6 ms·

Brendan Eich, James Damore?

jdavis703 9y ago
OP is clearly talking about people he personally knows. I have to say I concur with OP, but that’s just anecdote. Looking at 2016 voting habits in the Bay Area, Donald Trump got double digit election returns in every county. That’s not even factoring "never Trump" conservatives who voted 3rd party or stayed home. So there are a fair amount of conservatives here. For comparison there are more Trump voters in San Francisco than African Americans.
- avmich 9y ago
  Did you include those who didn't vote, but would vote for Democrats? In other words, double digit election returns are from those who voted, or "votes for Trump as percent of eligible voters"?
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    The latter, "votes for Trump as percent of eligible voter." One of your sibling comments comes with more data.
- somecontext 9y ago
  In case anyone was curious, Wikipedia says Trump received 37,688 votes in (the city and county of) San Francisco, which was 9.3% of the votes counted. The 2010 Census counted 48,870 African Americans in San Francisco, which was 6.1% of the population.
utopcell 9y ago
Damore wasn't fired because he is a conservative. He was fired because he thinks women are inferior wrt tech and was very vocal about it.
- wyclif 9y ago
  This is false. Damore did not get fired "because he thinks women are inferior" which is a simplistic, uninformed, and cartoonish version of the controversy. Damore was fired by Google for writing about scientifically supported sex differences and the social ramifications of those differences: https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw
  - salvar 9y ago
    Brushing all of this off as "scientifically supported sex differences" is quite simplistic, uninformed, and cartoonish by itself.
    - wyclif 9y ago
      Brushing all of what off? The controversy itself? No, that's not what I did at all. I recognise that it's controversial; I simply don't think most people commenting on it have read Damore's memo, especially if "women are inferior to men" is the mangled message they managed to extract from his writings.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  Sigh. As the sibling comment points out, what you are saying is not true. It is contradicted by the text of the memo itself. Moreover he wasn't "very vocal about it", he wrote a memo that was then deliberately leaked by his ideological opponents in order to destroy his career: successfully so. Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left. These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man. This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false. The same tactic crops up in other similar contexts. Jordan Peterson being interviewed on Channel 4 is a recent notorious example. The guy made debatable but essentially conservative arguments about how men and women are not the same, the gender pay gap has multiple causes and so on. And Cathy Newman (the interviewer), who clearly isn't really interviewing him at all but rather sees her job as destroying the ideological enemy, just constantly twists his words. The entire interview consists of her exclaiming, "So what you're saying is ..." followed by some absurd straw man that bore no resemblance to what the guy just said. It got so insane that by the end of the interview, after Peterson made a long and complicated point about the biological roots of social hierarchies using the nervous system of lobsters as an example, she replied "So what you're saying is, we should organise our society along the lines of the lobsters" and the guy doesn't even blink or miss his stride. He just gets right on with correcting her, because by that point the lying and distorting of what he just said has become so predictable: https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
Brendan Eich lost his job because he supported a campaign whose sole purpose was that of bigotry and hate. After doing so, he could not be seen as an effective leader, because many other companies did not want to work with Mozilla.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thanatropism 9y ago
  I guess I'm too young to see how gay marriage is even controversial, but where's the frontier between bigotry and discrepant values? Is being anti-abortion bigotry & hate?
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    For gay marriage, the part that made being against it bigotry is the part where you are denying other people fundamental rights, and all of the ancillary rights that go with that. You are, in essence, creating second class citizens. And for something that literally had zero effect whatsoever on those that were against it.
    - Veelox 9y ago
      There are people who genuinely disagree with you and believe that same-sex marriage is not a fundamental right but a separate additional right requested by the LGBT community.

OP is clearly talking about people he personally knows. I have to say I concur with OP, but that’s just anecdote. Looking at 2016 voting habits in the Bay Area, Donald Trump got double digit election returns in every county. That’s not even factoring "never Trump" conservatives who voted 3rd party or stayed home. So there are a fair amount of conservatives here. For comparison there are more Trump voters in San Francisco than African Americans.

avmich 9y ago
Did you include those who didn't vote, but would vote for Democrats? In other words, double digit election returns are from those who voted, or "votes for Trump as percent of eligible voters"?
- jdavis703 9y ago
  The latter, "votes for Trump as percent of eligible voter." One of your sibling comments comes with more data.
somecontext 9y ago
In case anyone was curious, Wikipedia says Trump received 37,688 votes in (the city and county of) San Francisco, which was 9.3% of the votes counted. The 2010 Census counted 48,870 African Americans in San Francisco, which was 6.1% of the population.

utopcell 9y ago

Damore wasn't fired because he is a conservative. He was fired because he thinks women are inferior wrt tech and was very vocal about it.

wyclif 9y ago
This is false. Damore did not get fired "because he thinks women are inferior" which is a simplistic, uninformed, and cartoonish version of the controversy. Damore was fired by Google for writing about scientifically supported sex differences and the social ramifications of those differences: https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw
- salvar 9y ago
  Brushing all of this off as "scientifically supported sex differences" is quite simplistic, uninformed, and cartoonish by itself.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Brushing all of what off? The controversy itself? No, that's not what I did at all. I recognise that it's controversial; I simply don't think most people commenting on it have read Damore's memo, especially if "women are inferior to men" is the mangled message they managed to extract from his writings.
peoplewindow 9y ago
Sigh. As the sibling comment points out, what you are saying is not true. It is contradicted by the text of the memo itself. Moreover he wasn't "very vocal about it", he wrote a memo that was then deliberately leaked by his ideological opponents in order to destroy his career: successfully so. Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left. These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man. This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false. The same tactic crops up in other similar contexts. Jordan Peterson being interviewed on Channel 4 is a recent notorious example. The guy made debatable but essentially conservative arguments about how men and women are not the same, the gender pay gap has multiple causes and so on. And Cathy Newman (the interviewer), who clearly isn't really interviewing him at all but rather sees her job as destroying the ideological enemy, just constantly twists his words. The entire interview consists of her exclaiming, "So what you're saying is ..." followed by some absurd straw man that bore no resemblance to what the guy just said. It got so insane that by the end of the interview, after Peterson made a long and complicated point about the biological roots of social hierarchies using the nervous system of lobsters as an example, she replied "So what you're saying is, we should organise our society along the lines of the lobsters" and the guy doesn't even blink or miss his stride. He just gets right on with correcting her, because by that point the lying and distorting of what he just said has become so predictable: https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.

s73v3r_ 9y ago

Brendan Eich lost his job because he supported a campaign whose sole purpose was that of bigotry and hate. After doing so, he could not be seen as an effective leader, because many other companies did not want to work with Mozilla.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thanatropism 9y ago
I guess I'm too young to see how gay marriage is even controversial, but where's the frontier between bigotry and discrepant values? Is being anti-abortion bigotry & hate?
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  For gay marriage, the part that made being against it bigotry is the part where you are denying other people fundamental rights, and all of the ancillary rights that go with that. You are, in essence, creating second class citizens. And for something that literally had zero effect whatsoever on those that were against it.
  - Veelox 9y ago
    There are people who genuinely disagree with you and believe that same-sex marriage is not a fundamental right but a separate additional right requested by the LGBT community.