Maybe he was fired not just because he made the company look bad, but also because he insulted about 30% of his co-workers, and on top of that kept trying to get his memo read by as many people as possible within Google.

Banging on about a controversial subject that can cause upset and disruption in a work environment. Does that sound very professional, or something that a smart person would do? And do you really want that kind of person in your team?

> he insulted about 30% of his co-workers

He didn't insult anyone, although some amount of his coworkers did feel insulted.

The difference between these two things is significant.

I don't think he intended to insult anyone, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to believe that people could be insulted based on what he said. That's the gray area your binary distillation completely ignores. It's a little more nuanced than "he hurt my feelings!"

I think what he wrote should be judged on the merits of what it said and not how others choose to misinterpret it.

Put differently: We are going down a dark road when someone simply being offended by pretty mainstream views mean those views are the problem.

I'm not saying that the views are a problem because people are offended. I'm saying that since people are offended, it's reasonable to take a step back and ask if the views are offensive, and if the intent was to offend. "He didn't mean to offend" doesn't automatically mean that whatever he said was okay. In this particular case I think it was, but there's nothing wrong with stepping back and asking if the underlying views are okay.

Given that the media and all of Damore's other critics have to overtly lie about the contents of the memo in order to cast it as "offensive", I think it's abundantly clear that the memo itself is innocuous.

That's not a gray area, it's the difference between intent and effect.

Insult is in the eye of the victim, not the perpetrator. Always has been.

> actually jewish-marxists plots

Where did you see the word "Jewish". I didn't see it when I read the text, it's not in the relevant footnote, and I did a search and didn't find it.

Regarding the Marxist part: I'm not an expert on this but I believe it's called "critical theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory.

"Cultural marxism" and "marxism" are different things. One was a conspiracy theory with anti-semitic roots and one is a framework of academic inquiry. Guess which one damore mentions.

I've never seen anyone interpret any of that. Also has nothing to do with civil rights but was talking about men and women liking different things, so forcing them in equal ratios does more harm than good.

What exactly didnt make sense to you with that?

You should read the memo. Apparently lots of people just skimmed it, or read a summary. Your sibling comment quotes the exact footnote text where he references the popular anti-semitic conspiracy theory about "cultural marxism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...

"The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that William S. Lind in 2002 gave a speech to a Holocaust denial conference on the topic of Cultural Marxism. In this speech Lind noted that all the members of The Frankfurt School were "to a man, Jewish", but it is reported that Lind claims not to question whether the Holocaust occurred and suggests he was present in an official capacity for The Free Congress Foundation "to work with a wide variety of groups on an issue-by-issue basis""

So being critical of critical theory is anti-semitic now? How very convenient!

He comes off as a reactionary, for sure. Before someone calls out you for strawmanning, he does go there:

Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”

His entire memo is a distillation of reactionary talking points. That overall impression rather than any single argument is probably what pissed off a lot of his coworkers because these battles are much older than him.

Yes, because he was wrong about something that he had no business or expertise or business position to even be discussing, and because he did it in a very loud way.

Damore got what he wanted, he wanted to be a martyr, probably because that was all he was ever going to be good for. He’s the truest of snowflakes, stop giving idiots this platform and maybe they’ll go away.

To me that reads like a lot like credentialism. "Unless you've been formally vetted by the institutions we like you can't participate". It's like a bizzarro-world anti-intellectualism, where you can't read a scientific paper unless you have the right degree in that particular sub-field.

If the alternative to credentialism is idiots like Damore rabble-rousing other total idiots, sign me up for credentialism.

I mean the well credentialed seem to be doing more than their fair share of rabble rousing. Also like half or more of social psychology research can't be replicated, so clearly that particular credential is not highly correlated with being correct...

Yep, that’s right. The well informed lead society, not the idiots. If you wanna go back to the dark ages make your point, but mine is that a biology major working for a technology company making commentary on psychology is a slam dunk case of someone who should just shut up. Certainly not someone who should be egged on.

BTW: the original comment was based on his job. Google didn’t hire him to make comments like that, they hired him to code. That’s all I meant, don’t shit where you eat, if you’re hired to code do that job and focus on that. I don’t know what this generations problem is with not being able to keep it together in a professional workplace, but the problem is this generation, not the rules.

Your comments in this thread have been breaking several of the site guidelines, especially the ones against flamewars and name-calling in arguments. Users here need to follow the rules, regardless of which views they favor. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules if you want to keep commenting here.

Your account also looks like it's tending to use HN primarily for ideology and politics. We don't allow that, because it's destructive of the intellectual curiosity that HN is supposed to be for. I've posted about this a lot, if anyone wants to understand how we apply that rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Mine is that the basics of science are the same, no matter the discipline. Of course a lot of "science" has nothing to do with scientific methodology.

He did post the memo to an employee-led internal forum on diversity... Clearly the problem was he posted the wrong opinion.

> he did it in a very loud way

From what I remember he did not. Someone at Google publicized a document written by Damore on a Google forum.

He did himself. Got ripped to shreds in a forum with folks that I'd expect to be somewhat sympathetic with his cause.

He then reworked the doc a bit to be less overtly offensive (the published version is one of these later ones), still got shot down in a friendly way by the sympathetic part of the Google population for bullshit reasoning. Eventually it got wider circulation - not sure by whom, but he certainly didn't object to that.

At some point, when managers and friendly inclined folks tell you to shut up at work, you do. If you decide to pursue the topic further, don't whine when people disassociate themselves from you - not for the content of your speech, but for your conduct and the disruption that comes with it.