Ethnically maybe. But in terms of diversity of opinions and tolerance of those opinions it's actually much worse that other places in the country I have been.
I found CA’s laws to be quite reasonable; I was told all variety of stories about guns being taken from my home when I told people I was moving out. Weird stuff.
I think CA is highly demonized and I don’t really get it, even as someone originally from a very conservative (and also evangelical Christian) background/area.
I actually live in a very ethnically diverse area that’s about 50/50 red and blue, and right near the ocean in SoCal. Love the diversity in this state!
And yeah, I think being a transplant really helps; it’s easier to realize just how unique the climate and culture truly are. And that applies to any other state where one is a transplant to: I think a big part of this conversation that’s missing is the whole “grass is greener” effect. CA has more population than anywhere else, so we have the most natives by definition (or at least close enough that my point stands - I know the birth rate is below the national median here, but I’d suspect the population outweighs that effect). It’s only in leaving the Midwest that I appreciated some things I overlooked there, but none of those were in the areas of personal freedom (e.g. my city had an amazing food scene and I didn’t know how much I’d miss the unique spirit of that scene).
I do think people make it into this “competition” almost, which is a really odd reflex to me, considering this country has freedom of movement and you can just hit up any of 100s of sites to find a place with the right balance of laws for your lifestyle, costs, diversity, etc.
It’s the furthest from a zero-sum game, in other words, and that argumentative spirit seems like it could be easily replaced with a cooperative one.
Makes me want to start a national real estate/moving consulting company where it’s all focused on finding the perfect place for your specific interests and price point, but I digress
At my last job I was open about my Christianity. I haven’t really had a chance to do that at my current job because of COVID. At my current job though I do talk about the fact that I own a gun in the context of recreation, and at my last job I defended the second amendment in a lunch conversation, but I haven’t really run into an opportunity to espouse a commitment to proactive self defense in a work context… I do talk about self defense with friends though, some of whom strongly oppose the second amendment. My current friends are to my knowledge entirely not Christian.
It's definitely possible to be tasteful and silent when sitting on a Zoom call as people voice strong views in support of XYZ, but it's another thing to wonder if your working relationships are at risk if you voice the opposite, and the majority of media sponsored by SV money sets up the discourse to make that view look foolish which triplicates the amount of work you need to do to defend it.
At the same time it's possible that this is just an issue of a vocal minority of companies controlling the majority of impressions. Since you seem to have had more positive experiences (which I wouldn't expect), I should let you have the floor.
(Last question, if you don't mind: what denomination?)
Yeah, at my last job people definitely were more vocal about political issues. That’s actually how my religion came up. Now everything is work from home and over video, and people at my new job are also more heads-down. I’d certainly say that people have misconceptions about Christianity or might paint Christians with broad strokes in discussions. But I haven’t found people to be rude after I try to explain my stances, even if they disagree, unless they are not great people to work with in the first place :)
But I don’t think that’s anywhere near as intolerant as for example racism I’ve experienced, which is why the claim that the Bay Area is more intolerant irks me.
I’m a Presbyterian and consider myself to be pretty hardline theologically. TULIP and all that.
EDIT: I would definitely expect different reactions if I said inflammatory things to coworkers like “you’re going to hell!”, or to people against the second amendment “hope you don’t miss your children when the oligarchs enslave them because you didn’t have a gun!” But I think communicating while disagreeing without resorting to vitriol is also just a core part of being an engineer. Maybe those things are true but they’re not really productive ways to engage people.
Essentially, "tolerance" has been redefined as a term to essentially just mean "liberalism"; whenever you hear someone suggesting that one "be tolerant", you can just mentally replace that with "be liberal". The term is leveled at folks like yourself, who are deemed intolerant and illiberal for having and trying to perpetuate a different value set.
If taken to the utmost extreme, which admittedly few people actually do, this boils down to excluding tolerance of _actually_ different beliefs and ways of life; only tolerance of different looking liberals from different backgrounds is actually included. Different cultures are tolerated as long as they're far away and out of sight and mind.
The irony of all of this is completely lost on them, of course; they don't think about it like this at all. They truly believe themselves to be tolerant, good people, even as they do this!
Most of them are actually trying to be good people, too; if they had been raised in your household they would have grown up to be good Christians, if they had been raised in India they'd be trying to be good Hindus, and so forth. They were raised under the aegis of liberalism and are doing their best to stand up for its own moral principles.
The big problem is that they're incapable of seeing that same kind of goodness in people like you, preferring to boil you down to a reductionist caricature. This same problem rears its head in Christians who don't see the goodness in others, as well; they'd do well to remove the log from their own eye, and so on.
Stepping back from this, I for one find generalized "tolerance" to be a fairly useless mechanism to espouse, anyway. Like any right-thinking person, I have my own moral code of what I believe to be right and wrong, based on philosophies ranging from Christianity to the best atheist thinkers to a variety of Eastern ideas. I'm not going to start believing an action is right when someone else does it that would be wrong if I did it - for a system of morality to make any sense and have any actual purpose it has to attempt to be objective and independent.
Importantly, it only applies to the actions of individuals, not to aggregated cultures, races, or other intersectional groups. When someone commits an immoral act, the context of their identity is only important so much that it might explain their motivations; it does not excuse their actions, unless they're perhaps someone who should not have their own power of attorney, so to speak.
I think for me it seems more like Google is just very much against people speaking up about anything.
I also agree with your comments about how people think they are being tolerant while they are actually being intolerant, but from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly. I feel like I’ve had worse experiences with this outside of CA, and I can’t see CA as being particularly intolerant this way. I appreciate you writing back though.
If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places I’d be particularly interested to hear them.
Perhaps you're right; certainly I would cleave off Google's private interests (shutting up people who damage their business prospects) from Google's idealized public position (good, diverse, modern liberal values, a trusted source of information, etc). Few people know what their management _really_ thinks or talks about, but we do know their public position well.
Consider this, at least: when firing James Damore, it was absolutely not necessary or expected for them to say anything about how this shouldn't impact efforts to continue to make sure white males are represented in the workplace - quite the contrary.
> from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly.
If you reread my post, hopefully it should be clear that I actually did ascribe this behaviour to everyone. The issue in CA is that, at least in urban areas, the liberal value set is the norm, and is enforced as such, much as Christianity would have been enforced a century ago in many cities. For those implicitly doing the enforcement, ranging from thought leaders to city politicians to moms posting on Facebook, it's just the water they swim in; virtue is on a single axis and like most good people they want to swim upstream. It's not "particularly intolerant" in the grand scheme of things, compared to other such cultural centers throughout history, but it is particularly intolerant of anything outside of postmodern American liberalism today, and is perhaps (outside of maybe NYC) the biggest enclave of such thought in the world.
> If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places
CA and the Hollywood->SF corridor in particular export their value set to the entire world, never mind just America. The intolerance for free speech, conservative or third position values that we see on social media today stems from this. It's not enough to enforce it within their own cities, rather it seems that they need to export it in the form of regulations and propaganda that continually escalates in intensity over time.
It's not far from the proselytizing behaviour that religion has had forever; memetically speaking, it's actually entirely logical that any successful cultural set of values and ideas would have to propagate itself via word and deed in order to survive and grow generationally. In many ways, liberalism is just a third-rate religion; it may have some improvements in select places over the traditional value set that it replaces, but has lost the ability to truly create communities somehow in the process.