will examine that, though it's worth noting that Trump was endorsed by the nation's largest police union [1], so the thought of police being part of a conspiracy to hurt Trump would be pretty surprising.
In case you were unaware of Democrat-supporters who were either fired, or were threatened to be fired, for their support of Democrats, here you go:
- https://www.aol.com/2013/01/18/utah-terry-lee-forensics-fire...
- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/was-employee-laid-off-for-voting...
- https://www.mediaite.com/online/fired-for-voting-ohio-woman-...
- http://www.salon.com/2017/01/20/newt-gingrich-wants-to-fire-...
- http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/09/news/economy/siegel-email-em...
For your own pro-Trump files:
- http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/boss-tells-pro-trump-em...
[0] http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/15/judge-wont-throw-out-t...
[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/09/18/494451660/the-nations-largest-...
I'm sure there's challenges to being a left-leaning person in rural Georgia. But moving to rural Georgia isn't necessary, or really even an option, for people seeking economic mobility.
But it can really screw up people's lives in that short period of time, and scares everyone into not sharing any potentially controversial views in public nowadays, which I find disconcerting living in a country that's supposed to hold Freedom of Speech as one of its highest values (yes, I know freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, but the consequences have gotten extremely severe, career ending in a lot of cases, for statements that are sometimes taken out of context).
I'd rather people see these statements they dislike as an opportunity to engage in discourse and try to change these people's minds, instead of swift retribution, often without examination of how guilty the people in question actually are, just being told they're guilty by some random person they like on the internet is often enough to get them to jump on board.
It's especially concerning considering a lot of these people turning their shame button up to 11 consider themselves to be religious people, and most religions tend to espouse not letting yourself get swept up in hatred and casting stones at others. I'm not particularly religious, but I still don't think it's a healthy mentality to have, and I've had to ignore and heavily filter my social media in order to not see this presented to me every day, and even then I still get a lot of it shoved in my face (I can only imagine what all a person who actively looks for these things must see).
The Two Minutes Hate seems more and more appropriate the more I reflect on it. Here's a quote about it from 1984:
"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."
"Outrage of the Day" is appropriate because what else can fill the mundanity of your life? The trouble is they accumulate and you inevitable form judgements, courtesy to the echo chambers (I'd like to see a new word echosystem!) This also makes it harder to introduce new ideas because the 'right' opinions and argument trees are already set.
I don't see social media as good/bad, but my observation of it is making me wonder if I'm turning into a reluctant Luddite.
https://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-17/how-the-in...
I desperately hope this is not, in fact, the prevailing sentiment of half the country. But to be convinced, I could really use examples of right-wing politicians affirming that LGBT+ people, the non-Christian religious , and people who can't afford their own living expenses are welcome in society.
0: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-tru...
I come from a small town where Trump dominated Clinton, and most people I know voted for Trump holding their noses. They considered him to be a less-bad option, and Thiel even said as much in interviews. Yet folks are being smeared for being "complicit" and dragged as if they are Trump, or agree with everything he stands for.
I don't think that's ever happened before, at least publicly. Every candidate I've ever seen has major flaws, and people that lack those flaws and even despise those flaws voted for them anyway. I get that Trump is particularly incompetent, but if voting for a candidate that wins the election is a punishable offense maybe we should rethink our political activism.
He claims that, therefore, we should make software engineering more emotional and people-focused.
The left got pretty hysterical about Bush too (did you know he was a Nazi, just like Trump?). I would not be surprised if being outed as a Bush voter would have been considered career-limiting in SV at the time. What has changed in the time since is a dramatic increase in our ability to discover and record people engaged in wrongthink and let our outrage go viral through social media.
46.6% didn't vote
25.6% voted for Hillary Clinton
25.5% voted for Donald Trump
After the election I saw people, smart people that work in the physical sciences, crying. Yelling that people will be killed now. That they should give up on their careers as it no longer matters.
These people obviously have bought into something along the lines of "literally Hitler". And if you really believe that, then his supporters are "basically Nazis". And given how Nazis are portrayed (and not just them, anyone involved in Germany's WWII effort is labeled a Nazi regardless if they were), anyone remotely like them forfeits all rights.
So it's not about disagreeing on any particular issues. It's that in their mind, the US just elected a monster and there's no excusing it.
This makes sense if you believe he's literally an evil monster. Just saying "politics!" doesn't give people a free pass to think or do anything at all.
The reactions captured on video seem to indicate some serious psychological issues with these people.
All this was easily predictable before the election. How is this flaming pile of garbage not worth crying about? Are you seriously suggesting that any of this is normal?
Trump is a liar but also emotionally honest; people knew what they were voting for when they "held their noses" and that's no excuse
They were sick of Republicans getting battered by the media and their opponents. Every time the Republicans put up a "nice guy" the media skewered them along with their Democratic opponent. Think Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney. All decent guys, completely dismantled by their opponents and the media and turned into evil men during their campaigns.
My friends voted for Trump because he was a straight up brawler. The guy didn't back down, he didn't apologize, and was a flame thrower.
Clinton tried and tried to go after him and everything fell flat. He went after her, labeled her "crooked Hilary" which his base ate up. He talked about her husband being a rapist and how she allowed it and they went nuts about that. Nothing was off the table and it kept her completely off balance, she had no comebacks for most of his attacks.
The media went after him and what happened? He punched back - repeatedly and they were unprepared for him. Called him a joke, derided him, tried to bring him down. He just kept coming back and countered with something they weren't reporting on, or the polls being way off, or any other number of issues. The media were so unprepared to deal with him, even more so now that he's been elected. In one election, he completely dismantled the MSM and convinced half the country they couldn't be trusted. How many times a day do you hear the term "fake news" now? Trump started that. Now the media can't get away from it and now it's a part of our political lexicon. CNN is no longer a reputable news organization because Trump called them out repeatedly, their reputation is in tatters because of him.
The Republican base ate him up and loved the fact they finally had a candidate who played in the mud and never tried to be the "nice guy" and fought the media and Democrats with everything he had. It's not that they knew what they were getting, it was more about pushing back the Liberal ideology, and feeling like they had someone who would fight for them.
I don't remember anyone speaking of Dole, McCain, or Romney as evil. Frankly, Donald Trump has said crappier things about McCain than anyone on the Democratic side ever did. Romney did get slammed on his statement that some percentage of the population was freeloading.
CNN is as reputable a news organization as it ever was. It may well be in worse odor with the Republican base because of Trump's statements, but I don't think it was ever that popular with them. And let's face it, Fox News has a 25-year investment in depicting Hillary Clinton as bad. If we're going to talk about CNN saying bad stuff about Dole, we should probably go back and think of all the folks who pushed the notion that Hillary Clinton arranged the death of Vincent Foster.
Romeney had the intimidation factor of a house plant.
this statement makes virtually no sense to me. They didn't like Clinton's politics, but instead of voting for Bernie or a third party candidate, they voted for someone they didn't like? That kind of logic completely escapes me.
>> CNN is as reputable a news organization as it ever was.
I'm not sure how they can be. It's one thing to have a political slant to your reporting. It's quite another to tow Democratic party lines, publish fake or purposefully misleading stories to hurt Trump, and 90% of the stories you run about him are negative. That's not journalistic integrity, it's a running tirade about him and his administration.
How much does CNN hate Trump? 93% of coverage is negative
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/23/how-much-doe...
You can say Fox News reporting has a conservative slant and I won't argue that fact. Even their reporting on Trump during and now after the election has had an air of pessimism about it. They ran very few, if any positive stories about him during the campaign, and many of their more moderate commentators still hedge their support of him and his policies.
>> Hillary Clinton arranged the death of Vincent Foster.
I've followed the Clinton's since the 90's and have heard various conspiracy theories about them, but this is the first time I've heard someone talk about Hilary arranging Vince Foster's death.
The media used to be the check on the government, now they're firmly on its payroll. When that happens, you lose all credibility. When you can't trust the news being reported to you to be unbiased, and not filtered through a political lens or some ideological slant, then it's no longer news, it's an agenda - which is exactly what I saw and experienced all through the election cycle and even now several months afterwards, with no signs of abating.
I'm not in a bubble. I've been an independent voter since I was 18. I read both conservative and liberal news sources and then have to sort them out to try and determine where the truth lies. It's exhausting, but it keeps me honest.
I didn't say Trump ruined CNN, they did that all by themselves when they cast their lot with Clinton and after she lost, they've since doubled down trying to oust Trump, outing them even further as partisan hacks.
I would, however, consider firing someone who voted for Trump because of their lack in critical thinking skills–if such skills are relevant to their job.
The difference is in the employer's motivation. Say you've hired someone with a medical condition as a truck driver. As it turns out, they tend to randomly fall asleep at the wheel every few weeks. If you can't find a job where it's safe for them to do so, you will probably have to let them go. That doesn't mean that you harbour ill will towards them, or that you seek to punish them for this behaviour (that they have no control over). It only means that it's a bad fit.
But, to be honest, there are certainly people who wish others to be fired based on their vote. But that isn't actually a new phenomenon: it's the basic reason behind the principle of the secret ballot. If people voluntarily let others know how they voted, all the usual mechanisms of social feedback will kick in: Because people feel that a vote for Trump has and/or will harm themselves or others, they will treat the people who did it with the same sort of retribution they would inflict on someone they saw littering, or hitting their dog, or any number of actions they consider harmful.
The right uses the state to censure.
The left uses people and popularity to censure.
To fight the dictators I can simply join a militia and fight a civil war.
But how to I fight people? I'm not popular, I'm not cool, I'm not socially connected. I am no one. How do I maintain my rights when those depriving me of them are everyone else?
If I'm targeted by the populist mass, where is my recourse?
I'm lucky that I live in a country where I could just study and pass a test to be a public servant, where I'm guaranteed a job and won't be fired based on public outrage. But what about others?
(All these people whining about "facts" being censored and none of them are using facts of their own..)
The state says there are no gays, therefore if you discuss being gay with people you will be arrested for propaganda.
Ring wing censorship comes from the state, left wing censorship comes from peers.
Sorry that people don't react with perfect civility to your uncivil attempts to create an ethnostate. That doesn't make you a victim.
> your uncivil attempts to create an ethnostate
"Identity politics" better describes such a thing. Tell me, would you describe the actions of historical fascists as "not perfect civility" as well?
> That doesn't make you a victim
What strawman are you projecting here?
Republicans control the US government through what most on the left consider illegitimate means. The way they hold power is decidedly anti-democratic. They've gotten to a point where they control the day to day narrative and don't even have to listen to opposing viewpoints as they govern.
Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick just said this:
> "People are happy with their governments at their state level, they're not with the city," said Patrick, a Republican, in an interview with Fox Business Network. He was responding to a question about gubernatorial races.
> "Our cities are still controlled by Democrats," he added. "And where do we have all our problems in America? Not at the state level run by Republicans, but in our cities that are mostly controlled by Democrat mayors and Democrat city council men and women. That's where you see liberal policies. That's where you see high taxes. That's where you see street crime."
Ignoring that crime scales with population everywhere, people live in cities, cities are centers of production for most states, cities are generally healthier than suburban/exurban/rural areas, and cities are absolutely not happy with republican state governments, this comes on the heels of a series of anti-city legislation at the state level. The Texas legislature has been actively undoing liberal policies in Austin for no reason other than ideological disagreements. We apparently can be overruled at any time by rural legislators from hundreds of miles away.
Suppression is censorship in aggregate. It's not exactly "your opinion is harmful so stop talking" but it sure feels like it, and has the same results. The aggregate form happens to be easier to hide because it is more abstract.
Classic quote by Republican strategist Lee Atwater:
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
P.S. The dichotomy of state vs private censorship among parties is a false one. I've seen multiple references to a contemporary "red scare" in this forum today. It concerns me that if I were to bring up Russian collusion and election interference I might be shut down as a fear-monger when the concerns are completely valid. I also understand the Republican viewpoint of states suppressing opinion when it comes to things like affirmative action, political correctness, etc. There's too much noise right now for anyone to take anyone else seriously. Hard to imagine that ending anytime soon.
At least for me, usually the extreme image for the right is a dictatorship, and the left, academics, popular people and their twitter mob.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
The far left and far right have similar policies but for different reasons.
The far right will censor to ensure that nobody questions the regime. But the far left will censor to ensure nobody questions the idea of the day. Which is functionally equivalent to a social regime.
> The far right will censor to ensure that nobody questions the regime. But the far left will censor to ensure nobody questions the idea of the day. Which is functionally equivalent to a social regime.
Ok, I see. Your politics boil down to what you can say or cannot say in public without being publicly criticized.
That's why you had Snowden and Jill Stein throwing soft support to Trump, telling their followers that the previous election was a choice between Goldman Sachs (who apprarently clinton represented) and freedom from banker rule (which apparently trump represented), and why you have Bernie supporters now attacking minority centrist candidates, who would be a challenge to him in democratic primaries.
It's pretty standard for any revolution, to be able to come together to kill the status quo without necessarily needing to agree on what would come next.
That's just a truism. The extremes of the political spectrum are, by definition, not the mainstream that defines the status quo.
Other than the fact they have the same short term goals, they're totally different.
If your political ideology allows you to think that 'people who disagree with me about policy but agree with me in principle are still bad people and deserve as much righteous indignation as I can muster from others' then no, the virtue of your particular policy positions do not distinguish you in any meaningful way. That attitude is how the Republican party manages to churn out bulllshit platforms year after year
If Trump and the republican congress's healthcare policy were put into effect, millions of people would lose their health insurance. I know how shitty it can be to go about health insurance with a chronic illness. I expect thousands of people to die if this policy were put into place.
What the fuck does it mean to disagree with me about policy but agree with me in principle, in this case? Am I supposed to ignore the fact that political decisions impact the material lives of actual human beings? Am I supposed to play polite with politics that will harm people I care about because it's more important to agree in principle than to agree on actual concrete policy?
People who complain about how close-minded it is to be vehemently against Trump and by corollary people who put Trump into power never mention actual policies and how those policy differences actually impact people. It is always vague statements about politics in the abstract.
Politics in the abstract is never the reason for anything.
>The left uses people and popularity to censure.
I think that's only because of how our country's electorate has evolved. The left would be happy to use the state to censure, and the right would be happy to use people and popularity to censure. You could find examples of both sides using populism or legalism to advance their agendas.
>To fight the dictators I can simply join a militia and fight a civil war.
You say that pretty casually! To me that sounds almost as daunting as being targeted by a populist mass.
Getting fired over a creepy manifesto that you chose to make public isn't censorship, and not a threat to your "rights".
Most educated people (who aren't massively insecure) see gender equality as a progressive goal and moral good. Most educated people are socially progressive, even if they are capitalists and have very libertarian economic leanings. Silicon Valley is the biggest example of this dynamic, that I know of.
Posting creepy memos about how one gender is biologically unsuited to write boring software is dumb and the guy was basically asking to be fired. It's good and hilarious that he is now dead.
What rights were deprived from the author exactly? Did I miss a story where he got arrested?
You can perhaps say there are exceptions to views to be tolerated, but we're letting those exceptions become bigger and bigger. It's a dangerous trend, and if it continues, the idea of Freedom of Speech could be gone, even if the Government doesn't explicitly suppress it.
He hasn't been silenced though, if anything his voice carried far further than intended.
I'm not sure Google did the right thing here. The argument that this is the precise sacred cow he was talking about is strong.
But it isn't censorship. His speech wasn't abridged. He isn't in jail. There is no freedom from reaction, nor is there a freedom from outrage. If he had sent out a racist tirade, dropping racial epithets, would you still say his right to free speech was infringed when he got fired?
What rights were deprived from the author exactly? Did I miss a story where he got arrested?
That being said, it's never a good idea to get on a soapbox about politics at work (or anywhere really). It doesn't make a difference in your listeners opinions and only gets people with opposing views aggravated. Best to just think about the issues and vote come election.
It's easy to circumvent the legal issue, just have a vague code of conduct and claim the employee broke said code of conduct.
certainly not a slam dunk case, but he may have some reasonable basis for a case.
The difference, presumably, is that people inside Google are already talking about all kinds of other political issues on internal message boards. They want to believe they're different, that they're in a new kind of enlightened environment where politics can be discussed by reasonable people without danger.
But this is ridiculous. It's easy to talk about things for which there's wide agreement. You don't even notice those things as politics. It's only politics when you disagree.
I don't suppose the human beings at Google are any better at talking about this stuff than any other human beings. If they want their workplace policies to reflect that, then fine! But there are a whole bunch of implicitly accepted leftist positions that they shouldn't be talking about, either. That's the hard part, because, again, they don't even notice those positions as politics.
Here are some Google executives saying exactly this:
https://youtu.be/wa8nc27Jb8E
Just as Uber and AirBnb are slowly revealing why we had hotel and taxi regulations in the first place, this Google case shows why our grandparents established those old-fashioned ideas about politics in the workplace.
In most circumstances it's perfectly legal to do so. Exceptions include states with specific laws that protect political affiliation (which includes California) and federal government employees.
Really? Leave it up to the media to decide what he was fired for afterwards?
> it's never a good idea to get on a soapbox about politics at work
Many companies actively encourage this, when it comes to left-leaning politics.
I honestly don't care. Anyone who sends a company wide memo is asking for trouble. The news throws so much stuff that you are expected to get "outraged" over. It's not healthy to absorb it all.
Looks like we might go nuclear with North Korea real soon, if that happens, none of this will matter.
He didn't.
Is it legal in the US for someone to judge a person’s political beliefs or a declared support for a candidate in a performance review? I can imagine that even if the answer is ‘no’ that things might be different on a public board where it is less ‘performance review’ and more ‘public face of the company’, but the idea of judging someone professionally on the basis of their personal politics at the ballot box seems a little disturbing to me.
But you're right that executives are often treated differently, and board members even more so (since they're not just management - they're not employees at all). But I believe that under federal law political views are not currently a protected status, so it would not necessarily be illegal to fire someone for their political beliefs. Though this might seem odd, it is perhaps a behavior that is sufficiently deterred by the fact that it would be very bad for business in many cases. Remaining employees could be upset by it, customers and potential customers could be alienated, and legal challenges could be mounted under various theories.
Another reason that this could be less common that might expect, given that it's legal under federal law, is that some states are not at-will employment states (like California is), so it's generally harder to fire employees in general.
Has anybody's mind been changed at all through this whole ordeal? Or are we just going to sail through another historic moment of cultural reckoning with our comfortable beliefs firmly intact and affirmed the whole way through?
Depends on the workplace, doesn't it?
Why would that matter? Every workplace has an expectation for you to get along with your colleagues.
it's unhealthy, but I suspect we're going to keep doing it.
Sometimes some relevant points emerge from both sides in between the shouting and flagging.
If you don’t think there is a conversation here I guess you are free to leave unless you are a mod.
If I followed people around insisting about talking about human sacrifice they would dismiss me, and if I kept following them saying things like "you're just hurting the conversation" it'd be pretty obvious I was either delusional or being manipulative.
I think you are right and it is a general human thing.
I believe it is a side effect of the feeling of being in majority.
I think old Catholics behaved this way back when they were mainstream all over Europe and persecuted all kinds of wrongthink including other Christians.
I belive other religions does the same.
Communists did the same.
I might even have been guilty of the same myself half a life ago and -looking back - I think I can see a pattern:
When we belong to the majority view then we feel strong and infallible. In this position (infallible and with strong support) it feels like doing anything that acknowledge the other sides point is just counterproductive.
I also think it is interesting - maybe even a bit deserved given what I think I said as a young man - that this is happening now and I'm on the receiving end of it as atheists and sjw are going mainstream and are starting to act like any other cult: punishing and supressing wrongthink.
Conservatives and Republicans fought decades to enshrine the power of corporations and the 1%, and to undermine any worker autonomy. I have to roll my eyes at all this. I guess Damore found out the hard way that he's not part of the biologically IQ superior clique he thought he was part of.
The comment in question was not referring to IQ of males or females in any way.
So I am not sure where your accusations regarding IQ come from.
Considering the balancing of these interests (which most people consider to at least sometimes conflict) is the core issue of politics, such a belief would actually render politics useless. You could just appoint the top 10 CEOs and wait for the trickle-down wealth to wash over the masses.
If this were Hobby Lobby or Chick Filet, and an employee wrote an "pro birth-control screed" on their company discussion board, and was promptly fired, many of the people on the right standing up for the Google engineer would currently be defending the rights of big business to fire who they want, and attacking the fired employee for lacking awareness and common sense to know his audience, and to keep his politics out of his work environment, etc.
But that's a bit of a cold comfort, since so many of the left are doing that exact same thing now. And do the exact opposite in cases where the situation is the inverse.
Basically, most people are hypocrites.
How do we get past this garbage? I wish I knew.
On a side note: The article mentions alt right people complaining that a lot of SV companies' cultures are left leaning, which I think bizarre. There are plenty of industries that lean far right, in fact, unless the company is a non-profit or is in the public sector, in my experience the typical company culture is more right leaning than left. In most companies outside of SV, diversity programs are almost non-existent or just something that is briefly mentioned on the careers page.
The fact that Google or other SV companies have robust diversity programs and have cultures that lean left is an anomaly and freaking out that you aren't included in these companies' diversity programs or that you feel on the outside of the company culture screams of entitlement and ignorance of the actual reality that minorities and women face in the rest of the job market.
Totally, except for the economic stagnation, widespread malnutrition, common alcoholism, kleptocratic gerontocracy, almost every way, and the actual arrests of dissidents.
Oh, and losing a war in Afghanistan also doesn't seem to be in Twitter's immediate future.
Politics used to be a gentleman's game. Sure, you argue and huff and puff over bills, and the opposing parties viewpoints, but at the end of the day - you found compromise. The last decade or so? No such thing. Politics is now a bloodsport. Total victory is the only option.
- Different viewpoints? Not allowed.
- Compromise? Not allowed.
- Rational discourse? Not allowed.
- Don't believe what I believe? Your're a racist, bigot, homophobe, xenophobe, misogynist.
The Liberal ideology that has dominated politics for the last decade is now eroding, the Republicans own Washington DC right now and its rather off putting to the people who used to be in power. The whole Google issue just highlights that this isn't going to end anytime soon - but it sure didn't start with Trump, and it sure didn't just "land on Silicon valley's doorstep" this past week.
I think the larger question is when is rational discourse going to return? Google had an incredible opportunity to create a forum to discuss the issues the author brought up. Instead, they had a knee jerk reaction, based on the current environment, and fired the guy. They would rather deal with a lawsuit, a ton of backlash and a social media furor I haven't seen in a while, instead of having an open dialogue on what happened and why this guy believes what he believes. Can him, put him the box and label him an evil person and let's move on.
Nobody wins, and nothing is gained.
Another wasted opportunity.
Sad and depressing this is where we are as a country.
I don't have a solution.
And let's not pretend like the split between left and right in the US is somehow the shared responsibility of both sides. It's no coincidence that both the "reality-based community" as well as "alternative facts" are terms coined by the right.
There are literally dozens of lists on the web of actual, proven, indisputable lies of the current President. From crowd sizes to "even the liberal media calls it the greatest speech ever held on foreign soil". To insist that both sides are the same, and that therefore the best course of action is somehow in the middle, is ridiculous.