10 ms·

Alright, let me chime in: For people that were less political danger, they usually were fired for "Political Incorrectness" and "Agitation and Propaganda", se

Alright, let me chime in: For people that were less political danger, they usually were fired for "Political Incorrectness" and "Agitation and Propaganda", sent to re-education classes, and only given shitty job opportunities from now then. It was a convenient way to keep the less dangerous masses at bay. If "being conservative" becomes a "fireable" offense in most large tech valleys, then we are in a path to similar stances. Now, here where I disagree with the memo in general (it didn't seem constructive), I disagree with the way google handled the whole situation overall. Anyway, this whole episode (if you are not a feminist you are the enemy stance and the black list that managers at google have) starts smelling more of a McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism For people that just want to do their job and don't want to get involved in these discussions you almost are forced to do something, otherwise you are an evil/enemy/suppressor/whatever else. That bothers me, as I lived under communism and have lived the results of blind ideology.

vilmosi 9y ago
> If "being conservative" becomes a "fireable" offense in most large tech valleys, then we are in a path to similar stances It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get.
- trhway 9y ago
  I wonder what your "credentials" are to speak on the subject. I grew up in the USSR. During 195x my grandfather and grandmother together with their 5 children did a number of years in a low security camp at the Russian North cutting timber. >It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get. It looks similar to me, very similar (and i'm ok with it because it is against conservatives this time).
  - vilmosi 9y ago
    I was born in communist Eastern Europe and grew up in the years immediately afterwards. What's your point. It's still not even remotely similar.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    I think a big difference between the USA and the USSR is that in the USA, everybody hates on their countrymen and thinks that the rest of the country is full of shit, while my understanding of the USSR is that you could only do this if you were relatively powerful. In the USA, no matter how offensive you are, you can find someone who agrees with you. Mr. Damore has already been offered a job by Wikileaks. He's making the media rounds. He's being hailed as a hero by Breitbart and other right-wing talk shows. Chances are, he's not going to have trouble finding another job.
    - trhway 9y ago
      man, the fact that a witch hunt didn't result in the target becoming poor/homeless/imprisoned/mob-beaten, etc. doesn't make it to be not a witch hunt. It is just a result of not everybody participating in the witch hunt. As you pointed out, the US society is [God bless that] far from being single-minded/totalitarian , and thus it is hard to make everybody to participate in the same witch hunt.
      - nostrademons 9y ago
        That's basically how America works, though. We still have witch hunts - hell, we had the original New World witch hunt in 1692 - because we're human and humans are little shits to people they don't like. The beauty of America is that you can always find a bigger shit who doesn't like the little shits who are beating you up, and nobody will stop you from going and hanging out with them (well, except in the public school system, the most fucked up part of America).
        dunkelheit 9y ago
        I guess this system is not without its failure modes. Sure you can get up and leave at any time and find a tribe that will accept you, but where is the incentive to seek consensus? Then comes the election time and half of the country ends up thinking the other half has gone insane.
        9y ago
  - wahern 9y ago
    How is it similar? I worked with a guy circa 2002 who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s. He was from a fundamentalist Christian sect who had _all_ his teeth knocked out by the butt of a gun in a Russian prison. This would have been sometime in the 1990s. He was a good engineer but pretty abrasive, and ended up leaving on his own accord. But even _if_ he was fired for expressing his unorthodox political or religious ideas at work, I doubt he'd equivocate it with the treatment he received in Russia. All these senseless equivocations do everybody harm. Supposedly liberal college students do something similar with their micro-aggression framing device; it's not reasonable in that context, either. We can debate Damore's points endlessly. But at the end of the day plenty of women still suffer old-school sex discrimination across the board. As that disappears, I'm pretty confident we'll have less reason to discuss more abstract discrimination issues. Basically, if you disagree with some of the approaches utilized by the left for addressing discrimination (and there's plenty that reasonable people could disagree with), then the most constructive reaction is to redirect the discussion to more concrete, historical manifestations of discrimination. Most ideologies on the right and left are constructed of poor equivocations and metaphors. And the so-called culture war is just an endless escalation in the sophistication and depth of equivocation and metaphor. It's like in programming. Most debate is pointless bike shedding once the discussion is divorced from a reproducible bug or well-articulated pain points. Which isn't to mean if it's not clearly reproducible that a problem can't exist; just that if the problem isn't yet empirically grounded you can't have productive discourse. Equivocation rarely helps in this regard. If you have to resort to equivocation you've all but conceded that the problem lacks the necessary qualities which make it amenable to solving. If you can't have productive discourse, then there are better ways to spend your time. There's no dearth of reproducible bugs or well-articulated pain points, in programming or in society. And people are always free to put in the hard work of empirically grounding a debate. Unfortunately, discrimination research is inherently tendentious because of the nature of the problem, which compounds all the other shortcomings of economic, sociologic, and psychological methodologies. But it's not impossible and we should encourage people to take up the challenge. Part of that encouragement is to criticize pointless equivocations; to make it clear that they're not an acceptable substitute.
    - pandaman 9y ago
      The USSR fell in 1991, the guy who went to prison in 1990s likely went there for a regular crime. Most political prisoners were released in late 80s (ones who left in 90s were people who participated in various wars of 1980s-1990s or were politicians charged with regular crimes). The whole arrest at night, the family arrested too, a trial by three ("Troika") and 10 years of camps/execution is from the Collectivization and the various Purges of 1930s. In the USSR after the War, if you merely criticized the Party line (e.g. say "We are a Communist country but the Proletariat is rarely consulted by the Party, I think the Party has to pay more attention what the working class people think.") you'd get the treatment ardit33 described. You would not get arrested, you would not be thrown in prison, you'd just get, what they called "wolf's ticket" - a record of "anti-soviet agitation" and then you would not be able to get any decent job, ever. People worked as janitors or threw coal in the communal central heating. Usually a single case of doubting was not enough, you'd get a talking first (quite unlike Google, it seems). Only people who directly opposed the Party were repressed with prison/mental institution.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Why are we drawing the connection that he was fired for being a conservative? Tons and tons of people in the valley are their own special breed of techno-libertarian and they seem to be totally secure in their jobs. He was fired for being political at work. Don't be political at work. No one wants someone walking around their workplace talking about the evils of abortion. No one wants your coworker to ask if you'll sign an ACLU petition on trans rights while you're microwaving your pasta. No one wants to sit down at their email and see something like FW: My Thoughts on Women and the Workplace with Damore's pdf attached.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > He was fired for being political at work. Don't be political at work. Well, more specifically, I think he was fired for being political in a way that caught outside attention and caused bad PR. Plenty of people are political at work, whether they be work politics or otherwise. This is a "You made the company have to weigh in on something that is way over your pay grade, and that's not something we're going to take a chance happening again with you." Executives and boards don't like when they have to stop what they're doing and put out a PR fire started by a low rank employee, whether that employee expected that outcome or not. That the firing of the employee causing problems at the executive level coincides with a way to combat the PR just makes the decision all that much easier.
  - ivoras 9y ago
    Whoa, there - doesn't the fact that a low ranking employee, to use the phrase, can cause a global scale shitstorm, mean that just maybe, there are actually problems which were swept under the rug for too long?
    - kbenson 9y ago
      Not necessarily. All that person has to do is tap into a controversial topic that divides people and involves the company. E.g. "Big pharma researcher says our system is killing people." If it wasn't already done and old news, if it happened to get traction we'd have the same situation. And let's not kid ourselves, he's probably not the first there to state this or even the first to share his views. He is the first that had it turn into big news because it went viral, but content isn't the only factor in something going viral.
jcranberry 9y ago
You're right of course, but in particular the "Goolag" thing was pretty ridiculous.
- mrisoli 9y ago
  I have the same feeling, regardless of whether his claim makes any sense or not, "meme-fying" the company and the underlying subject only makes his argument less substantial IMO.
  - fche 9y ago
    you underestimate the power of memes
    - croon 9y ago
      I think they're arguing about rationality, not populist effectiveness.
threatofrain 9y ago
But religious freedom, being applied as the ability to employ, be employed, or to provide service without fear of religious violation or indignity, is something American conservatives are arguing for at the moment, and that includes the ability to fire or not serve homosexuals. How else am I supposed to create a Christian establishment, such as school for K-12 children? What if it's part of my wholesome Christian values and worldview to create a healthy environment where children can learn, free of homosexual influence?

vilmosi 9y ago

> If "being conservative" becomes a "fireable" offense in most large tech valleys, then we are in a path to similar stances It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get.

trhway 9y ago
I wonder what your "credentials" are to speak on the subject. I grew up in the USSR. During 195x my grandfather and grandmother together with their 5 children did a number of years in a low security camp at the Russian North cutting timber. >It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get. It looks similar to me, very similar (and i'm ok with it because it is against conservatives this time).
- vilmosi 9y ago
  I was born in communist Eastern Europe and grew up in the years immediately afterwards. What's your point. It's still not even remotely similar.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  I think a big difference between the USA and the USSR is that in the USA, everybody hates on their countrymen and thinks that the rest of the country is full of shit, while my understanding of the USSR is that you could only do this if you were relatively powerful. In the USA, no matter how offensive you are, you can find someone who agrees with you. Mr. Damore has already been offered a job by Wikileaks. He's making the media rounds. He's being hailed as a hero by Breitbart and other right-wing talk shows. Chances are, he's not going to have trouble finding another job.
  - trhway 9y ago
    man, the fact that a witch hunt didn't result in the target becoming poor/homeless/imprisoned/mob-beaten, etc. doesn't make it to be not a witch hunt. It is just a result of not everybody participating in the witch hunt. As you pointed out, the US society is [God bless that] far from being single-minded/totalitarian , and thus it is hard to make everybody to participate in the same witch hunt.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      That's basically how America works, though. We still have witch hunts - hell, we had the original New World witch hunt in 1692 - because we're human and humans are little shits to people they don't like. The beauty of America is that you can always find a bigger shit who doesn't like the little shits who are beating you up, and nobody will stop you from going and hanging out with them (well, except in the public school system, the most fucked up part of America).
      - dunkelheit 9y ago
        I guess this system is not without its failure modes. Sure you can get up and leave at any time and find a tribe that will accept you, but where is the incentive to seek consensus? Then comes the election time and half of the country ends up thinking the other half has gone insane.
        9y ago
- wahern 9y ago
  How is it similar? I worked with a guy circa 2002 who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s. He was from a fundamentalist Christian sect who had _all_ his teeth knocked out by the butt of a gun in a Russian prison. This would have been sometime in the 1990s. He was a good engineer but pretty abrasive, and ended up leaving on his own accord. But even _if_ he was fired for expressing his unorthodox political or religious ideas at work, I doubt he'd equivocate it with the treatment he received in Russia. All these senseless equivocations do everybody harm. Supposedly liberal college students do something similar with their micro-aggression framing device; it's not reasonable in that context, either. We can debate Damore's points endlessly. But at the end of the day plenty of women still suffer old-school sex discrimination across the board. As that disappears, I'm pretty confident we'll have less reason to discuss more abstract discrimination issues. Basically, if you disagree with some of the approaches utilized by the left for addressing discrimination (and there's plenty that reasonable people could disagree with), then the most constructive reaction is to redirect the discussion to more concrete, historical manifestations of discrimination. Most ideologies on the right and left are constructed of poor equivocations and metaphors. And the so-called culture war is just an endless escalation in the sophistication and depth of equivocation and metaphor. It's like in programming. Most debate is pointless bike shedding once the discussion is divorced from a reproducible bug or well-articulated pain points. Which isn't to mean if it's not clearly reproducible that a problem can't exist; just that if the problem isn't yet empirically grounded you can't have productive discourse. Equivocation rarely helps in this regard. If you have to resort to equivocation you've all but conceded that the problem lacks the necessary qualities which make it amenable to solving. If you can't have productive discourse, then there are better ways to spend your time. There's no dearth of reproducible bugs or well-articulated pain points, in programming or in society. And people are always free to put in the hard work of empirically grounding a debate. Unfortunately, discrimination research is inherently tendentious because of the nature of the problem, which compounds all the other shortcomings of economic, sociologic, and psychological methodologies. But it's not impossible and we should encourage people to take up the challenge. Part of that encouragement is to criticize pointless equivocations; to make it clear that they're not an acceptable substitute.
  - pandaman 9y ago
    The USSR fell in 1991, the guy who went to prison in 1990s likely went there for a regular crime. Most political prisoners were released in late 80s (ones who left in 90s were people who participated in various wars of 1980s-1990s or were politicians charged with regular crimes). The whole arrest at night, the family arrested too, a trial by three ("Troika") and 10 years of camps/execution is from the Collectivization and the various Purges of 1930s. In the USSR after the War, if you merely criticized the Party line (e.g. say "We are a Communist country but the Proletariat is rarely consulted by the Party, I think the Party has to pay more attention what the working class people think.") you'd get the treatment ardit33 described. You would not get arrested, you would not be thrown in prison, you'd just get, what they called "wolf's ticket" - a record of "anti-soviet agitation" and then you would not be able to get any decent job, ever. People worked as janitors or threw coal in the communal central heating. Usually a single case of doubting was not enough, you'd get a talking first (quite unlike Google, it seems). Only people who directly opposed the Party were repressed with prison/mental institution.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Why are we drawing the connection that he was fired for being a conservative? Tons and tons of people in the valley are their own special breed of techno-libertarian and they seem to be totally secure in their jobs. He was fired for being political at work. Don't be political at work. No one wants someone walking around their workplace talking about the evils of abortion. No one wants your coworker to ask if you'll sign an ACLU petition on trans rights while you're microwaving your pasta. No one wants to sit down at their email and see something like FW: My Thoughts on Women and the Workplace with Damore's pdf attached.

kbenson 9y ago
> He was fired for being political at work. Don't be political at work. Well, more specifically, I think he was fired for being political in a way that caught outside attention and caused bad PR. Plenty of people are political at work, whether they be work politics or otherwise. This is a "You made the company have to weigh in on something that is way over your pay grade, and that's not something we're going to take a chance happening again with you." Executives and boards don't like when they have to stop what they're doing and put out a PR fire started by a low rank employee, whether that employee expected that outcome or not. That the firing of the employee causing problems at the executive level coincides with a way to combat the PR just makes the decision all that much easier.
- ivoras 9y ago
  Whoa, there - doesn't the fact that a low ranking employee, to use the phrase, can cause a global scale shitstorm, mean that just maybe, there are actually problems which were swept under the rug for too long?
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Not necessarily. All that person has to do is tap into a controversial topic that divides people and involves the company. E.g. "Big pharma researcher says our system is killing people." If it wasn't already done and old news, if it happened to get traction we'd have the same situation. And let's not kid ourselves, he's probably not the first there to state this or even the first to share his views. He is the first that had it turn into big news because it went viral, but content isn't the only factor in something going viral.

jcranberry 9y ago

You're right of course, but in particular the "Goolag" thing was pretty ridiculous.

mrisoli 9y ago
I have the same feeling, regardless of whether his claim makes any sense or not, "meme-fying" the company and the underlying subject only makes his argument less substantial IMO.
- fche 9y ago
  you underestimate the power of memes
  - croon 9y ago
    I think they're arguing about rationality, not populist effectiveness.

threatofrain 9y ago

But religious freedom, being applied as the ability to employ, be employed, or to provide service without fear of religious violation or indignity, is something American conservatives are arguing for at the moment, and that includes the ability to fire or not serve homosexuals. How else am I supposed to create a Christian establishment, such as school for K-12 children? What if it's part of my wholesome Christian values and worldview to create a healthy environment where children can learn, free of homosexual influence?