It's worse. They don't care for what you've said, and they don't particularly care about the issues they talk about either.
Some (media people, etc.) use the issues to have a career or an audience. At best, they convince themselves they care, but they don't in any real capacity.
Others use the issues to vent their frustrations from their lives (as a religion substitute and group signifier) and as an excuse to fight with people.
Others are just repeating what is in fashion in their circle (progressive or conservative) and use the issues as a tribal thing.
(And I'm talking about people on both sides of the spectrum here).
Born Again/Woke
Transgression/Microagression
Heresy/Dissent
Sinner/(Racist, Misogynist, Bigot, Sexist)
EDIT: Original Sin/(Privilege, Unconscious Bias)
They even follow the same behavior pattern. First they declare you a Sinner. If you've done research they question the motive of your research and claim it is invalid, regardless of its content. Like the Church burning those who tried to prove the Earth wasn't flat or the center of the solar system, when presented with evidence the extreme left says, "Heresy!"
Then they want to be protected from the sinners. The sinners make them feel unsafe. They have to be taken care of.
Seriously I thought humanity got past all this religious nonsense.
We have strides to make in better treatment of women and minorities, but adopting this kind of religious attitude is ridiculous and not the way forward.
Thank God that the US is a place where for whatever reason people inherently seem to not like following the rules.
However, it is extremely substantive, an entire doctoral thesis could be written on secular religions/orthodoxies and their illiberal and authoritarian nature and is directly relevant to the discussion of the reaction to the Google memo.
I agree however, that lack of civility can undermine your argument. See the very uncivil comments below from Damore's fellow Google employees, including managers. They undermine their argument and literally create a toxic and scary work environment.
I abbreviated the names, but these were all public statements. I just don't want to run afoul of any HN rules regarding naming names.
CB: "You know there are certain "alternative views, including different political views" which I do not want people to feel safe to share here... You can believe women or minorities are unqualified all you like — I can't stop you — but if you say it out loud, then you deserve what's coming to you. Yes, this is "silencing". I intend to silence these views... Take your false equivalence and your fake symmetry, and shove them hard up where the sun doesn't shine."
KB: "I am considering creating a public-inside-google document of "people who make diversity difficult"...which calls out those googlers who repeatedly made public statements that are unsupportive of diversity... Things I'm still pondering: should inclusion on the list require something resembling a trial? should people be removed after some period of time if they start behaving better?
CW: "One of the great things about Google's internal communication mechanism... is that, as a manager, I can easily go find out if I really want to work with you."
KE: "Your reply...ignores the many women Googlers who have expressed the frustration they feel as a result of this. F* off. Thanks for using your real name here, though. Makes it easier to update my spreadsheet."
Thanks to the Implicit Association Test, it can now be demonstrated that everyone has racial bias. If you point out that follow up studies have shown poor test-retest reliability and that there are all sorts of other flaws in this field of research, you'll simply be dismissed as a denier.
So now, implicit bias takes the place of original sin, with white European (even the ones from Eastern Europe that had nothing to do with slavery) slaveholders standing in for Eve. You can never get rid of original sin, you can only ask for Jesus to forgive you. So who or what will be the new secular left wing Jesus?
"What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism."
Amen to that.
>Comparing it to Stalinism is silly, and surely disrespects
No, making a comparison of abstract forms of government is not in any way disrespectful to people who lived under a regime. It can only be construed as disrespectful if you are looking for an emotional tangent to distract people reading from the argument at hand (which, incidentally, indicates that you know your argument is bad!)
Please don't attempt to tell me that I know my argument is bad.
I didn't attempt to tell you that, I did tell you that.
Do folks really believe that's what gender-balanced work places are like? I used to work at a large New York law firm where 40% of the lawyers were women. All of my teams were mixed, and out of happenstance I spent the bulk of my time working for women partners. Nobody was "terrified" because everyone knew how to act like a professional adult.
The people you're describing of being so terrified by these events or adopting unofficial policies against women already had a misogynistic bent. They were already a problem. Them using an event like this to justify their anti-social behavior is typical, but it is not the cause. They weren't accepting bastions of equality until they were frightened into sexism. Putting them on notice isn't the end of the world for anyone.
Whether we appease bigots or confront them, some people are going to be assholes until they die. I'd rather confront them and leave no question about which way the world is going.
Why are you so scared of women?
We all know this is how Directors and VPs and the like think, we just don't say it.
It's really not.
As to answer. Inside a corporation, there is as much freedom as the top allows. With the consequences of that emanating from all the levels, so it is wise to not make it entirely freedom-less.
Understatement of the century. How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?
How can you have a nuanced debate with a serial device? It just won't work.
Oh come now, it seems to work fine for Trump! /s
But in this case though, she is does repeat some interweb fallacies about the memo, even though she has certainly read it herself and thought about it for herself.
But she does get the important thing right: which is that even if the memo is as bad as she says it is, it's still no reason for a sacking.
[Disclamer: I am a Googler, but quite obviously I am not speaking for the company here.]
I guess they did not consider the voting booth to be private, as SV is one of the areas that swung towards Clinton?
As long as there's food and shelter for most, things will continue as they are. First little bit of suffering, and it will explode into revolution. Normal way of things.
For further reading on this topic:
Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point.
If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fallen prey to the manufactured outrage surrounding the issue. Take a step back and ask yourself if it matters if the list was called pc-considered-harmful, woodchipping-kittens or fluffy-bunnies? What is the impact on the list's name on the situation?
If you're associating any questioning of the situation with the other side then it's worth spending a moment to see if you might have tied your beliefs to identity. When we tie our beliefs to our identity, we associate questioning of those beliefs with attacks on our identity. This is being exploited at the cost of completely polarizing your view.
The next step would be to see how upset you are. If you're very upset or wound up, or maybe you're not but you've commented a zillion times about this elsewhere, why are you doing so about this matter and not other things? What is it about this issue that gets you so riled up and why? Why would you care about some guy you don't know getting fired more than the President's involvement with Russia, or the killing of innocent civilians in the Yemen? What is it about this subject that gets to you in a way other's don't, and why?
You might find some serious answers, but probably more questions here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...
The idea in your comment is that you can't, or at least are dissuaded, to express certain opinions. Most the things I hear about Google, including the existence of a list talking about the harms of political correctness, that the author felt free to write such a report and many other reported freedoms at work indicate that this isn't the case. That in fact people at Google are more free to express themselves in these types of issues than at other companies.
You're the one who seems to be upset. I wrote one line and you jump to conclusions, question my motives, dig into my comment history and even managed to bring up Hitler. I try to argue the facts. Maybe you should question yourself as you question others.
I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.
- did he create the group?
- how long had the group existed before he posted the memo?
- was Google as an organisation ok with that group existing?
- is there anything wrong with there being discussion surrounding the value of PC viewpoints?
- What other sorts of lists exist at Google, and what sorts of viewpoints to they cover?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)
I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here".
I'm reminded of Chomsky's words in his book, The Common Good:
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"
Where things have gone drastically wrong here are that the spectrum is now so tiny that any debate within that spectrum is now impossible. It becomes almost impossible to depolarize the situation and widen that spectrum, and that's going to lead to everything you more eloquently put above, if not more.