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Comment by look_lookatme | Hacker News Reader

Damore does not fit into the neat ideological right or left classification but it would be impossible for an institution like Bloomberg to have nuance on this issue. Just because some deplorable lifted him up doesn't mean he should be defined specifically on an ideological axis.

But, of course, who gives a fuck. The rage machine rages on.

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Do we know his politics to say he is or isn't a thing?

I think the story just notes that he got a lot of positive attention from some specific groups.

Headlines matter.

I think the crazy nature of things now very much means you can become some groups hero overnight..... potentially not of your own choice.

Accordingly I don't see the headline telling me what he personally thinks.

Or some groups villain. It's especially crazy considering the first article posted was the gizmodo one [0] which was "reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted" and if you look at an original [1], you can see that it was actually completely reformatted, all charts were removed, and all 35 hyperlinks were removed. I've heard of journalists selectively quoting people but this is a whole nother level.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...

[1]: https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversi...

Oh come on are you serious? The alignment with "Right-Wing" in the headline of a story that more or less has nothing to do with that and is about the end of a lawsuit isn't intentional?

I remember the story being picked up by a lot of such news outlets. Thus the story tells me it is the same guy I remember.

Is mentioning that a problem?

But he did become an alt-right / Fox News / conservative machine darling.

And Snowden defected to Russia. Sometimes you just have to go where you are free to state your case and not be shouted down which sometimes means an enemy-of-my-enemy scenario.

Snowden did not "defect to Russia", he got stuck in Russia while in transit after the US cancelled his passport.

And crucially, Snowden is as critical of Russia as possible, though not to the point of endangering himself. He doesn't want to be there. It's not where his allegiance ultimately lies.

That's not crucial at all, if he was a Russian asset he would have been behaving the same way - criticising Russia in ways that resonate with his audience to establish credibility but not in ways that actually pose any threat or embarrassment to Russia. But on the balance of publicly available evidence it seems far more likely he is stuck there due to lack of choice.

Seems like you and the parent are agreeing.

Maybe, but I think Snowden would have preferred to be pretty much anywhere else while Dammer was just too inexperienced to recognize that being popular in some circles is more of a liability than asset.

Your timeline is wrong. Snowden defected to Russia.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden...

That's an opinion article.

It has a timeline. His passport was suspended while he was in Hong Kong. He did not travel to Moscow on his US passport, he travelled to Moscow on some other travel document. He’s a defector.

I know this site is full of Snowden apologists, but for goodness sake you don’t have to swallow every easily disprovable lie he tells.

Depending on the mechanics of passport cancellation it could have been both, that is the US could have issued a cancelation order while he was still in HK but HK either did not act on it in time or refused to honor it like it did with Snowden's arrest warrant. The fact that Russia did honor the passport cancellation and did not issue him an alternative travel document is more suggestive but would have been the same if Russia just wanted to hang on to him for the simple reasons of being Russia.

No. Lol.

You’re on the run from the US because you committed espionage, and you fly to Russia?

That’s called defecting.

It's called defecting if you committed that espionage for Russia or cooperated with their intelligence while there, which while not entirely impossible is not very likely either.

No, that's not how it works.

You have to consider the possibility that they were the only people who he could actually talk to. Not that he wanted to be in such channels in the first place.

A while back I published some research that had implications about the us government’s treatment of digital privacy. A Russian media arm reached out to me for an interview.

I said no. Damore has the same choice.

Saying weird stuff about the kkk having cool uniforms was his own choice.

> Damore has the same choice.

You mean he had the choice between:

- not speak at all and let all the media portray him as a misogynist and generally horrible person

- or try to explain himself with whoever was willing to hear him, knowing that he would also be judged "by association" in a negative light?

Sorry but it seems like there was no good choice for Damore anyway in terms of reputation.

Or, he could have taken a step back, let the media do its thing, and then come back in a few months with his own view. This is actually the strategy many PR firms suggest, because it suggests moderation and makes people more likely to have cooled off and become ready to forgive. But he didn't do that, because his aim wasn't self-preservation, it was to grandstand. So he got what he got.

His brief media appearances just doubled down. It wasn't about how he was trying to express himself more clearly. It was about how "the left" was out to sabotage him and tech is taken over by SJWs. The media appearances weren't going to do anything to repair his reputation even if they were on NPR.

> It was about how "the left" was out to sabotage him and tech is taken over by SJWs.

Well, this part is true at google...

There was an article about this, that said he went on some alt-right show/podcast and was really uncomfortable/disagreed with what the guy was saying but also isn't the kind of person who can charismatically argue on the spot like that (isn't he "on the spectrum"?). He had no idea what he was getting into.

Well, he should have just stick to writing. Spectrum or not, recognizing that you're not great at talking, and you're not great at handling the fallout doesn't require special skills.

I'm not blaming him for going on those shows, but he should have recognized - after all he tried to argue a complex problem complexly - that supporting very biased simple platforms won't do him and his arguments any good, especially on the long run.

That says more about the audience that can't listen and judge the content presented instead of who's presenting it.

Possible, but he also didn’t have to go on TV with them. You can’t go on a TV channel repeatedly and then try to pretend that it doesn’t affect your reputation in one way or another.

"Because he didn't accept his mistreatment in silence, that proves his mistreatment is justified."

That’s a nonsense argument.

Humans will always be judged by the company they keep. You can be angry about that, but you’ve got to rage against human nature. He decided to repeatedly go on conservative outlets and be associated with alt-right figures; he should have been aware that he’d be judged by that.

It seems like you're judging Damore for being willing to share his considered and evidenced based beliefs with other people, because you don't like the ideology of those other people. That strikes me as a very anti-intellectual and anti-philosophical position.

I don’t really care about Damore or what he thinks.

I’m just saying that if Damore continues to associate with alt-right figures, he shouldn’t be surprised when people start assuming that he’s an alt-right crank, because that’s how people work.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and is loved and lauded by ducks, you have to consider that it might be a duck.

My first thought as well. You see liberals invited onto conservative outlets for genuine debates / opinions. Rarely see liberal outlets do the same as guilt by association, causing anyone who's ever been in the same room as an 'alt-right' to be tainted, seem to be rampant.

"genuine debates" on conservative outlets, like what? Fox News? talk radio? a dingy YouTube channel?

Can you give examples of what you consider "genuine debates" then?

I care more about the content than where it's hosted.

Most news agencies besides Fox struggle to get Republicans to agree to appear on the show.

CNN famously lambasted Republican lawmakers for refusing to appear after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso last year.

What you have described is that liberal lawmakers are willing to face adversarial news coverage while conservatives are unwilling to do so.

The comment was not about lawmakers though, plenty of conservative pundits / people like Damore that want to share their stuff but are treated like they're radioactive.

Damore was invited to share his thoughts by the media. By his own admission, he turned them down.

So what exactly is your point in this scenario?

Of course, "I have to hate it because opposing media likes it" is no more rational than "I have to like it because allied media likes it."

It's pretty well known that if you go on Fox news, the other news organizations like CNN, MSNBC, etc will ban you from their station. Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew have talked about this on their podcast and so have many other people interviewed by Fox news.

This creates the false impression of "Fox News darlings" and ends up furthering the "us vs them" narrative.

Perhaps it's actually because Dr. Drew, Dr. Oz, and Dr. Phil are dangerous self-promoting quacks who dispense deadly medical advice, and CNN, MSNBC, etc have a problem with that, but Fox News loves it. Looks like CNN etc made the right call.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/04/17/dr-oz-dr-...

>Dr. Oz, Dr. Drew and Dr. Phil made these claims on Fox News. Now they're backtracking

>TV hosts Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Phil McGraw have all appeared on Fox News and made these misleading claims about coronavirus. Now, all of them are backtracking.

CNN had Richard Spencer, the nationally recognized neo-nazi white supremacist, on prime time.

As of 2020, there is no mainstream news that has any reputation for moral superiority and truth.

So did liberal professor Bret Weinstein when the extremist mob attacked him in Washington for daring to show up to teach while being white. As in Damore’s case, this says more about the mob than the subject.

If Fox praised Obama, would that immediately make him alt-right?

If over and over again they praised and held him up as a symbol fighting for some ideology they espoused, and some enemy (media/ideology also identified over and over) supposedly tried to silence him, then I suppose it’d be analogous?

I’m not sure what that proves.

Ironic

He chose to appear on at least one show that routinely promotes white-nationalist talking points – I don't think his politics is really much of a question.

White nationalist as in kkk or white nationalist as in conservative?

White nationalist as in nationalist conservative [1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/nationa...

I don't think there is a big difference between these two groups.

White nationalist as in Stefan Molyneux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux#Alt-right,_rac...

That wiki reads like someone who is very objective wrote it. /s I wonder which journalist/journalists wrote that wiki article.

When it comes to political topics, wikipedia is as unreliable as the news sources listed in that wiki article.

It's not just journalists who think that Stefan Molyneux is an absolute nutcase.

“Fascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on the mountain of the center” —Benito Mussolini

Can you explain what this means?

Mussolini essentially saw the left-right spectrum as useless. I think he was correct about this. The fact that both fascism and anarcho capitalism are classified as being on the right indicates the spectrum is a gross oversimplification.

Fascists and Anarcho-Capitalists have certain abstract philosophical differences, but in practice, their actual behaviors are almost identical. Most (Fascists|Anarcho-Capitalists) are young, white males who use the internet way too much and either don't vote, or vote Republican. Even among their intellectuals, there's a lot more overlap than you would assume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe.

The left-rights spectrum isn't supposed to capture the details of everyone's ideology: a spectrum that did that would be some kind of 20-dimensional hypercube. It's just supposed to capture who take who's side when it comes to that.

> young, white males who use the internet way too much

What does "use the internet way too much" mean?

It means they don't socialize, are not pragmatic, have little understanding of the issues most people actually care about, lack the capacity to empathize with people with radically different life experiences.

Apart from "don't socialise", you've described literally everyone, everywhere.

Fascists have a long history of presenting their movement as a third way, neither right nor left. In fact "ni droite, ni gauche" was a slogan of the far-right French political party Front National, whose founder is on the record having defended the Nazi occupation government.

I don't think Damore is a fascist. However, it seems clear to me that, he, along with a lot of other right-wing figures today are using the exact same tactic as fascists once did by presenting themselves as "centrist." If you don't believe me, check out this Twitter account: https://nitter.net/a_centrism.

His political standing is fairly transparent.

If that is meant to say moderate then I agree.

>Damore does not fit into the neat ideological right or left classification

Lets see, his lawyer for this suit who is quoted a lot in the article:

>Harmeet Kaur Dhillon is an American lawyer and Republican Party official. She is the former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, and the National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California.

Wonder if it was pro-bono.

Damore hasn't said much of his idealogical beliefs publicly and I think it's unfair to criticize him on his choice of legal counsel because he just wants to be well represented which is his right. Regardless of your political beliefs Dhillon is an accomplished attorney. Other attorneys on the left in California don't want to touch the case because of the pearl-clutchers and public political implications so the enemy of your enemy becomes your friend.

> Damore hasn't said much of his idealogical beliefs publicly

That’s all he needs to say to make his beliefs clear. If the whole country (minus some “open-minded” tech bros) thinks you’re a sexist jackass and you do nothing to correct them, I wonder...

Why do his beliefs even matter? Are we supposed to burn him at the stake at the end if he's got the wrong ones?

It's closer to 50/50 as to who takes your preferred media outlet's word for it that any given individual is a sexist jackass.

"Wonder if it was pro-bono."

It was originally a class action[1]...that case still exists, just without Damore as the lead plaintiff.

So, perhaps originally on contingency.

[1] https://www.dhillonlaw.com/blog/news/google-damore/case-upda...

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