The story didn't read as "sour apples" to me but rather an employee pointing out evidence that contradicts the "two strikes" policy Zuckerberg explained at the company Q&A. It's tough to write that off as "Facebook isn't perfect".
If he actually cannot get a job due to his stated opinions, well, frankly I’m not surprised. Why would you hire someone who publically says up front he scorns many of his potential coworkers?
Right after the (somewhat-carefully-worded) memo was punished, the author showed his hand by appearing as a guest on the YouTube show of Stefan Molyneux who, even then, was well-known for his white nationalism and "men's rights" activism.
In any case your underlying argument is really bizarre.
Kind of like how he soon after sued Google for discrimination for being "white male conservative" (which has not aged well).
What does it mean to you?
By suing Google for discrimination against white conservative men, Damore fits this fairly well. That, and the alt-right podcasts he went on.
In fact extreme xenophilic restrictionism is the norm in Japan. There's almost universal support by the Japanese people for their extremely restrictive immigration policy—probably the most restrictive first world country. But no sane person could call the Japanese people racist. They love other cultures—no, they adore them. They are incredibly welcoming to tourists from across the planet and delight in the sharing of culture.
I would disagree with that. You will see many sane people pointing out the racism against koreans, chinese, tourists, western residents, etc in Japan.
Can you point to some statistics on that, please?
>probably the most restrictive first world country
If you can get hired by a Japanese company (and some do accept applications from overseas), they will sponsor your work visa. There's none of this H1-B style nonsense. After you're in Japan, if you've been there continuously for five years (which, mind you, is a smaller period of time than any country I can name OTOH), you can apply for citizenship, and again as far as I know, it's not a ridiculous waiting list/lottery style process. In what way is this nearly as restrictve as you're saying?
It's also not difficult at all to get into Japan by applying to an English teaching company (eikaiwa or ALT jobs) from overseas (where they recruit from), and all you need is any Bachelor's degree. You'll have a valid work visa and you can be shipped out within months. Try doing the same as a Japanese teacher applying to teach in the US (or many other countries, for that matter). Browse tech job listings for Japanese companies on major job boards in the West. Almost all of them note that they'll be happy to sponsor your work visa.
This game of prettying up the language to make it seem nice and friendly, while maintaining the otherness that daily affects people (groups which the other reply to you here has pointed out) with language like "xenophilic restrictionist" does nobody favours.
And if there is support for such policies, and in particular bent on nihonjinron notions and race perceptions, I must be insane, but I'm going to go ahead and call "the Japanese people" racist. Being "incredibly welcoming to tourists" doesn't mean anything if you want to work and live there. It misses the whole point of the discussion, and waves away systemic issues with a gloss of "they're good to tourists". We're not talking about tourists. I don't care how much they are able to enjoy Western comedians. I care how receptive they are to people integrating and living in their society like everyone else, as the Japanese constitution guarantees should be possible.
At the risk of stirring the pot a little (and only because I couldn't think of a better analogy), you may as well say no country has race problems, because after all, members of the majority race might frequently listen to music by, and watch films featuring, the minority race. That doesn't mean anything in terms of how the minority race is treated, and it's a farcically ignorant point to make. So sorry if I see the same sort of logic in nebulous feelgood terms like "xenophilic restrictionism".
Is this a joke? Japan has well-known issues with race relations and its historical and current treatment of its minority indigenous populations.
It’s the same as when people protest building housing: “oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood”. I know what they are really talking about, and I know full well what he was talking about — he was making the same argument, in the same terms, as plenty have before him. I assume he read those arguments before, himself.
> oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood
Is there no situation where this is obviously, trivially true? If someone wants to replace a traditional cottage in the middle of an Irish village with a glass and steel modernist masterpiece, would you accept the argument then?
And anything that says * ism might be a smaller problem than thought, that * ism is getting better, or that our current efforts to reduce * ism are ineffective... Well, that's an unapproved direction.
Also, if I know there's no way to convince someone of something, I'm generally going to stop caring about what they think. (Because it's always going to be the same, and nothing I can do will change that)
I read the memo as sincerely asking whether the data showed a sexist conclusion. Either it is inherently sexist to ask the question, or it isn't. If it is, then... what? Is it inherently sexist to note that men are faster than women? (Yes, I am aware that there are 12-year-old girls who can beat me in the 100 meters. No, that doesn't invalidate my point.) Then is reality sexist? Or is it only sexist to notice? Or to admit that you noticed?
If it isn't inherently sexist to ask the question, then we start into judgment on whether he asked it in good faith. That's a different question, on which I will not pass judgment. But I suspect that what's happening is that people have decided that it is sexist to ask the question, and therefore he couldn't have asked it in good faith.
When they're not conservative opinion pieces, they're cherry picked articles, even going to far as to misrepresent the data they support.
The sort of people who argue against his memo always end up looking foolish because they never argue against anything that was actually said. No specific claims are ever brought up except lying strawmen like "he said women can't program", a claim not found in the memo.
Instead it's all just slurs, insults, attacks on his character, guilt-by-association and so on. There's never any actual depth to it, it's all "don't look at the bad man".
Damore's arguments must be good, because in years of this coming up nobody has ever once managed to make an intellectual argument against the stuff in his memo.
From what I understand it was about preferences not competencies.
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the memo, I'm curious about this take:
>That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation.
I didn't get that much of a dichotomy from the memo. To me he focused much more on interests than competency or capability, and he went through some effort to indicate that the effect was limited, including this summary at the top:
>Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Then followed with a little chart showing two distributions with a lot of overlap.
I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself, which seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt at exploring how we prioritize various metrics with diversity and inclusion. It was obviously premature as well, based on his own charts the effects he was discussing wouldn't come into play until we're approaching something much more even than we have today.
Ultimately the way Google handled it seemed rather cowardly. Damore's personal story adds a little complexity to the situation and I really feel that he touched a third rail that might not have been as obvious to him at the time.
And that story was mostly fictional. The memo itself bares little resemblance to most of the reporting about it.
Squaring off over unfalsifiable claims about intent and impact isn't going to get us anywhere, in the Damore case it's literally 'he said/she said'. We need to navigate it piece by piece and try to apply a balance of reason and empathy to try to get to a place of understanding.
Sure, but you can't hold the original author responsible for how it is being rewritten and reinterpreted in other people's minds. It's not a reasonable expectation that everyone should write everything with concern for how every cultural intersection might interpret it. That simply can't scale.
I thought at first you meant gender, but then I looked up the word and it means "the process or period of developing inside the womb between conception and birth" and now I'm not sure.