Hard to take the author’s point seriously with phrases like this. It comes off as a tantrum born of envy, written in today’s lefty lingo.
There are better arguments against the 4hww here in the comments than hers.
Who do they think they are reaching with this rhetoric?
They pretty much told him that ignoring it was impossible, and they couldn't even entertain the idea.
So there is your answer. That kind of rhetoric has a lot of power right now.
The thrust behind this was that companies need to go back to being apolitical, and it's workers need to leave their politics and ideologies at the door.
Doesn't fully undermine your point, but I remember his proposal being stronger than that. I think he was more proposing to basically blacklist twitter SJW warriors from industry. Whereas now they feel like they can make a fuss and if they get fired they can just get hired by a competitor, he wanted leaders to have a public stance that they wont hire people like that.
1. identifies a particular type of person
2. characterizes them in a specific way that, like other group characterizations, is simultaneously an exaggeration, a truth, and a point of view
3. encourages us to think about that the assumptions we carry around about what a "default" model for life should look like
I know people who are very well described by this sort of language, even though (like any group characterization) it necessarily does not capture their whole selves. The description reminds me to not just accept that these people (or anyone else) have some natural born right to whatever position they end up in life, and that we can question whether we do in fact value what they do and say. It leads to questions like "Why are almost all the people who do <insert type of work> like this?", in ways that we frequently do for other sorts of work but tend not to ask about "success".
> "more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton"
That specific language recasts (in my mind) people I might have seen as extremely confident extroverts. At this point in life, I think that the "recast" take is more accurate than the way I used to see them, but it's not something I'd have come to spontaneously. Encountering language like this helps to raise questions about what is really driving people, whether or not my own answers to that question are correct.