Asusme Altman authored the meme on page 121 of the lawsuit the text of reads

> If you want to increase diversity at Google fire all the bigoted white men.

I would put the above statement at about the same as

> If you want to increase productivity at Google fire all the lazy black people.

I will let the reader decide if the two statements should be treated the same by HR.

There is a distinction between those two statements - firing white men in and of itself increases "diversity" by adjusting the gender and racial balance of employees, but hiring black people does not increase average productivity unless you believe that all black people are lazy.

That is, the first statement does not require the assumption that all, or even many, white men are bigoted in order to make sense, and the mention of race and gender is directly relevant. (It would also be true that firing white men at random would accomplish the same goal; the meme author is trying to say, why don't we fire the bigoted subset of this group, because we want to fire bigots anyway.)

I think it's a defensible position to believe that the statement isn't acceptable anyway - but I don't think the two statements are analogous by any means.

Would you be willing to provide an alternative statement that you view as analogous?

It's kind of hard to think of something exactly analogous, but something I think is pretty close is "If you want the choir to be balanced during the quiet parts, get rid of the all the loud basses." People don't choose whether they're basses, like they don't choose whether they're white men. It's ambiguous without context whether this is an implication that all basses are loud, or that there are specific basses who are too loud and the rest are fine - but it certainly could mean the latter. (There is enough of a tradition in musical performance that stays barely on the ironic side of ironic bigotry of making fun of certain people for their instrument or vocal part, so the former isn't an unreasonable possibility.) And certainly there might be sopranos or altos or tenors who are too loud, too - but for the immediate problem of solving balance, the implication is that's not the current problem.

If someone in my choir kept going on about how the basses are too loud no matter what they objectively do, I would tell them to cut it out, and I would hope that the choir director would get rid of them if they persisted; it's pretty demotivating to be told that you're doing something wrong no matter what you do. But if we actually have a problem with auditioning too many basses and it's hurting the sound of the choir, and some of them are just not good at singing quietly, getting rid of them is the right thing to do (unless this is a school choir or something where participation is a more important goal than sounding good).

> I note that Linus seems to manage at least one "people who do X should be fired"-equivalent email every week

Fired for poor programming practices. The two situations are in no way comparable.

I agree. Thinking other people are subhuman and unworthy of the rights you have is way worse.

By some marvel, Linus manages to avoid the language of "people who are X should be fired".

There's a distinction between saying unflattering things about people who do unflattering things (like submit broken or low quality code) and making hostile statements about people who simply have some physical attribute.

When low intelligence becomes a protected trait all Linus's rants about morons and idiots will be seen in a much harsher light.

In the Air Force, this was explained as follows. It is wrong to say that a person is an idiot. It is okay to describe behavior as idiotic.