That's... Not what zunger says.

He says people may want to be violent against you because of what you said. He makes no claims about the justification of that violence. He makes a statement of fact, not of judgement.

Not really. It would be statement of fact if Zunger were some random, no consequence person. Since he himself and others mention that he is/was fairly senior engineer, his words take rather ominous meaning. Also refer to his other article 'Tolerance is not moral precept'.

A famous Indian political leader quoted Newton's third law "Every action has a reaction" in regards to an incident which further lead to unprecedented violence. All leader did was to quote a scientific law but he was widely criticized in media, it also lead to death of many more people.

I have no problem with what he says including veiled violence threats. It is his political positioning not some ethical advice.

In other posts, Zunger does strongly imply justification for violence. See "Tolerance is not a moral precept; it is a peace treaty" headed with a pic of a Degenderette holding a baseball bat..

I disagree, but even if true, I'm not really sure why that's relevant here. Zunger's opinion may be that violence toward Damore is justified (I doubt that, but it could be the case). That doesn't change what he said, which was a fact: saying things that deeply hurt people will makes some of them want to punch you. Why does who the author is matter to the truth of that statement?

The author only matters since he is being cited as someone with insight, and has written a response to the "Google memo" that I found to be particularly telling.

In a vacuum, yes. Saying certain things may incite a violent response. But we're not in a vacuum. Let's look at three scenarios, and ask the following questions: Is violence expected? Is violence understandable? Is violence justified?

A - While drunk at a bar, a man repeatedly says derogatory things about another man's wife. A fight breaks out between the two of them.

B - While at a KKK rally, a young black man calmly discussing afrocentrism is jumped and beaten by a mob.

C - While at an LGBT rally, an old white man hostilely quoting Leviticus is jumped and beaten by a mob.

In the first scenario, this is targeted harassment. We should anticipate a violent outbreak. If you were to poll a diverse group of people, most people would say the violence was understandable, but not justified. This scenario bears the least similarity to our situation -- although I will make one comment. This is the only scenario where violence could be justified. If the provocateur becomes violent (or makes threats), a violent response MAY be expected, understandable, and justified.

In the second and third scenario, violence is an expected result. While some people within these groups may feel the violence was understandable, the real question lies with the groups organizers. I suspect that the LGBT group would denounce violence, even though the man had bad intentions. (I wouldn't expect as much from the KKK.)

To relate this to Google, Zunger is a leader. He excuses the violent response of the employees, and blames Damore for inciting the violence. (This is an INCREDIBLY poor position to take.) While it's fair to question whether Damore was the provocateur from example C, or the debater from example B, it's unfair to blame him for a violent response.

Like I said already: Zunger isn't blaming anyone. He's making a statement of fact. The fact, which is true, is that damore wrote a memo. The fact, which is true, is that having read this memo, many of Damore's coworkers would not be willing to work with him. These are facts. They're not attempts to assign blame or fault, they are objective statements about the state of the world.

As soon as you say the word "justified" or "understandable", you're not responding to Zunger, you're responding to a strawperson. There is no excusing, justification, or blame in the article. There are statements of fact.

You're conflating causality and blame. Zunger only discusses the former, and there is a huge difference between them. You're transforming his statements on causality into ones on blame when they clearly aren't. Damore wrote a thing. That thing hurt people. Cause, effect. No blame. Hawaiian government employee pressed button. A million people were alerted of an impending missile by accident. Cause, effect. No blame. (To be clear, with Hawaii, the blame, imo, falls onto the design of the system, and not the guy who happened to misclick).

In another post you claim that Zunger uses the phrase "it's your fault" (an assignment of blame), But the word "fault" doesn't appear in the essay. Zunger specifically says that Damore's action "has caused a significant harm" to his colleagues. But that, too, is a statement of causality, and is not assigning blame. (I think this is telling by the way: to justify, to yourself, your disagreement with Zunger, you managed to invent things the essay didn't actually say, without even realizing it!)

To be very clear on this, I think that violence is potentially expected in all three cases you mentioned, and justified in none of them. The exact argument Zunger is making works in the reverse, by the way. "You came out as trans to the office, all of whom are staunchly on the religious right and as a result now refuse to work with you. This is...problematic for your employer, and makes you decidedly less valuable from the perspective of your employer. This is problematic.". Am I blaming the trans individual? I certainly don't think so.

Zunger's argument is almost entirely a utilitarian one: You have made yourself less valuable to the organization, and either we get rid of you, or we get rid of a lot of other people. The choice is, unfortunately for you, obvious. And that's the case irrespective of who is "at fault".

Did Zunger assign fault in that statement? I didn't read it like that. It's a prediction, not a prescription.

Your summary is misleading. He didn't "justify" violence. Saying that jaywalking is risky is not an ethical statement about cars.

Yes, he did assign fault. The words he used were: "it's your fault".

If I'm assaulted in the workplace for a political viewpoint I anonymously posted, the fault is with the assaultee. Not with the assaulted. However, Zunger flips the blame.

Didn't you see this coming? You should have known opposing the majority viewpoint would be met with violence. For workplace safety, I have to fire you.

Ironically, he seems to blame tolerance on this. It seems the man doesn't understand what the word means.

Edit: > Saying that jaywalking is risky is not an ethical statement about cars

See my response above to joshuamorton.

A) It wasn't posted anoymously and B) yes while it's absolutely the fault of the assailant, the assaulted does bare some blame depending on what was said. If you walk up to someone an say hey your mom is an <insert derogatory term> and get punched in the face. You can't say there wasn't a reasonable expectation of violence as result of your actions.

Yonger is quite correct in that intentionally or not, for better or worse, Damore created a situation in which it would be very difficult to put him on a team anywhere. While work place violence is rarely the answer, and I sincerely doubt anyone at google would raise themselves to that level the fact of the matter is that even the risk of that puts Google in an impossible situation.

>> Saying that jaywalking is risky is not an ethical statement about cars

> See my response above to joshuamorton.

I didn't understand the connection between that response and my assertion.

Zunger clearly writes that what Damore has done makes people want to punch him in the face. Of writing the memo Zunger says "What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful" and later "its [writing the memo] impact on you: ... a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face." In other words, the impact of writing the memo is that people will want to punch Damore in the face.

Zunger's blog post is extremely obnoxious. Not only does Zunger write something like "everything you say is wrong, but I won't explain any specific way you're wrong, or link to any such explanation" he then goes on to explain engineering to a senior engineer, and grossly misrepresents Damore. In addition he clearly does assign fault to Damore for people wanting to punch him.

> Zunger just stops short of advocating a violent response. I don't think he's someone I'd ever want to work for, or pay heed to.

That's one thing about the number of folks who've publicly stated positions I find abhorrent: I've got a list of folks I won't work with in the future, because I don't wish to support them.

I don't know if that's a good thing, though. It doesn't seem wise for society to fracture into different polarised groups refusing to do business with one another. Seems like a recipe for recreating Lebanon's mess.

Why can't we go back to the rule of not bringing politics and religion into the office?

Zunger didn't write "this is how I think", he wrote "this is what I'd do". This isn't a matter of supporting someone with a controversial opinion. Zunger goes on in explicit detail about how he would act in response to someone else's opinion.