I think this statement goes a long way towards helping Damore. That a senior engineer can say something like this openly and not see how it could cause concern and accusations of double standards is telling. I am not advocating for or against Damore but statements like these are not helpful. Saying Bigots should be fired but when you specify race and gender, you are encouraging feelings of persecution and animosity.
I personally don't believe that a workplace is the right location for either Altman or Damore's statements. However, if a culture of allowing this sort of talk is created, you cannot arbitrarily decide that one side is right or wrong without inviting a lawsuit.
Google is currently learning that people need clearly defined rules and if you allow people to say and act how they want in a professional environment, confrontations and trouble are inevitable.
There was a similar small bruhaha in the Rust community severals weeks ago. They hired a community manager who has leanings (nothing wrong with that), but had made tweets like "kill all men".
Believe no actual ill will was intended, but you could see why it may trigger people. In the thread announcing this person's new role, a few people brought up issues like this (that wasn't an isolated sentiment, it was a pattern of behavior) and the mods for a while simply deleted any criticism, then they made a hard rule that nobody could talk about it (because that was related to personal issues). This rule was in the interest of preventing harassment (which yeah, legit reason), but it was completely tone deaf. You can't appoint a community manager who has made pointed statements about people in your community and then shut down discussion in the interest of tolerance.
Check out the thread, it looks like a warzone. It turned me off Rust a little bit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7nx3cm/announcement_a...
I wish we could talk about these things openly, the way we are handling these discussions only isolates us.
If someone thinks "kill all X" is okay, depending on the value of X, then there's something really weird going on! What if X is any of these? Women, Black people, Jews, Lesbians, Asians, Gay people, Republicans, or Rich People? Back in the good old days, "prejudice" meant judging people on their surface characteristics as opposed to on their merits, and such a statement would have been seen as highly suspect. Now, it's seen as the kind of stuff "Social Justice Advocates" say? People who are "community managers" have such a distorted sense of fairness that they can't parse what they're doing?
I guess even supposedly intelligent tech people believe this "X-ism == Prejudice + Power" crap? Sorry, but racism is judging people by only their race, and sexism is judging people only by their sex. The direction of the arrow does not matter. Anyone who believes something like that hasn't learned skeptical thought, and anyone who promulgates that is supporting a supremacist position of one group dominating another.
Power is contextual. This is clearly true, as demonstrated by history. Anyone who promulgates "X-ism == Prejudice + Power" as if Power is a global, unchanging vector is either dishonest, disconnected from reality, or ignorant of history.
But if the individual stands by those same public comments calling for violence against a particular race or ethnicity then cause for concern is justified. By silencing that concern they are not doing themselves or anyone else a favor.
https://www.removeddit.com/r/rust/comments/7nx3cm/announceme...
https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6whs2e/multiple_coc_v...
> no actual ill will was intended
Pick one.
That's why the standard for orientation discrimination doesn't apply to straight people. It's why the standard for race discrimination doesn't apply to white people. And it's why the standard for sex discrimination doesn't apply to cis men. The history is just very different.
Personally, I have no problem with people saying things like this, especially in their personal lives. I like banter. But part of banter is that both sides are allowed to play. If someone can express extreme ideas like "kill all men" I should be able to make equally extreme jokes, but in different ideological directions.
What bothers me is not the language, but the unfairness. I can understand not permitting banter at work or in organizations. It makes some people uncomfortable. But what I can't understand is just allowing banter of some ideological bent.
I can. The point of "[only] allowing banter of [a particular] ideological bent" is to enforce conformity to that ideology. When that happens fairness isn't a priority.
> What bothers me is not the language, but the unfairness.
Me too.
I would support a blanket ban on all things like that _in the workplace_.
"Kill all men" though... I'm sure the guys on her team would get a fair shake, right?
Please start thinking more deeply about these issues and please do some research. Racism, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia are all far more complicated than a few language rules.
Even if this is actually true! Even if it is actually true that "kill all men" expands into this reasonable position. Because I have no access to what goes on inside someone else's head. All I have access to is what I see.
And when I, a man, see a person with management authority over me, wearing a pin that says 'kill all men', I get scared. This is not appropriate for a workplace, no moreso than any white supremacist garbage is.
That's the constructive thing to do, if you're interested.
edit --
Hey I wrote a little screenplay to demonstrate how a conversation like this might go, in order to placate some of the totally earnest replies below:
A: kill all men
B: huh, A, what's that about?
A: Peter Thiel blames the 19th Amendment for the collapse of our society; the patriarchy is everywhere
B: <googles patriarchy, suddenly starts buying Shirley Chisholm gear>
All of which is to say that if you ask, "huh, A, what's that about?" instead of, "you genocidal maniac feminism is the worst and you're the worst" you can have a discussion.
That might be your intent, but that is not how it is interpreted. It sounds bigoted, thus, that language should be avoided if the speaker cares about stopping bigotry.
2. What if the speaker cares about expressing frustration about bigotry? Do they have to get your sign off on how to express it?
3. It's a little wicked to oppress people for centuries, and then tell them they have to choose between expressing anger about it or participating in a constructive dialogue about ending it -- especially when a lot of us don't even recognize the problem.
I'm really tired of having to explain to people that claim to have studied this exact thing why it's not as simple as white people vs everyone else. When you boil it down like that you don't get solutions.
Isn't it though? Look at the race numbers for prison, school quality, poverty, profession, representation in media, etc. Even when you control for everything else (especially socioeconomic status; people love to argue that being poor and white is just as hard but hey, racism is still something that poor Black people have to deal with that poor white people don't) race is a huge, dominating factor.
Wow. How can employees believe that this type of language is acceptable in the work place? Is this common in other tech companies on their internal communication channels (like slack)?
Fortunately, this comment made them stop (or move to a private channel, who knows). But the fact that they were making these comments for a week was rather shocking to me. Nobody involved seemed to think there was anything wrong with saying that you would, quote, "beat in the face of the nearest Trump voter" in a work chat room with ~1000 members
Edit: I guess I'm assuming the bigot is behaving as a bigot, and I think that's a safe assumption.
Race agnostically, it is an obvious statement and should be part of company guidelines : "bigotry will get you fired". Simple.
Similarly, how can anyone believe that saying something like "violent black men should be fired" is okay? Just address violence in the workplace race agnostically in your company guidelines and don't tolerate it.
Is this really complicated?
> If you want to increase diversity at Google fire all the bigoted white men.
I would put the above statement at about the same level as
> If you want to increase productivity at Google fire all the lazy black people.
I assume you would agree that the 2nd statement is not appropriate. If so, can you explain why the 1st is acceptable and the 2nd is not?
One of the typical examples of a micro aggression is the unnecessary inclusion of a description "I went to the women doctor today," "That was a very fine dressed black man," "That old cashier was really slow."
In the same way I see the inclusion of race in both sentences promoting discrimination based on race. I would go so far as to say that the inclusion of race in both statements makes the statement racist (in the sense that racism is the discrimination of a person or persons based on their race).
Highlighting race and gender when making such a statement is completely unnecessary, e.g. imagine the outcry if someone had said "If you want to increase diversity at Google fire all the bigoted black women".
It really can't.
However, the following concerns apply
1) I as a (non-bigoted) white man do not trust the good faith of the person speaking (in context, at Google)
2) I have seen analogous comments about eg. black people be auto-interpreted as bad faith when context made it clear that it was not bad-faith.
3) The inclusion of "white" and "man" in that statement are unnecessary, so them being included in spite of that is a signal of bad faith.
I would like to work in a place where everyone is intelligent and good-faith enough to interpret this sentence in its reasonable sense. But the reality is that such a place doesn't exist. At best I can get a place where statements against white men as a group get this treatment, but statements against other groups will always be interpreted as bad-faith, regardless of context.
I would like for all ambiguous statements like this to be interpreted on the same standard, but as long as they will not be, the next best step is to err on the side of caution and have a blanket ban of things like this
If both statement seems fine fine to you than okay.
IIRC, there's bit social justice ideology that essentially says that only white people can be bigots. I believe the typical formulation is "racism = power + prejudice." "Power" in this context is a function of your race and other identities, for instance white people axiomatically have "power" but black people don't. This assignment of "power" doesn't change based on context, so if your boss is black and you are white, you're still the one with "power." Therefore, by this "logic," a black person can't be racist because he lacks "power." An identical procedure is applied men an women with sexism.
There is another related social justice idea that you should "never punch down, always punch up." In this context "up" are those with "power" (again, assigned by fixed formula based on race, etc.). The act of "punching up," by the people who think this way, has connotations of "fighting for good," and "punching down" with "oppression."
Combining these ideas, "white men" are the most "powerful" and therefore can and should be "punched" in the name of social justice. This is one source of the gratuitous negative references to "white men," and associated hostility to them, that you see in social justice circles.
IMHO, these are pretty screwed up ideas, and they're a recipe for polarization (and bullying) and not progress. Unfortunately people do believe them and think this way.
Worse, "racism" is defined cyclically. If you ask "Who has power?", the answer is "whites/men because they aren't victims of racism/sexism".
This means no matter how much actual power non-whites get, they'll never be guilty of "racism", and racism is effectively defined as a sin of which only whites can be guilty.
In that lens, the statement makes sense if you feel that white men get away with bigotry more than their non white male counterparts. In other words, the subtext is "fire all the bigoted white men too".
Like I said, I'm not sure if I endorse that view it not. It makes more sense in the context of lifting up than putting down, but I can at least see it.
However, in normal discourse context is not generally understood to be that of a logical proof. Things are implied and inferred by what's included or excluded from what's said.
So, for example suppose I were to say simply "white male high-performing employees should be promoted". Logically this doesn't contradict the statement "all high-performing employees should be promoted". But I didn't say that. I made a much more qualified statement regarding white males. Why did I qualify it so. It's natural to ask such a question. I would expect people to think I'm implying something about non-white non-males. Again - It's natural, and in fact part of normal discourse, to infer things from what people chose to include and omit from their statements (please let me know if you disagree with this).
Similarly, original statement was about white male bigots specifically, not just all bigots. It's natural, outside the context of a logical proof, to infer some meaning from that.
If we propose a raceless society, why are we mentioning a race? That's the weird part.
Not only that, but they said as much after the fact. I believe them. Why don't more here believe them?
They would have to be a complete idiot radical for those quoted interpretations to be what they meant.
It doesn't say anything about firing other bigots. If you assumed it did, you inserted that meaning.
This statement implies to me that you think white bigotry != bigotry. This is one of those statements that make me think "no rational caring individual could believe that" because it sounds racist against white people to begin with. Yet I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Can you explain your mindset? Hopefully also how this mindset does not lead to treating people of different races differently or a justification for why it is okay to treat them different?
Starting with the assumption that all people should be treated equally than all bigotry is morally objectionable and we should treat all bigotry as such. The only issue that comes in is that since white people have the power and numbers white bigotry happens more than other bigotry and thus we by chance we object to it more.
I don't see any way that this allows bigotry against whites to get a pass, it just gets called out less because it happens less.
Am I missing something? I feel like I am because I still don't feel like I grok your responses.
Does anyone else think that "goading them into" is basically transferring responsibility to others for saying stupid, inappropriate things at work?
If the HR department doesn't operate that way, or the company guidelines suggest that some statements demand reprimand regardless of context, then I would suggest the issue would be surrounding the way the HR department operates rather than the people making complaints to HR.
(I note that Linus seems to manage at least one "people who do X should be fired"-equivalent email every week)
> 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.
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.
Fired for poor programming practices. The two situations are in no way comparable.
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.
This can also cause strife between well meaning people who wouldn't otherwise be at each others throats. Like you have someone complaining about bad <X> people, an <X> person gets triggered and lashes out, the original complainer now believes the triggered person is a bad <X> person.
I think a sizable portion of the diversity arguments are brouhaha caused by people who don't speak specifically and clearly.
I'm not always good at it myself. But when "say what you mean, and mean what you say" isn't at least someones goal for their choice of phrasing, then they're probably just going to make things worse.
Also, people don't have an obligation to instantly re-cast everything they hear into the best possible argument for a poorly made point. You can make a good point poorly. We should stop blaming the reader for not bending over backwards to take it the way the writer wanted. Or, maybe, at least stop calling them autistic.
Conservative Americans openly advocate for white supremacists but somehow want to escape the label of 'racist'. Since the trouble is having discussions openly, the first step would be to first fully embrace our own positions. It would be far more helpful for the discussion if all these 'what about white men?' types just get the courage of their convictions.
And one thing we certainly don't need is more people expressing the "courage of their convictions" with remarks like "kill all men" or "acts of courage" like the shootings at Eugene Simpson Stadium Park.
Not all conservatives are advocating this, not all of those who do want to escape that label, and not all of those who are both talk about what about white men.
If you are all of those things, you are an extreme minority, one that I doubt is present in this discussion.
To me, this could all be solved by HR releasing a document on what can and can not be discussed on company time and where the lines are. And if a document exists, enforce it on both sides.
Or you know, not talk about politics in the work place.
There's a lot to be said about this approach (and I had a good conversation about this with someone I know who works at Google and leans conservative / Republican but not alt-right, and is unhappy that internal social media is tied to business-related communication - blocking someone who posts a lot of partisan political stuff apparently means that you can't communicate with them in an emergency, if they maintain one of your dependencies, which seems like a pretty bad design).
But I think there are two reasons it's not a completely simple solution.
The first is that Google, as the article says, encourages you to "bring your whole self to work." Heck, Google even encourages you to bring your dog to work. Google encourages you to stay for lunch and probably dinner. Google encourages you to form bands with your coworkers, go on hiking trips with your coworkers, etc. There's a lot of deliberate attempts at promoting social cohesion beyond just normal traditional professional relationships, and by all accounts, that's a lot of why Google is as successful as it is. Requiring "Don't talk politics at the workplace" involves not talking politics over meals, on weekend team trips, and so forth, which is unlikely to be enforceable and also seems like it would hurt the genuine social bonds these things are trying to promote.
The second is that "politics" includes things like "Is it valid to be trans" or "Are certain races inferior to others." I'm not going to deny that this is "politics;" the generalized question of whether whole swaths of people are deserving of recognition under their claimed identity has been part of politics since basically the first empire captured its first nation. But it's unavoidable for a large company to pick an answer one way or another. A hypothetical Google running at the time of Cato the Elder, with Roman and Carthaginian employees, could not avoid the "political" question of whether Carthage should be destroyed and its residents sold into slavery.
Something that always rubs me the wrong way when reading about these issues is that people in (for now) mostly American spheres use both the word and the concept "race" so uncritically [1], with no reflection at all. Heck, if we consider the US Government, then "race" is an official property of humans (see e.g. bop.gov Inmate Locator, which literally has a drop-down labelled "race" with choices like "White" and "American Indian").
[1] It should go without saying that using a different word for the same concept means you're still using the same concept. It's essentially the same as the good-old-fashioned euphemism treadmill.
My past job, I would have political discussion with coworkers but they were people I had formed extremely close and trusting bonds with. We may have disagreed at times but it came from a place of respect and knowing someone a little.
After the US presidential election, the lead execs of the office sent out emails about the results and commiserating with the staff (we had people call in sick, crying, etc.) but, despite the office being 99.9% on their side, lunch conversation later that day revolved around how most didn't think what they did was appropriate because, if there was that .1% that could feel alienated, why do so from on high?
As for the second reason, I think it comes down to professionalism. We can politicize anything if we try hard enough. But if our employer says "no politics, just get the work done", then both sides must adhere to whatever policies are provided, within the law. Don't like the bathroom rules or workplace guidance? Work somewhere else.
That's certainly an incredibly common view, so I'm not going to say that it's wrong or irrational.
But I'm reminded of the bathroom subplot in Hidden Figures - all the restrooms in one building were for white people, and so the one black woman working in the building, who was extraordinarily technically competent, needed to go on extended break to another building every time she needed to use the restroom. "Don't like the bathroom rules, work someplace else" was absolutely the prevailing culture at the time, which had hefty rules about "professionalism" and not "politicizing" things. But it had a serious negative impact on the business, and the right thing to do (which a manager eventually did) was to change the bathroom rules.
The choice to adopt "professionalism," and to bring in no politics and leave the political decisions to whatever existing culture is in place, is a political choice of its own. There are a lot of arguments in favor of that choice, yes. But it remains a political choice.
Seems like you're overcomplicating the problem. Nearly all other companies seem to be doing just fine. Certainly not without incident, but by all appearances, companies aren't waging the sort of internal political wars that this article portrays.
In your opinion, did the google memo touch on similar topics? Many represented it as saying "women are inferior engineers to men", but a crux of the argument seems to be that many say this is not what the memo said.
Also, there are tangential topics that are often phrased similar to the above so as to make it seems like we're in a Carthaginian scenario when it isn't necessarily the case. For example, the main argument seemed to be about trans-people using certain bathrooms, that touched on the topic of "trans validity" (or dragged conversation into that), but was also also a separate, related argument about bathroom usage that precipitated that.
Those people are right. The full text of the memo is readily available. The author not only didn't say this, but repeated numerous times that this was explicitly not what he was trying to communicate. There is no reasonable, charitable way to interpret those who misrepresent him.
I think this brings up an important point. Some people insist on painting this as a "diversity champions vs blithering racists/sexists" issue, ignoring the numerous legitimate criticisms for the current approach to diversity.
The politics instantly put the memo squarely at one side of the current cultural / political wars. With the current binaries in American politics right now, such will never lead to sober discussion.
Note that it doesn't imply or conclude that a given female applicant is less qualified than a given male candidate nor that the pipeline of female applicants is less qualified in aggregate than the pipeline of male applicants (because there's no reason to assume that the pipeline has the same distribution as the overall population).
It merely suggests that (assuming pertinent biological causes) we shouldn't expect a fair process to result in parity of outcomes.
Whether or not there are pertinent biological causes is a question I leave to scientists, but I do want to note that (contrary to Damore's critics), science has established biological sex differences that may be pertinent, and lots of scientists have validated Damore's position (that biological differences may explain some of the gender distribution in tech). https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201711/the-truth-ab...
The latter, yes (in the sense that the question was relevant to the memo, not so much that the memo coherently attempted to address it), but it wasn't the memo I was referencing here here—it was other posts, either in internal social media or on external forums with clear links to employees.
China has similarly dominant tech companies and I'm sure they do not share SV's political opinions.
You could just as easily say they were successful despite this or that aspect of their company culture.
Majority of US companies have 'diversity advocates' among the ranks of non HR employees?
Except that if your whole self is not within the established pc, liberal standard, you'll be fired.
[0] - I realize the lawsuit would obviously want to make it look as bad as possible.
I'm not sure which is worse, that there are people at Google who (and I know the lawsuit is using extreme examples) have these extreme left-wing views who are in positions to force their views on a large unsuspecting populous, or Google for not fixing the problem.
If you've ever been an online forum mod, or similar, you'll know that the larger the "board" gets, the more out of whack it gets. When a company, or forum, is small, and most people know each other, at least a bit, they tend to stay civil. Past some point, that goes out the window.
Not talking about politics is a good idea, but it's very hard to specify what is "politics" and what is not.
The problem is that there is a small minority of people who don't/can't see things from other people's perspectives, so they either make blatantly offensive comments without realising it, or they get offended and their feelings hurt when no reasonable person would have taken a comment to be offensive.
Perhaps there could be a peer-based mediation panel within Google to make non-binding, non-public rulings on these cases without them going to HR (if both parties agree on the outcome). If these panels were make up of reasonable people (think wikipedia admins), then it might work quite well.
They should put up a big banner of the question the employees should be asking themselves about their work activities: "Is this good for the company?"
And I'm not being totally unserious.
[0] If everyone involved has an implicit mutual respect for the other person, which seems unlikely.
That discussion is unlikely to go well if any of your co-workers are immigrants. You can't discuss "should you be in this country or should you and your family be deported" in front of someone dispassionately.
Edit: the last few times I've discussed "heavy handed immigration policy" at work it has been because co-workers have had to deal with the Home Office and I'm commiserating how difficult it is. One guy got tripped up by "the middle initial on your ID wasn't present in the name field of this form" (or vice versa).
> Gudeman further stated that at the suggestion of another Googler, he searched Gilani’s story of being profiled, and found “zero evidence for the claim that [Gilani] was targeted just for being a Muslim.” Gudeman posed more questions about the FBI’s motives for looking into Gilani such as the fact that Gilani had recently visited Pakistan, and that the FBI could have possibly found something interesting about Gilani’s trip or the region that he visited.
If you're going to have a rule about not discussing politics in order to uphold a productive workplace culture, it seems like a very good place to start is that your coworkers should not be able to say something with the subtext "Maybe the FBI had a reason to investigate you for being a terrorist."
Aside from the feeds of a few dozen Twitter edgelords, the discussions you're imagining (or want us to imagine) do not exist and are a strawman argument.
I'm afraid demands for people to be deported are very common in UK immigration discussion, and very few people seem to be fussy over the legality of it.
But then, I'm a European, living in another European country, so the same racial sensitivity might not exist?
EDIT: and what I mean by that is, you can discuss with a close coworker whatever you want, but people seem to want "open texted based communication" in a way that invites argument.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/passion-...
> We share everything we can. We have a weekly all-hands meeting called TGIF, hosted by our founders, Larry and Sergey. In the first 30 minutes, we review news and product launches from the past week, demo upcoming products, and celebrate wins. But the second 30 minutes is the part that matters most: Q&A.
> Everything is up for question and debate, from the trivial (“Larry, now that you’re CEO will you start wearing a suit?” The answer was a definite ‘no’), to the ethical (“Is Google going in the right direction?”).
I assume it's been a net positive for them in the past, I wonder if this TGIF policy will get changed.
> at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you [...] a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face [...] You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.
TL;DR - Yeah I mean, violence against you is totally justified because of what you said -- but if there is violence, it's your fault.
Nothing in Damore's memo justifies violence as a response. 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.
1 - https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
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.
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 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.
Your summary is misleading. He didn't "justify" violence. Saying that jaywalking is risky is not an ethical statement about cars.
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.
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.
> See my response above to joshuamorton.
I didn't understand the connection between that response and my assertion.
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.
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?
Acceptance comes through dialogue, and mutual understanding.
Sadly, there's a lot of "open minded people" who are pretty close minded to openly entertain a viewpoint that isn't their own, let alone be able to look in the mirror.
It can be easier (and lazier) to trivialize, dismiss, degrade the viewpoints of others, or be a crybully, rather than have a sincere look at yourself in a conversation.
Add into the mix reasonable themes of fragility, privilege that one group has been raised with (not entirely their choosing but a responsibility to work on), and in another experience at the expense of others, another group having an unfair go for a number of fair reasons.
The reality is bias exists. The best candidate does not win if the decision makers are not of the best and of the most open temperament.
I read somewhere that some of this may be a majority having the experience of a minority for once - and maybe that can help drive a better conversation and mutual understanding.
One thing is for sure, being quiet won't work, and freedom of speech without being thoughtful with your words won't help either.
Do you have any actual empirical evidence or research for this? This reads like window-dressing for thought-police. "You don't accept our views? Sounds like you need more dialogue (re-education)."
In a business setting at least, tolerance allows individuals with different beliefs and motivations to work toward shared goals.
Sorry another person's reality can be effortlessly maligned as window dressing to you. Happy to chat offline and you can report back here - email is in my profile. Happy to do a hangout too.
A reality is it's easy to marginalize and dehumanize those you haven't had to sit down, face to face and have an interaction with and have to consider that they might actually hold you to task as much as you are holding them to task.
Getting along with others doesn't only involve logic and the mind.
Interpersonal skills are not purely logical, they require a balanced ability to use one's emotions with intelligence and maturity.
In business settings, teams that practice deep horizontal loyalty generally outperform teams that borderline tolerate each other but would prefer not to. Similar effects happen on sports teams that have proverbial Cinderella runs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commi...
In any case, I'm guessing I misread your original intent.
Normally I’d say “they’re ALL idiots for talking about this at the workplace, and ALL deserve to be fired,” but when your employer is making you attend discussions on this topic... well, it’s fair game, isn’t it?
I agree but hard to do when your company pays political lobbyist.
That used to be common sense. You don't talk politics or religion at work. It's even in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
But that's from the 1960's, and SV is compelled to re-invent anything older than 2002.
Note that the debates at Google are not about "is Trump an idiot?". They are about political issues affecting decisions made by Google. In these debates, not bringing up politics is equivalent to continuing the status quo.
That's not avoiding politics, it is simply accepting the politics underlying the status quo. It may sometimes appear to be "neutral" because people have grown accustomed to it, but it isn't.
You don't have to talk about politics to be political at work.
I'm not saying that talking 'politics' at work is wise thing to do, but in the US at least, all people have the explicit right to do so. There have been a fair few SCOTUS cases on this one.
[0] https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_and...
Depends if diversity is considered "politics". There are lots of diversity measures inside all companies and to say don't discuss these is a bit weird. Perhaps only certain HR professionals can be "allowed" to discuss diversity initiatives?
I honestly wish this was the law.
Like, honestly honestly, or jokingly honestly? What if I say "I wish I were allowed to speak about politics at work" at work? That's political. Do I get a fine? How about "am I allowed to talk about this?" If it's a gray area and we start debating it, which one of us gets shipped to the gulag?
Who gets to decide what's politics? Isn't even that question political?
I wish my coworkers (and my fellow citizens for that matter) would be interested in politics just a little more, so they would realize what is happening around them, and know what they are talking about whenever they touch politics and legislature. My opinion is gradually becoming a minority view all over Europe, with people fleeing to either extreme.
The thing is: We were once "politically uneducated" here in Europe. It made the "third Reich" as a mass phenomenon possible, because a lot of people joined this movement blindly and with enthusiasm and did not realize where this train was heading until it was way too late (and they were completely delusional).
When the allies took over they tried to make sure we would be and stay politically educated, so this would never happen again (spoiler: it did not work). How ironic that America is spearheading the movement to normalize extreme views.
Assuming you think coercion is a bad idea, your only tool left is discussion and consensus-building about rules. In other words, politics.
(To be fair, I understand the underlying sentiment: I, too, would like to live in a world where my personal desires were somehow the law of the land in such a way that everybody else were also happy with them. But after some long thought (and some good literature) I think that really falls in the "be careful what you wish for" category.)
Politics easily being a fuzzy term which can be adapted to fit a very wide range of ideas gives those few in power who set the rules the ability to silence whatever they wish.
It would better if there were more initiatives to improve intellectual discourse so people could like actually talk to one another.
The less we talk, the further apart we will grow
Google is big and kind of not really busy with building products anymore. Anytime a company starts losing its busy-ness, its focus, you see "politics" come to the forefront. Once HR and Legal run the show, stick a fork in it.
GE and Six Sigma was the same shit, different angle. Products and their success rule, everything else is distractions and blockers.
Note how Amazon is kept focused and on track. Note how Apple is able to do this, but only after SJ came back and turned it into a busy product place again.
Facebook has Sandberg and others coming to the forefront, Twitter had all kind of drama - jury still out on those. Uber ditto.
Understaffed/lean teams working on winning, running for their lives - and drama is less likely. Breeds camaraderie and cuts the crap. Hard work is the best equalizer.
Bored people look for trouble, distraction.
- heh, and here I was thinking discussions of science were about deciding degree of correctness. I’d better attend the political re-education camp before math class, to avoid making any “politically naive” or “dangerous” statements...
> Some employees see similarities between some of the behavior inside Google and alt-right manuals for fighting advocates for social justice, such as one written by Beale that instructs readers to “Document their every word and action,” “Undermine them, sabotage them, and discredit them,” and “Make the rubble bounce” on your way out the door.
> Beale says they’re right. “I know that there are a number of people there who have read [the guide], I know that they’re using it,” Beale told WIRED. He claims to have had contacts inside the company for years and dozens of followers. He says he doesn’t know if Damore has read his guide, but is following the playbook. Damore says he has not read the manual.
This is a science fiction author, someone outside tech, who admits that he has contacts inside Google following a playbook for sabotaging people with political views opposed to his own. This is an outsider attempting to get Google to prioritize politics over technical merit - and he seems to be succeeding.
I find it particularly suspect the way he tries to align Damore with his interests and politics.
"He says he doesn’t know if Damore has read his guide, but is following the playbook."
This looks to me like Beale is trying to make everyone view Damore as a member of the alt-right. It makes the left see them as a growing organized group that's waging war.
It's the same tactic that terrorist groups use when they take credit for attacks that they in reality had nothing to do with. It makes them seem bigger and scarier if people think they're organizing all these attacks around the globe.
It's a good concern - but Beale's concrete and measurable involvement with the Hugos and with Gamergate makes me inclined to believe he's not at a loss for followers or in need of magnifying his own influence.
To be clear, I don't think Damore is a member of the alt-right, nor do I think that Damore planned to disrupt anything at Google. (The best explanation to me is that he was earnest about the points in the memo, had a little bit of the why-can't-I-answer-this-from-first-principles tendency that is incredibly prevalent in tech, and got coopted by alt-right folks, yes.) I believe there are lots of other people at Google doing this, though, on purpose.
He's been a video game developer for decades. Is that considered to be "outside tech" now?
> a playbook for sabotaging people with political views opposed to his own
How is that any different from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals?
Isn't it the opposite - he hasn't been a video game developer for decades? I think the last project he was involved with was The War in Heaven in 1999, which I can only find negative reviews about, both in terms of storyline and technical quality.
And even if he were still involved, I think an indie video game studio is still in a relevant sense outside the tech industry - I don't believe he's e.g. interviewing at Google or any other tech company. I take voice lessons and sing at churches and so forth, but I'm certainly an outsider to the music industry, even though I can sing pretty well. If I were trying to push my politics on the music industry, that would be pretty different from someone who has a recording contract doing the same.
> How is that any different from Saul Alinky's Rules for Radicals?
As far as I know, nobody is saying "I'm following Alinsky's playbook to disrupt this tech company I don't work at." (There might be conspiracy theories that people are doing that, but that's rather different from someone outright saying as much, which is what we have here.)
I do agree that if someone were doing that, it would be equally worth criticizing.
No, his primary source of income is still and continues to be video game development. He simply shifted to the European market when he moved there.
> As far as I know, nobody is saying "I'm following Alinsky's playbook to disrupt this tech company I don't work at."
You must not be looking too awfully hard, then. There have been hundreds of instances of people trying to get other people fired at companies they don't work for. Most (if not all of them) have read that book. In fact, there were entire countries that were overthrown in the 70s where that book was used as a manual.
Also there's a big difference between "dox" in the sense of "identify a name" and "dox" in the sense of "post lots of personal documents / records about," which is what Kiwi Farms does.
He was also doxed in the regular sense by left wing trolls (which do exist). In one example he was stalked, harassed, and had his photo taken and released from a rather private event.
"Both sides did it" isn't a defense (both sides can be wrong), and it's definitely not a defense if one side is doing it to a much larger and more organized scale than the other, and the other side is generally trying to do the right thing and happens to have some outside trolls who are being misguidedly sympathetic to the cause.
Something like this has happened to me. I will say this, the alt-right are excellently adopting the tactics of the SJWs in taking offense at everything. Horseshoe theory at work?
I appreciate that the alt-right's response is a valid piece of the story, but it would be nice if they at least acknowledged the presence of the significant middle ground.
@mods: How about getting some stats on which accounts actively downvote the most reasonable posts here?
Maybe you shouldn’t be surprised to find people fighting back at you.
This is the toxic diversity-advocates in Google effectively getting the same treatment they have been giving others, their own methods used against them.
In other words: cry me a river.
Edit: wording.
I find opposing such hypocracy perfectly reasonable, but I can tell from the voting that the HN consensus is that they would rather leave this giant elephant untouched. In which case, you reap what saw.
Fittingly for this debate, the word "libertarian" was first used by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacques in attacking the anarchist Proudhon for his misogynistic views [1]. But unlike the "diversity-advocates" you complain about, Dejacques argues for diversity as a consequence of liberty, and argues for liberty as essential to the humanity of all.
Applying power over others to force diversity is the antithesis of this, and there is a major schism over this on the left just as there is between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian ideologies on the right too.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...
(b) there are tons of "Greyglers"
It's hard to make people not to talk about main event of the year, happening in their country, in real-time, and probably such ban is counterproductive.
Thinking about it a bit more, the underlying problem here is not politics per se, but exteremely polarized society. Not sure this is something fixable with HR directives.
In Western Europe the amount of kvetching is ten times lower on average, meaning people really care about elections 4 weeks before and 4 weeks after and then move on with their lives, as opposed to US, where political fighting is never stops.
My pet theory (which may cause downvotes here) is that US democracy seriously differs from Western Europe. In Western European countries you have different parties with their different pet issues, but you don't have different ideologies.
In US, there are two different ideologies, having different views on everything -- gender, religion, race, well, any topic you can pick, actually. What we observe is these two ideologies maturing, crystallizing and diverging from each other.
I often wonder how it will play out, in a long run. ;)
That's a really good insight. On many issues, I look at the viewpoints of those I disagree with and wonder how a sane person can think what they think; no doubt they look at me and wonder the same.
> I often wonder how it will play out, in a long run. ;)
Poorly, I suspect.
And getting back to Damore memo -- from what I know about large european IT companies (and I do know something), if such memo was published on some intranet in, say, Netherlands or Denmark, you will end up with some flamewar (not even guaranteed) and maybe locked thread, thats it. Nobody would be fired, and it's absolutely impossible to imagine such case resulting in nation-wide news story. Zero chance. Nobody will really pay attention, because why.
But when you have two opposing ideologies, even a symbolic victory matters. So even if the reason is just some words some random dude typed on some private intranet (lol), outrage on national scale ensues. Soldiers from both ideologies armies are recruited, downvotes fired, and we have something NYT and Wired writing articles about. Just because of some post on some corporate portal.
Good thing that this is still contained to online flamewars. Still.
No, the difference was that we didn't have modern social media amplifying and echoing and re-broadcasting all the noise; so political arguments burned themselves without a wide conflagration
- Does Google have unusually many conservative employees compared to similar tech companies? Or maybe a different attitude towards "diversity" programs?
- Evidence of Google employees doxing one another is evidence of insufficient HR vigilance against assholes. How could it happen?
- Does the "alt-right" have specific reasons to harass Google, compared to other equally hostile and equally important companies?
I work in a pretty political environment, where both significantly liberal and significantly conservative views exist. They're rarely discussed, and it rarely is an issue, because it's not a work-related discussion.
I can think of one, aside from the Damore fiasco. Last year, Google, as a domain name registrar, took an inherently political position in clientHolding a fascist website's domain name - and doing no such thing to any of its overtly communist customers.
Prior to the Godaddy/Google decisions, domains were generally only subject to action of this kind in the case of FBI/DHS/ICE seizures or egregious network abuse (spam, botnet c2, etc).
This action set the precedent, for the first time, that denying access to your own domain names (clientHold prevents you from even transferring your domain to another registrar) on the basis of political disagreement is a perfectly acceptable action on the part of one of the largest infrastructure providers on the planet.
Have you read through some of the business practices during WWII? Americans almost directly funding the German war effort by moving money around for their own capitalist benefit. I think the subject requires are more in-depth analysis than "companies shouldn't get to say who's business they want".
Communism as a political theory has none of these things. You're confusing it with authoritarian socialism (Soviet Russia, Mao's China, ...).
I belong well into the (anti authoritarian) left, and I agree with your last sentences, but the problem here is not that a lot of people see libertarian and anarchist socialist/communist ideologies as equally bad as Stalinism and Maoism - often because they don't know or accept the distinction -, and so sees blocking far right sites but not far left sites as taking a stand against the right, rather than a stand against totalitarian ideologies.
We're better served with a society where communications providers are not allowed to deny service based on their customers views for the simple reason that as long as we allow them to censor, chances are someone who is clueless about distinctions like the ones you make get to make those decisions,
Case in point: Several countries have legislation against spreading communist ideas or using communist symbols that are ill defined enough that they would just as equally hit someone promoting Stalinism as someone who would be first against the wall if Stalinists were to gain power, because they don't understand that the same name encompasses ideologies ranging from those that wants a totalitarian state to those who wants no state or authority. (In other places such laws have been struck down or revised exactly because of that ambiguity)
Are we? I agree that we get some polarization as collateral damage, but the alternative would be to have hateful and violent ideas be able to roam freely, hurt people, and be normalized. There has to a line.
(Or did misread "I'd expect google to" and we agree)
(The argument "oh, but they're not really communist" here strikes me as about as meaningful/relevant as the argument that the Soviet Union wasn't really communist)
> Engineer Colin McMillen says the tactics have unnerved diversity advocates and chilled internal discussion. “Now it’s like basically anything you say about yourself may end up getting leaked to score political points in a lawsuit,” he says. “I have to be very careful about choosing my words because of the low-grade threat of doxing. But let’s face it, I’m not visibly queer or trans or non-white and a lot of these people are keying off their own white supremacy.”
I don't understand this mentality at all. Rules requiring civility don't only apply towards white men, and I have never heard of anyone within Google being a white supremacist. Do many of these people think that anyone not pro-affirmative action is a sign of their white supremacist thoughts or something?
If this is your opinion, just downvote it - don't comment about it.
> Rules requiring civility don't only apply towards white men
Welcome to the cutting edge of contemporary social justice culture, significant portions of which seem to want to invert and reorganize racial/gender power structures to put themselves at the top, rather than working to actually wash them away.
I mean... I do see you have to take this with the usual American-sized boulder of salt, but I honestly wonder how someone thought this was a good idea. I.e. this goal is obviously neither achievable, nor would it be actually a good thing; it doesn't make sense as a slogan.
Silicon Valley creates a perfect maelstrom of isolation and loneliness. You have thousands of new people move there every year to find work, and moving tears off a huge chunk of your social network. Even if you manage to keep in touch with some people, you lose the entire portion related to "casually hanging out with your friends and talking about your day". Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is a figurative desert of office parks and suburbs, making it difficult to do anything but work.
Companies like Google (and many before, and many after) solved this problem by creating campuses where their employees could eat, hang out, exercise, play games, and socialize. Their otherwise isolated employees formed new social networks, were happier, more productive, and less likely to leave. It solved many problems, but it also created the other problems that stem from "our employees' work and social lives are too entangled".
...or, perhaps, it is getting rather contentious, but some as-yet-unknown policy will mitigate these issues, either through honest / open conversation or, conversely, through reasoned limitations on what can and cannot be talked about at the workplace.
...or, perhaps, the benefits of pursuing diversity initiatives continue to be larger than these drawbacks, and in the medium-to-long term they expect this sort of nonsense to die out. (This scenario would imply that their leadership is, in fact, very strong, as it requires a level head to stay the course in the middle of a political / media firestorm when you know that's the right thing to do.)
Which of these is true? All? None? I have no idea without further data, but I'd just as soon not prognosticate utter ruin based on sensationalist news articles.
Why does everyone has to be an activist? On either side.
This is all counter productive, and I think that trying to create chaos and damage your employer is the most disturbing part.
> Meanwhile, inside Google, the diversity advocates say some employees have “weaponized human resources” by goading them into inflammatory statements
That's on the same level on "she made me hit her so I could call the cops on me".
Killing the privileged people will only create a newer class of "privileged". It's like a never-ending cycle of martial artists killing another martial artist, and his son coming back for revenge and killing the aforementioned killer martial artist, and so on. (Sorry I should have used "her", and "daughter" instead of "him" and "son")
The diversity numbers from 2014 show Google is 70% male and 61% white. Also isn't Google's interview feedback demo blind?
>Blind interviews have nothing to do with this
Seems like hiring is decided by merit. Any diversity recruiting program seems like it's about outreach to identify underrepresented candidates but the bar is the same once those candidates are interviewed.
Well, I guess there's a line between an activity specifically designed to include minorities and an activity specifically designed to exclude the majority. The first one is not discriminatory towards the majority - the second one obviously is. I am fairly certain there is a difference between the two, no?
Going back to my example - if you specifically only offer parental time off to one gender, you are specifically excluding the other one. That's discriminatory, even if that other gender is in majority.
If you run a black history month, you are not specifically excluding white or asian or any other history - you are just focusing on the black history month for now.
Why does Google have an internal list for political discussions and stuff?
Are Google employees allowed to post their stuff on their publicly viewable personal blogs, HN, etc., while at Google?
What happens if someone posts a link on the Google internal lists to their publicly viewable blog entry and requests publicly viewable comments on it? Would they get in trouble?
Trump is like the figurehead for a culture war where the deeply religious, those who describe themselves as having traditional values and racists, all of whom have felt under siege (rightly or wrongly) and have come out of the woodwork.
How anyone who works at Google can feel oppressed is honestly beyond me. In my own experience, the company bends over backward to accommodate you, as a general rule.
I'm actually perplexed by the argument from some that things like Damore's memo are an issue of freedom of speech. It is not. More importantly, defenders seem oblivious to the fact that implicitly questioning whether your coworkers deserve to be there inevitably creates a hostile work environment and that's really the problem.
The low point to me is how some (reference in the article) feel justified in leaking conversations and personal details of their coworkers to the likes of Breitbart. That is truly disgusting behaviour as far as I'm concerned.
If you're a white male conservative Google engineer who feels oppressed and leaks such details, maybe the best thing for you to do is question your belief system that's so warped that you've managed to convince yourself that that's OK. Because it isn't.
And let's be completely honest, Damore's memo was mischaracterized in the wider media; at no point did he say that women made worse engineers than men, and at no point were his suggestions regarding improving Google's diversity efforts (which is something he spent time and thought on) even glanced at by his detractors. I'd challenge anyone who thinks I'm misinterpreting the memo to prove me wrong; I would welcome being corrected as right now the coverage of Damore makes me feel like the only sane person in the crazy house.
You're not the only person to have mentioned that the memo leaked. So what? That's basically the "well, they started it!" argument. Or even "two wrongs make a right".
Knowingly opening up colleagues to a barrage of hate is a vile act. There is no justification for it. Condemn the leak of the memo if you want but it is unrelated.
> If you're a white male conservative Google engineer who feels oppressed and leaks such details, maybe the best thing for you to do is question your belief system that's so warped that you've managed to convince yourself that that's OK. Because it isn't.
Here you are implying that white male conservative Google engineers who leak such details should question their warped belief system, yet you're excusing others who presumably aren't white male conservatives who have done exactly the same thing.
So that applies to both sides? Or just the white males?
- Neo-nazis committing violence in Charlottesville with a president who almost refused to condemn them and tempered any hollow condemnation with claims of their being very fine people on both sides;
- The Chief of Staff peddling the quite racist view that the Civil War was a "failure to compromise", implicitly blaming Northern aggression;
- Defense of civil war statues and monuments. Personally I have mixed feelings about this one because you can't erase history no matter how ugly. But that wasn't the point. The point was a rallying cry to the descendants of former slave owners who seem unable to get over the fact that they can't own slaves anymore;
- Puerto Rico basically being abandoned post-Marla. Compare that to the response after the Houston flooding. On its own this may simply be incompetence. It fits a pattern of behaviour however.
More examples:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
The existence of racist acts prior to Trump becoming president is beside the point. The issue is the quantity and nature of events after (compared to before) and how such purveyors of hate and intolerance have been emboldened by the white nationalist-in-chief.
> We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.
This addressed the extreme-right/neo-nazi violence, as well as the increasing violence perpetrated by extreme-left/antifa agitators (which you conveniently ignored). I would hope my president would condemn all political violence equally.
The media took his statement and ran with it, arguing that it somehow supported extreme-right violence. Alt-right people believed them and became emboldened. If the media had focused on the actual political violence and emphasized that all such acts should be condemned, maybe the agitators would have crawled back to their basements.
Opinions are a spectrum, but we are constantly blasted with the extremist opinions on both sides. Social media has only amplified these issues. Extremists generate many responses from both sides and thus a lot of eyes end up on these opinions. Talk to your neighbor. Regardless of their political affiliation, they're probably a pretty decent human being (obviously there are outliers). Just try to remember the person you're talking to is a human being and their opinion is probably more nuanced than you give them credit for.
which is understandable, since defenders don't hold this view. Which parts of the memo are you referring to.
> feel justified in leaking conversations
AFAIK the memo itself was a result of a leak, which sets the tone..
> It is not.
> Because it isn't.
Do you have any comments on the specific things in Damore's lawsuit?
I'm not going to dissect the entire memo and get into a back-and-forth about the exact comments but one example is illustrative:
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
The implication being that it's easier for "diversity" candidates to get hired. This implicitly devalues any such coworkers you have because you've just said they were held to a lower standard.
If you can't see how that might create a hostile work environment then I'm afraid I can't help you.
> AFAIK the memo itself was a result of a leak, which sets the tone.
So that justifies opening up your colleagues to very public harassment and open attacks by leaking not only what they said but their personal information? Because the memo leak set the "tone"?
I sure hope you're not saying that. And if you aren't, what are you saying, exactly?
When people think of mainstream American conservative views, do they mean like those on the Texas GOP platform? People should go take a look. Or on Reddit's /r/conservative?
https://www.texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PERM-PLA...
What do people here think about the fact that for the past 2 decades, the only issues worthy of national Christian consensus have been sexual issues? And now there's this transgender business? For example, do people remember the push for a Constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage? Was that used to rally the base?
Everyone knows, the definition of “making something diverse” is “removing white men from a group and replacing them with anyone not white and male.”
If I were to post anything remotely resembling disagreement , it would end my professional career. I would be called racist, sexist, transphobic, you name it. So I keep my mouth shut. I’m not the only one.
If I were to reveal that these statements make me deeply uncomfortable, I would be accused of “white fragility.”
Trump isn’t the problem. Any sort is disagreement has been effectively banned and silenced by use of the exact same coercive tactics that are now being turned back on these far Left Google employees.
Liz Fong Jones for example, who would openly disparage white men on Twitter on a regular basis - Still has a job!
Despite all of the harassment, administratively, if you disparate white people due to their race, age and gender (old white men), you are still employed. Maybe you get a mean tweet now and then but your job is intact.
Think about that. If I were to post any of the following: Women don’t work as hard as men and have different priorities due to their biology, All gender bathrooms are stupid and don’t make sense etc - I would get fired.
If me saying those things is wrong and fireable, so is their left wing equivalent.
It’s time for these large corporations to realize that allowing the minorities to disparage the majority isn’t the solution or acceptable either.
Look at what has happened.
I also know for a fact there are conservatives at work who are uncomfortable too because they don’t have the majority view, and that’s not okay. You should never feel uncomfortable at work just because you’re in some kind of minority. One real easy way to avoid that is just not talk about politics at work or outside work with your coworkers.
And that’s not to say companies can’t make political decisions. Company policy for letting trans people use the restroom that matches their gender identity is fine because it’s not people arguing about Trump during lunch, it’s an official company policy. I just want my coworkers to stop getting into arguments about things that then make it really awkward to work with them.
> just want my coworkers to stop getting into arguments about things that then make it really awkward to work with them.
Things like who is allowed in the women's restroom, perhaps?
The chickens are coming home to roost for google and other companies who let poisonous SJW ideology fester...