This is the initial comment we are discussing. It’s a pretty specific choice of words, so it’s not unreasonable to continue the discussion based on a reasonable interpretation of those actual words.
That claim is the specific issue being discussed, so I don’t think it’s a distraction. If you’re interested in some other issue, then by all means openly discuss that.
If the challenge was just to name any event that has occurred that didn’t involve hate speech, then sure, we can list many such events.
Your quote is a response to throwawaysea's comment, which is clearly much more general than that:
>Leaving aside culture wars waged by individuals, I see institutional tightening on free speech all over America. I see it in big tech companies, where only a progressive monoculture exists with no psychological safety for other viewpoints. I see it in censorship applied by defacto digital public squares like YouTube. I see it in the left's rampant use of deplatforming to silence opposing views. Increasingly, I also see it in universities (see this incident at the University of Washington today https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-was...).
2) Virtually no one actually read his essay in its entirety, including the media figures and bloggers who commented on it incessantly. His actual message and claims were completely ignored or outright twisted to fit a specific narrative. The fact that you had to go all the way to places like the Joe Rogan podcast to listen to him actually explain his thoughts without being editorialized was insane.
3) He lost his job as a direct result.
However, it was not well written nor was it particularly well reasoned. While there were some potentially good ideas buried it it, they were buried under poorly understood and debunked science and statements that were easily misunderstood.
I think critical debunking of where he went wrong and charitable interpretation of some of the things he may have gotten right would have been far more effective.
Unfortunately it was pulled into the morass that is partisanship in US these days. (I personally harbor a suspicion that this was deliberate and that he fully intended to get himself fired given the way that it and numerous other personal details of googlers got leaked in the lead up to his firing).
I didn't read his essay or follow this case at all, but from Wikipedia it seems he was arguing that biological differences between the sexes are a driving factor for the lack of women programmers at Google. That's a position that's solidly backed by the science.
I mean, come on, if it was a paper in any other field, even economy, people here at HN would have either ignored him or called him out.
Anyway he was dumb and should not have been fired (unless this essay looked like his work at Google).
That's the definition of creating a vicious and predatory workplace. Hence, fired.
Not to mention every source he quoted came out saying that the information was misused.
But really, this only highlights the real problem: if you censor someone, you can accuse them of having said anything because, by virtue of having censored the person, there’s no way for anyone to know better. Obviously many of us actually can still read Damore’s writeup, but that’s largely because the censorship isn’t actually effective yet. I’m just impressed that still doesn’t stop the would-be censors from lying about the stuff they’re trying to censor!
James Damore. And if you believe what he said really was hate speech, that just illustrates the problem.