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Damore clearly wanted an open and honest discussion, which is why he wrote so politely and provided citations for all his arguments. The resulting meltdown and

Damore clearly wanted an open and honest discussion, which is why he wrote so politely and provided citations for all his arguments. The resulting meltdown and repetitive lying about his memo just goes to show how right he is. Nobody has successfully defeated his arguments which aren't even complicated, they're obvious and common sense. Instead they just try to shoot the messenger.

oconnor663 8y ago
> which is why he wrote so politely This is kicking the can down the road on noticing the disagreement. Some people think he wrote in a perfectly reasonable, rational way. Other people think he wrote in a deliberately provocative way, to cause a stir. It's certainly possible to use polite-sounding language in deliberately provocative ways. Just to go with the most extreme possible example, if I wrote an article about any conceivable version of "was the Holocaust really as bad as people say?", it wouldn't be enough to just word the whole thing politely. I'd have to be extremely considerate of my audience audience to write something like that, and of the real world context in which my audience was going to read the article, and what it would mean in light of their experiences. My motivations for choosing that topic would be under intense scrutiny, since everyone has heard heard similar-sounding things before from horrible people. If I'm not extraordinarily considerate about those things, I'm either an idiot, or I'm deliberately causing trouble. Anyone can see that, right? Some people feel that way about Damore's arguments. They feel the content is inherently hurtful, such that starting an "even-keeled, rational-sounding debate" about it is inherently rude, at least without doing a lot of work to acknowledge the feelings context. And then obviously lots of other people feel differently. That's a big disagreement, and you don't have to be an insane person to be on either side of it.

oconnor663 8y ago

> which is why he wrote so politely This is kicking the can down the road on noticing the disagreement. Some people think he wrote in a perfectly reasonable, rational way. Other people think he wrote in a deliberately provocative way, to cause a stir. It's certainly possible to use polite-sounding language in deliberately provocative ways. Just to go with the most extreme possible example, if I wrote an article about any conceivable version of "was the Holocaust really as bad as people say?", it wouldn't be enough to just word the whole thing politely. I'd have to be extremely considerate of my audience audience to write something like that, and of the real world context in which my audience was going to read the article, and what it would mean in light of their experiences. My motivations for choosing that topic would be under intense scrutiny, since everyone has heard heard similar-sounding things before from horrible people. If I'm not extraordinarily considerate about those things, I'm either an idiot, or I'm deliberately causing trouble. Anyone can see that, right? Some people feel that way about Damore's arguments. They feel the content is inherently hurtful, such that starting an "even-keeled, rational-sounding debate" about it is inherently rude, at least without doing a lot of work to acknowledge the feelings context. And then obviously lots of other people feel differently. That's a big disagreement, and you don't have to be an insane person to be on either side of it.