Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

The memo makes a whole case against "the Left" (capitalization from the memo) and how "leftists" are violent. That doesn't sound like "conciliatory manner" to me, especially considering he makes a blanket statement about Google "leaning left."

The blanket statement that Google leans left is empirically true. You also seem to have misread his comments about violence, as he claims the left tends to be more compassionate. Did you read the memo?

An advertising company cannot lean left by construction.

Right. Anytime I read or hear someone stress the left or right (lib/con, etc) in an argument, it is often a warning sign that the person watches too much corporate television and that a low-quality argument is on its way.

Today's left has went a far way from socialism and whatnot. It's funny how today's far right cares about "common man" and labour rights more than far left which is busy with identity politics.

For example, in Europe more and more labour is voting for right wing parties. While left is becoming more and more rich/educated urbanite.

No, I didn't misread the memo:

> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

What he does is list "compassion for the weak" as a "left bias". That's not necessarily a statement in support of leftist ideals when combined with this two assertions:

> In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females.

> The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause

(Which, BTW, is right before the first thing I quoted.)

He said PC_authoritarians are violent. Not leftists.

Straight from the memo:

> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

Emphasis mine.

Referring to incidents of left wing violence does not imply all leftists are violent.

Oh really? Left and right imply different sides from a center. Do you have evidence that google "leans left" versus merely embracing majority positions? A sizeable majority of Americans believe in things like LGBT rights and the value of diversity. Those aren't "leftist" positions, they're widely popular American values.

You seem to have modified the memo slightly to enforce your point.

>While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftist protests that we’re seeing at universities

He's saying the leftist protests at Berkeley were violent. Which... is simply a factual statement.

What's your point? The same could be said of "conservative parties are a platform to neo-Nazis and white supremacists" it doesn't imply all conservatives are neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but... "the implication."

I did clarify the emphasis was mine.

Also, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "simply a factual statement" when there were a bunch of alt-righters participating in the violence. Ever heard of alt-right hero "Based Stickman"? People pay for his tickets to go incite violence across the US. Such a symbol of peace!

Seems more like a lie by omission to me.

Damore's memo was in favor of diversity.

Left and Right alike favor diversity, it how you get there where they disagree.

Diversity does not mean supporting the thought police, encouraging mob mentalities, and adopting zero tolerance attitudes.

A sizable majority of Americans do support gay marriage by almost 2:1, but they are very closely divided on other LGBT issues, particularly around what should and shouldn't be funded by the tax payer, etc.

And while Americans value diversity they also value freedom.

Scientifically the role of biology in gender behavior is not a settled issue, despite the many wishing to declare it so. I do not agree with the conclusions to which Damore jumped, nor do I feel strongly that biology was particularly relevant to the point he was trying to make. But it amazes me how even broaching the discussion triggers people.

You didn't just add emphasis, you changed the original text from "leftist" to "leftists" and failed to indicate this, which is dishonest.

Those are different statements. The memo didn't say "liberal parties are a platform to authoritarians and antifascists". If it had, I would agree with your characterization. The strawman arguments in this drama are staggering. I guess Damore couldn't have been all wrong if his critics depend on mischaracterizations and other fallacies.

His point isn't to compare the left and the right, so it doesn't make sense to bring up the right. "Google is an ideological bubble that suppressed free speech and we should change that." "Yeah, but conservatives are bad too, and therefore we should continue being a bubble".

I don't want to go into a whole politics discussion about it, but while I do agree with you regarding the left/right switch on the working class voters, I don't necessarily agree that it comes from the right being about "working people" but rather about working people feeling threatened by recent cultural/economic changes brought by globalization. It's not a coincidence that both American and British people voted against their own interests because they were concerned about "immigration".

In any case, it's not a discussion for HN, but I wouldn't mind having it over a few beers/coffees.

Huh, I was going to complain about it being a direct cut and paste from the document, but it does look like I managed to stick an 's' in there after I copied the text. Sorry, didn't notice.

The actual quote is:

> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftist protests

Still doesn't change the meaning, my point being that the "violent leftist protests" he talks about don't happen in a vacuum. On the other side of the 'violence' there's always been lovely people like the alt-righter "hero" Based Stickman inciting violence.

To me, his choice of side to blame for the violence is pretty telling of what he thinks about "the Left". Whether correctly or incorrectly identifying them as the culprits of the violence, he's making a statement about the "movement" and not the particular instance of violence.

> "Yeah, but conservatives are bad too, and therefore we should continue being a bubble"

I'm curious, why do you think Damore's position is "right" but that position is not? Aren't the coworkers and higher-ups entitled to an opinion just as much as Damore?

I don't think his position is right, I'm pointing out that it's not dishonest to omit irrelevant details. That said, others don't need to change their opinions in order to become a more diverse, tolerant workplace, they simply need to not go out of their way to shame and intimidate those who are different from them.

You're forgiven. <3

On a different note, Damore chose to include mention of "leftist protest" because Google's culture is left-leaning – he's explicitly saying that Google is very left, while not so left as these violent protests. Mentioning "violent rightist protests" wouldn't be germane to his statement about Google here.

My point is that you wrote:

> the memo makes a whole case... how "leftists" are violent.

Which isn't true.

Eh, HN has went enough political recently... But personally I enjoy a diverse set of reasonable people to talk politics with. There're little places with not much echo chamber AND not much shouting at each other at the same time...

The major question is what does count as being "about working people". Is it claiming you're for equality/diversity/whatever? Or working to make working people life better?

Labour feel threatened by globalisation, migrants and so on. Today's left is very clearly for that. Thus labour feels left is no longer working for their interests. The right, which is against migrants, feel much ore for their interests.

Of course, there's an economic theory that migrants help the host country's economy and everyone end up being better off. But a "working man" only see his wage stagnate due to increased competition and his rent raise. Or his work place gone completely due to outsourcing.

The left just declaring that they're for the working man is not enough. Their recent actions very clearly don't ring a bell for the working man. The feels (as much as I don't like that) is very important in politics. People are tired of politicians talking about several-degrees-removed benefits. Although sometimes (but, as we can see, not always) politicians are totally right and it is actually the right thing to do, public needs at least some direct benefits right away. Although this is frequently called as populism in a derogatory way, I believe it's a crucial part of democracy. And it especially rings true to less educated and less well off people which happened to be core electorate of the left.

Which is not a sign of "bigotry" or being "backwards" or whatever. Better off people have more wiggle room, can take more risks (e.g. voting for people who offer few-degrees-removed benefits in the future) and generally care about higher level stuff in Maslow pyramid. The labour don't have this luxury.

Women are more "left" than men generally. They're also less violent than men, so a) you'd think that would make the right more violent, and b) it puts his stated goal of more right-wing thought at Google in direct opposition to hiring more women.

So you don't think that singling out "leftist violence" in events where there were "alt-right violence" is choosing one side?

Or accusing "PC authoritarians" of stifling diversity of opinion? (violence is not just punching people)

Or accusing "the Left" of denying science regarding biological differences between individuals? (there's a huge difference between "taking with a grain of salt, considering there's a lot of societal factors that might play a bigger role" and "denying")

Damore does a really good job of adding a lot of disclaimers and caveat emptors around a lot of his arguments, but he really didn't put that much effort into hiding his derision for "the Left."

You still haven't acknowledged that you wrote something that has since been proven incorrect. I'm reluctant to continue the conversation because of that, but:

> So you don't think that singling out "leftist violence" in events where there were "alt-right violence" is choosing one side?

James's discussion of left violence is because Google is a left wing company.

If Google was a right wing company, then saying "Google has mainly right wing politics but has avoided the violence associated with far right groups" would indeed by apt.