Forget politics, this man was a red pill ideologue who, among other things, would brag about the number of women he's impregnated [1]. If this is the hill anyone wants to die on - holy cow.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...

Edit:

* added citation

* changed "the hill you want" to "the hill anyone wants"

It doesn't sound like he's bragging about it, he's mentioning shitty things he's done and how it's common among people in SV. I had to look it up, but calling yourself a "wastrel" doesn't sound like bragging.

n.One who wastes, especially one who wastes money; a profligate

n.An idler or a loafer.

n.Anything cast away as spoiled in the making, or bad; waste; refuse.

Do you think calling yourself a bad boy is self criticism?

He wants people to see him as a scoundrel with a heart of gold. Nothing I've seen from him has been regretful or contrite.

I’m kind of torn on this. I don’t know the guy or of his existence until now, but from his own into to that AMA he’s the kind of person that brags about having no loyalty or integrity so I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any in return from his employer.

However this must all have been clear from day 1 so this can only be a PR move on Apple’s behalf which is not a great look either.

There are no winners in this story, only losers. Including society which got thrown yet another polarising piece of social media drama.

> If this is the hill anyone wants to die on - holy cow

Which hill do you think is appropriate? The line has to be drawn at least a standard deviation below average behaviour or there will be a lot of unemployed people. Especially with the context that nearly everyone has socially unacceptable views, most just usually try not to talk about them.

I'm sure it'll come out in the conversation, but none of the commentors are rushing to accuse him of doing anything. It takes 2 to get a woman pregnant.

This is not a debate about "cancel culture". This is about a awful person who should not be hired into a leadership role where he is directly responsible for people he has treated horrifically in the past. And, like most narcissists, the evidence is in his own public statements and actions - not applied by the media or any outside group.

> ...people he has treated horrifically in the past...

That is a bit of an escalation from being an ideologue. What are you actually unhappy about here? What do you think he's done?

> This is about a awful person who should not be hired into a leadership role...

Well again, being an awful person and being unqualified for leadership are different things and need to be argued separately.

There are lots of great business leaders who were awful people. Eg, Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle by the Nazis. It isn't like the ranks of business have or ever will be made up of exclusively nice or praiseworthy people.

I’m tired of this trope. It excuses boorish behavior and ignores all the business leaders who haven’t acted like asses.

> this man was a red pill ideologue

What does a 'red pill ideologue' mean? Yes, I've seen the Matrix but I don't understand

But wow, that Reddit post is shocking

Pretty much end-game toxic masculinity - men blaming women for not wanting to sleep with them and promoting "pick-up artist" strategies like negging, gas-lighting, and other despicable behavior in an attempt to get laid. It grew into a fairly large subreddit.

It is a movement glorifying the "alpha male" idea. The strongest man rules and get all the women.

It is called "red pill" because of the idea that it is the real truth of this world.

There's a sub-culture of men who identify as "The Red Pill" who harbor some, uh, non-mainstream, ideological beliefs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/

There's a documentary about one part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Pill

Or you could look at the most extreme examples the other commenters are trying to present as the norm.

Oh boy, be prepared to rage. Just check r/redpill

Not easy watching, interrogation of a young man who took it to the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGFWovUuWak

The goal, presumably, is to address the problem before people start feeling obligated to die on hills. This guy's made some very offensive comments, so I feel no pressure to defend him personally, but we've got to have a better process for deciding what's socially acceptable than "sometimes the eye of Twitter descends on you and you become unemployable".

[deleted]

I'm on mobile right now, so I can't verify. But I don't think ctrl-f matches text in posts that are hidden due to low score. I would look in some of those.

Search just for "preg" or read at maximum 3 sentences from linked posts. "pregnant" is the 60th word.

Try pregnant.

the OP?

It doesn't appear he has "changed". He has an Amazon link directly to his book prominently as the first item in his Twitter profile.

Would you want to work with someone who considers you "useless baggage" because of how you were born? More importantly, would you want to work under someone who thinks you're useless baggage no matter what you do?

As long as that commentary doesn't interfere with his work life... I guess that would be fine. If everything we ever said on the internet was traced back to our name, we'd all have some pretty embarrassing blemishes. That's because failure is a part of learning, and social media has ultimately removed all of the nuance from failure. Instead of helping people up, we're more interested in kicking them while they're down for a little extra virtue to signal. We're all guilty of this to some degree: it's really just the human condition being exacerbated through the lens of the internet.

This guy sounds like a dick, but he doesn't sound like he's done anything wrong in this situation either. He had appropriate motivation to perform well in his position, and if Apple's human resources are worth their salt they'd be monitoring his performance very closely for the first month or two.

The problem with someone being a dick is when you're hiring them for a role with any sort of authority, particularly if their dickishness is in any way directed at specific groups.

I think there's a fairly reasonable concern that if he was in any sort of role with authority he couldn't be trusted to fairly deal with women.

Sure, lots of people have biases and are probably unfair. But this one wrote a NYT bestselling book where he loudly talked about his biases, and doesn't seem to have become contrite. HR complaints were very much guaranteed once this became known.

Related, The No Asshole Rule:

https://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Rule-Civilized-Workplace-Surv...

People don't compartmentalize anywhere near as well as some of the assumptions in this thread, and someone who is an asshole in private is going to be an asshole on the job. The "if it doesn't affect him doing his job" comments are either naive or completely disingenuous.

Nope.

To repeat something I said in a not entirely dissimilar discussion: I'm not gonna let Nazis into my car club because we have a single common shared interest. They're Nazis.

I'm also not gonna work with die hard mysogynists because they're mysogynists. Great engineers who are shitty people are shitty people first and they can go right back to gutter they crawled out of.

Don't compare blemishes to prideful hate. The stupid things I've said, the hurtful things, they are not the things I want to publish and stand firm on. They are mistakes for which I feel regret. If I glorified my abhorrent behavior, you'd be right to shun me.

But forever? We gotta give people the opportunity to change. The book is gross, but SV is gross and sexist a lot of the time - and much more so in the past. So IDK maybe some human sacrifice is worth it to change the culture - but I'm always confused because a lot of the folks clamoring for heads on stuff like this are also pro things like restorative justice (which I am super pro). So no d bags, but maybe if you were a d bag at some point it should be possible to redeem yourself?

> considers you "useless baggage" because of how you were born?

He considers people useless baggage because of how they were born? What are you basing this claim on?

> “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

- His book.

> British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.

- Also his book. So it's obvious both descriptions were written from experience, not gender-based prejudice.

But even without this passage, your quote only proves he has a low opinion of "most women in the Bay Area" - that does not translate to most women everywhere, and certainly not to all women.

Summarizing it as "considers people useless due to being born female" is a misreading so blatant I can only call it a lie.

Why include the word "women" at all, though? Replace it with "jews" or "gays" and see how it reads. The fact that he chose to single out Bay Area women, specially, implies he doesn't hold men to the same standard.

If I were a woman working for Apple who didn't happen to be into carpentry or animal husbandry, I really wouldn't want to work for this guy.

> Why include the word "women" at all, though?

Because that description was specifically to highlight how different his then-girlfriend was from them.

> Replace it with "jews" or "gays" and see how it reads.

"Most gays in the Bay Area are lame, but my current boyfriend is great." - seems fine?

This is a pretty childish perspective and doesn't fit what people that fight against discrimination want to convey at all.

You have constructed a strawman you are fighting against, perhaps to elevate yourself.

If you believe there are tons of uncivilized people around you, it is probably just imagination and exactly what people describe as moral panic.